Day: February 18, 2009
Will Homophobia Trump Justice in the Trial of Ryan Skipper’s Accused Killer?
TruTV legal analysts covering the trial in Bartow, Fla., of one of the men accused of killing Ryan Skipper spent considerable air time yesterday speculating about the prosecution’s decision to remove the hate-crime charge against the defendant, Joseph Bearden.
The anti-gay bigotry came to light from the first minute the story of Ryan’s murder broke, when Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd essentially told reporters that Ryan was asking to be killed because he was gay
It is true that Bearden and his co-defendant, William Brown, who will be tried later, knew that Skipper was gay. And the level of brutality in the murder — they stabbed Ryan 20 times and then dumped him, still clinging to life, on the side of rural road — suggests the two young meth addicts had motives beyond just fencing Ryan’s car for drug money.
Bearden has been in prison since he was charged with the murder two years ago. He has covered himself in tattoos, including a dagger or spike on his face that appears to pierce his skull above and blow his left eye, a large cobra in strike pose on his chest and neck and a small teardrop under his right eye. In gang and prison culture, teardrop tattoos are usually a sign that the bearer is a murderer.
The TruTV analysts speculated that hate-crime charge was dropped because prosecutors feared it would make the jury less sympathetic to the gay victim and more inclined to be lenient with the defendant — the young man sitting before them with a tacit admission of guilt tattooed on his face.
The prosecutors in Polk County expressed similar concerns to Ryan’s Skipper’s family:
