Third Circuit Affirms Convictions of Defendants in Luis Ramirez Killing
Photo Courtesy of Fair Immigration Reform Movement
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Julio Fuentes (Puerto Rico-born and the first Latino to sit on the Third Circuit), has affirmed criminal civil rights convictions of defendants in the killing of Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez in 2008 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
The killing of Luis Ramirez occurred in a place that the average American probably would not think of as a place where many Mexican immigrants live, much less a hotbed of anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican sentiment. As in nearby Hazleton, the home of an infamous anti-immigrant ordinance that remains under scrutiny in the courts, jobs and relatively inexpensive housing had attracted an influx of Latina/o immigrants to Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, a small working-class coal mining town.
Looking for work, Luis Ramirez moved to Shenandoah from Mexico. One Saturday night in July 2008, a group of white teenagers beat Ramirez to death near a Shenandoah park. During the beating, they called Ramirez a “spic” and yelled: “This is Shenandoah. This is America. Go back to Mexico. Tell your (expletive) Mexican friends to get the (expletive) out of Shenandoah.”
The Ramirez killing attracted national attention. Several news stories equated the killing to a “lynching,” invoking the bitter memories of the “lynch law” that kept African Americans firmly in their place in the Jim Crow South. The Ramirez killing resulted in multiple criminal prosecutions.
First, an all-white jury in Pennsylvania state court acquitted the white defendants of third degree murder, aggravated assault, and related charges. The defense had characterized the encounter as “a street fight that ended tragically.” Apparently swayed by this gentle characterization of the horrific events of that violent evening, the jury found the defendants guilty of the least serious criminal charge, simple assault, even though the assault resulted in Luis Ramirez’s death.
Evidence suggests that the racial composition of the jury affected the outcome of the state criminal prosecution. After the conclusion of the trial, the foreman of the jury went public to claim that the all-white jury was more sympathetic toward the white defendants than to the Mexican victim; indeed, he stated that “some people on the jury were racist [and] had their minds made up before the first day of the trial.” One potential juror with a Spanish surname had been dismissed from the jury; it appears that no Latina/os served on the jury in a trial about the hate killing of an immigrant from Mexico.
Recognizing that justice had not been done in the state prosecution, the U.S. Department of Justice to its credit intervened and brought a criminal civil rights prosecution in federal court. After a trial, the jury found that two of the defendants violated Luis Ramirez’s civil rights; the judge sentenced them to nine years in prison, much longer than they had been sentenced on the state assault conviction. This was the set of convictions that the Third Circuit afformed yesterday.
The U.S. government also brought a criminal prosecution based on an alleged cover-up of the Ramirez killing by the former Shenandoah police chief and two officers, who sought to protect what they apparently considered to be “innocent” teens. The jury acquitted the defendants of conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation, but found the chief of police guilty of falsifying a police report. The jury also found one officer guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation but acquitted him on the other counts; another police officer was cleared of all charges. The Third Circuit affimed the convictions.
The Ramirez killing, as well as the legal responses to the tragedy, sounds eerily reminiscent of the violence directed at African Americans in the South during the hey-dey of Jim Crow. Sympathetic state court juries refused to punish white violence against minorities. Local police sought to protect the white perpetrators of the violence.
Nor does it appear to be mere coincidence that the tragic killing of Luis Ramirez came at a time of a heated national debate over immigration – and a rapid proliferation of state and local immigration enforcement legislation passed after considerable acrimony in the region and nation. National agitation about immigration, and frequent allegations about the great damage to the nation done by immigrants, almost unquestionably influenced the young men who told Luis Ramirez to “go back to Mexico” before beating him to death.
To add to the historical parallels, the federal civil rights prosecution brought by the U.S. government resembled those brought to combat violence against civil rights workers and African Americans in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. The aim was to remedy the problem of all-white juries acquitting white defendants accused of violence against civil rights activists and Blacks in state courts.
The killing of Luis Ramirez unfortunately is not all that extraordinary. In 2008, white teens in Patchogue, New York engaged in what they characterized as the “sport” of “beaner hopping” and brutally killed an Ecuadoran immigrant. In 2010, racial tensions led to violence against Mexican immigrants in Staten Island, which provoked a federal investigation. In 2011, two anti-immigrant extremists were sentenced to death for the murder of a father and his young daughter, both of Mexican ancestry, in a home invasion in Arizona. These cases are the tip of the iceberg of hundreds of hate incidents annually directed at Latina/os and immigrants in the United States.
KJ