May 17, 2007 10:43 am US/Central
Girls Charged With Hate Crime For Anti-Gay Fliers
Prosecutor: 'This Is What The Legislators Wanted Us To Stop'
By Tom Musick / Northwest Herald
CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. (Northwest Herald) ―
Some classmates on Wednesday defended two Crystal Lake South High School students who appeared in juvenile court this week on hate-crime charges.
But McHenry County State's Attorney Lou Bianchi said the students clearly broke the law when they printed and distributed fliers that showed a male student and another boy kissing, along with inflammatory statements about homosexuality.
Police charged two 16-year-old Crystal Lake girls last week with committing a hate crime, disorderly conduct, and obstructing justice. The girls, whose names were not released because of their age, appeared in juvenile court Tuesday and are scheduled to return to court next Tuesday.
Crystal Lake South juniors Ryan Diamond and Crystal Erdman said the fliers stemmed from a recent dispute between one of the girls who was arrested and one of the boys who was pictured.
The pair used to be best friends but recently feuded, Erdman said, and one of the girls posted the picture on her MySpace page before police said she and another girl printed the fliers and distributed them in the school's parking lot.
Diamond said authorities went too far and described the incident as a prank that had been blown out of proportion.
"I don't care that people are gay," Diamond said. "If my best friend told me he was gay, I'd be fine with it. I just don't think my friend should be arrested for that. Give them a warning, give them a fine, that's one thing, but to arrest them, that's bull."
Bianchi said the students targeted a specific person and his sexual orientation. Under Illinois law, a person commits a hate crime when he or she commits a crime against another person based on that's person race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, or national origin.
"This is a classic case of the kind of conduct that the state Legislature was directing the law against," Bianchi said. "This is what the legislators wanted to stop, this kind of activity."
Investigators and school officials would not specify the flier's contents or whether the students remained in school this week. But classmates said the flier showed a picture of two boys kissing along with the words, "God hates fags."
Tom Carroll, first assistant state's attorney for McHenry County, said penalties for the girls could range from probation to a 30-day sentence in the Kane County Juvenile Detention Facility. If they were convicted, Carroll said, the girls' records would be cleared at age 18 but those records would remain available to law-enforcement agencies.
Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the case illustrated a complex struggle between protecting targeted groups of people and protecting the First Amendment.
In fact, the issue is so divisive that the ACLU of Illinois differed from its national organization's support of a federal hate-crimes law that passed the U.S. House of Representatives and now is in the U.S. Senate. The law would include gender and sexual orientation as protected groups in hate-crime laws, as Illinois already does.
"We have a rather strong and historic strain of protecting free speech in this affiliate in a way that caused us to differentiate from the national organization," Yohnka said.
District 155 spokesman Jeff Puma said the district needed to provide a safe and comfortable environment for students to succeed.
"Our focus is to make sure that each of our students is able to learn while at school and is in a situation where they feel comfortable coming to school and learning," he said.
(CBS 2 and the Northwest Herald are news partners covering stories in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. If you know of stories happening in this region, cont)
