Two men pleaded guilty Thursday to federal hate crime charges after they allegedly kidnapped, assaulted and branded a swastika on the skin of a 22-year-old, developmentally disabled Navajo man from New Mexico, the Justice Department announced.
Paul Beebe and Jesse Sanford of Farmington, N.M., were indicted by a grand jury in November 2010 for violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 – the first defendants ever charged under the federal law.
Beebe pleaded guilty to violating the Shepard/Byrd Act, and Sanford pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit a violation.
A third defendant involved in the incident, William Hatch, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit a hate crime in June.
During a plea hearing at District Court in Albuquerque, Beebe and Sanford described how they took the victim to Beebe’s apartment, drew on his skin with markers and then branded him with a heated wire hanger in the shape of a swastika, according to a DOJ release.
The men also defaced the victim’s body with various white supremacist and anti-Native-American symbols, including shaving a swastika in the back of his head and using markers to write the words “KKK” and “White Power” inside the shaved area.
The entire incident was recorded by a cell phone so that Beebe and Sanford could later play back for law enforcement a coerced statement from the victim agreeing to the acts, the men said.
During a press conference, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez suggested the case was the first of many successes for the new Shepard/Byrd Act, which also expanded prosecutors’ power to go after crimes relating to a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.
“Incidents like this have no place in our nation in 2011,” Perez said in a prepared statement. “More than 80 investigations have been opened under the new law, and we will continue our efforts to aggressively enforce it.”
