The Morgan Stanley (MS) executive accused of assaulting a New York cab driver is charged with violating a Connecticut hate-crime law that has been used to convict one man for uttering a racial epithet and another for shouting a gay slur while threatening to set a man on fire.
William Bryan Jennings, 45, who is set to appear today in Connecticut Superior Court in Stamford to enter a plea, is accused of calling the Egyptian-born driver, Mohamed Ammar, 44, an expletive and saying “I’m going to kill you. You should go back to your country” during a dispute over a fare. The hate- crime law brings the same five-year maximum sentence as the assault charge.
“You can’t punish somebody merely through speech, but you can punish him when he’s threatening to beat people up,” Martin B. Margulies, a professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law in Hamden, Connecticut, said in a phone interview….
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-09/morgan-stanley-s-jennings-faces-tested-hate-crime-law-in-cab-stabbing-case.html
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