Last Defendant Is Guilty in Attack on a Gay Man

By MICHAEL BRICK
Published: November 6, 2007

In a case that has drawn intense scrutiny to the legal meaning of hatred, the last of four young men charged with selecting a gay man as a robbery target and chasing him to his death in traffic pleaded guilty yesterday to manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crimes.

The defendant, Ilya Shurov, 21, agreed to serve 17 1/2 years in prison. In exchange, prosecutors dropped charges of felony murder as a hate crime, which could have meant a life sentence.

“If there was no life sentence,” said a defense lawyer, Hermann P. Walz, “we would have rolled the dice.”

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The victim, Michael J. Sandy, 29, a designer from Williamsburg, was lured from his home to a secluded lot in Sheepshead Bay on Oct. 8, 2006. He was directed to a beach known as a meeting place for gay sex, then beaten and chased into traffic. He was struck by a car and later died of his injuries.

In pretrial hearings, defense lawyers argued that no evidence showed that the defendants harbored any real animosity toward homosexuals. Prosecutors countered that the defendants had selected Mr. Sandy as a robbery target believing a gay man would offer little resistance and hesitate to report the crime.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/nyregion/06plumb.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=login