I am becoming dangerously close to being horribly disillusioned with the American legal system as it applies to LGBT people and cases involving them. First there was that nonsense with the Arkansas Family Council being allowed to present what I'm sure will be horrible, bigoted arguments in the lawsuit challenging Act 1, the law banning unwed couples from adopting or fostering children in the state.
And now there's this bullshit.
Yes, that's right. A Colorado judge has thrown out the confession of a man accused of killing a transwoman as evidence. You might think that surely this was a forced confession then, or that it had been tampered with as evidence in some way, and therefore should be thrown out. Sadly, that's not what happened. This was the judge's reasoning:
"Judge Marcelo Kopcow said that Andrade’s rights had been violated because he had told police he was finished answering questions, but investigators persisted with questions leading up to the confession.
“This court finds the defendant’s statement, ‘I’m done. Yeah, I’m not talking right now’ … is a clear statement of the defendant’s request to remain silent and cut off further questioning,” Kopcow said in a written ruling."
Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those who do not wish to confine yourselves to such limiting terminology, the judge threw out a confession because the perpetrator in custody just didn't feel like answering questions, and the investigators had the nerve to keep asking! Clearly this is a violation of his right to be stubborn and uncooperative! After all, it's not like he could have just had the spine to not answer any more questions when they kept asking!
Of course, the real gem comes from the fact that, while he threw out the confession, the judge has admitted tape recordings of phone calls made to his girlfriend while he was in jail. What's his logic behind that, you ask?
"In ruling that the tapes could be played for the jury Kopcow said that prisoners “have little, if any, reasonable expectation of privacy while incarcerated.”"
So let me get this unstraight. The judge feels that this despicable murderer has the right to not be asked questions about the brutal killing he did, but he doesn't have the right to privacy? All together, now, children: WHAT THE FUCK?
These are the simple facts, people:
Angie Zapata was a transwoman. She was a person just like you or I. She was twenty years old, with her whole life ahead of her. And she was murdered because of bigotry and phobia.
Allen Ray Andrade is her killer. He is, for starters, a horrible boyfriend to this girlfriend he was making calls to from prison for trolling the internet for girls ten years younger than him and getting them to give him oral sex. He is, however, first and foremost a vicious murderer. What did he do when he asked Angie what her gender was, a question that he had no right to ask in the first place, and she told him she was a woman? He decided to grab her crotch, just to be sure, and didn't like what he felt. So he beat her, brutally, with his fists and knocked her down. When he saw her start to sit up, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and beat her over the head with that.
"In a statement to police, he said, "I thought I killed it.""
I could not make this shit up even if I wanted to, people.
When will this hate stop? When are we--not just the homophobes of the world, but even those of us that make up the L, B, and G of the LGBT community--going to learn that the transgendered have the same rights that we do? When will we learn that they are not "its," and they deserve our respect and support for just having the courage to be who they are in a world where they can be beaten and killed just for being who they are?
And, more importantly, what the fuck are you going to do to help MAKE it stop?
Remember: An attack on one of us...
...is an attack on all of us.
