A hate crime law passed in Georgia amid outrage over the murder of Ahmaud Arbery could get its first major test as part of the murder trial of a white man accused this week of shooting and murdering six women of Asian descent from massage companies in and around Atlanta.
Prosecutors in Georgia who will decide whether to pursue a reinforcement of hate crimes have declined to comment. But one said she was “well aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community.”
Until last year, Georgia was one of four states without a hate crime law. But lawmakers swiftly moved to pass stalled legislation in June, during national protests over racial violence against black Americans, including the murder of Arbery, a 25-year-old black man chased by several white men and running in February. 2020 was fatally shot. .
The new law allows for additional punishment for certain crimes if they are motivated by race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender, or mental or physical disability.
Governor Brian Kemp called the new legislation “a powerful step forward,” adding when he signed it into law: “Georgians protested to demand action and state lawmakers … stood for the occasion.”
The murders of eight people in Georgia this week have sparked national mourning and reckoning with racism and violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. The attack also drew attention to the interplay of racism and misogyny, including hypersexualized depictions of Asian women in American culture.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with the murder of six women of Asian descent and two other people. He told police the attacks on two spas in Atlanta and a massage company near Woodstock in the suburbs were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction.
Asian-American lawmakers, activists and scientists argued that the race and gender of the victims were central to the attack.
“To think that someone was targeting three Asian companies that were staffed by Asian American women … and who had no race or gender in mind is just absurd,” said Grace Pai, director of organization at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Chicago.
Elaine Kim, professor emeritus of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I think it is likely that the killer had not only a sex addiction but an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”
Such sentiments were echoed Saturday when a diverse, hundreds of people crowd gathered in a park across from the Georgia state capital to demand justice for the victims of the shootings.
Speakers included US Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and Georgia State Representative Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American at the Georgia House.
“I just wanted to stop by and say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we’ll see you, and more importantly, we’ll stand next to you,” Warnock said with loud cheers. “We’re all in the same thing.”
Bernard Dong, a 24-year-old student from China at Georgia Tech, said he had come to the protest to claim rights not only for Asians, but for all minorities.
“Often Asian people are too quiet, but times change,” he said, adding that he was “angry and disgusted” about the shootings and violence against Asians, minorities and women.
Otis Wilson, a 38-year-old photographer, said people should pay attention to discrimination against people of Asian descent.
“We went through this with the black community last year, and we’re not the only ones going through this,” he said.
The Cherokee County District Attorney, Shannon Wallace, and Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, will decide whether to prosecute the hate crime.
Wallace said she could not answer specific questions, but said she was “well aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community.” A representative for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.
The United States Department of Justice could file federal hate crime charges regardless of state prosecution. Federal investigators have found no evidence to prove that Long was targeted by the victims because of their race, two unnamed officials told the Associated Press.
Georgia State University law professor Tanya Washington said it was important for the new law to be applied to hate crimes.
“Unless we test it with cases like these, we won’t have a law on how to prove that bias motivated behavior,” she said.
Since it is unlikely that a person convicted of multiple murders will be released from prison, an argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, time, and expense to pursue a hate crime designation that entails a relatively small extra penalty. But Republican state representative Chuck Efstration, who sponsored the hate crime bill, said it wasn’t all about punishment.
“It’s important that the law calls things what they are,” he said. “It’s important to victims and it’s important to society.”
Senator Michelle Au, a Democrat, said the law should be used to give it teeth.
Au believes there is nationwide opposition to denouncing attacks on Asian Americans as hate crimes because they are viewed as “model minorities,” a stereotype that they are hard-working, well-educated and free from social problems. She said she had heard from many voters over the past year that Asian Americans – and people of Chinese descent in particular – suffered from bias because the coronavirus showed up in China and Donald Trump used racial terms to describe it.
“People feel like they are being pulled through the air because they see it happening every day,” she said. “They feel very clearly that it’s racially motivated, but it’s not that linked or labeled. And people feel frustrated with that lack of visibility and that aspect is being ignored. “