Dareal Demare Williams, Christopher Cain, Dorian Moragne have been sentenced to ten years in Georgia for their violent assault on Brandon White because of his sexual orientation, reports the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
The assault was allegedly captured on video by Javaris Bradford who remains at-large.
“Y’all are the ultimate bullies, and you bullied somebody and you hurt him,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jackson Bedford told the defendants. “To me there is no question you did it because of his sexual orientation.”
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It was a violent attack caught on videotape and posted online for those across the country to see: Four men shouting anti-gay slurs as they beat another man outside a southwest Atlanta convenience store.
Friday, three of the four men accused in the February beating of White apologized before they were sentenced to 10 years — five years behind bars followed by five years of probation.
With White looking on in the courtroom, the three defendants offered apologies for their actions.
“I am disappointed in myself because I know better and know right from wrong,” Williams said.
Upon their release from prison, probation will include intensive community service and sensitivity education, Jay Abt, an attorney for one of the defendants, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I think it was a reasonable sentence under the circumstances,” Abt said.
The attack on 20-year-old White angered the city’s gay and lesbian community, but those same activists sought lighter sentences in the case, Abt said.
“There were a lot of people of the LGBT community that wrote letters in support of leaner sentences,” Abt said.
LGBT advocates said that incarceration was not as important as education and that stricter sentences serve no one.
“At first I was embarrassed,” White said. “But if they are willing to put it out there, I’m going to face it. I shouldn’t have to look over my shoulder just because I’m gay.”
Read more at AJC.com.
