Hate crime enhancements and the pressures to plea

A helpful readers alerted me to this fascinating article from the New York Times discussing a notable case that raises a lot of notable sentencing issues.  Here are snippets:

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.”…

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…. Prosecutors accused four men of hate crimes, a distinction that can extend prison sentences.

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.

Justice Jill Konviser-Levine, who had helped draft the state hate crime law as a senior assistant counsel to Gov. George E. Pataki, allowed the charges to stand.  She rejected a defense argument that the law was unconstitutionally vague. “The statute provides clear standards for enforcement,” she wrote, “in that it does not permit a hate crime to be charged merely because a victim happens to possess a trait protected by the statute.”

One defendant, Gary Timmins, 17, pleaded guilty to attempted robbery as a hate crime and accepted a sentence of four years in exchange for testifying against his friends.  Two others, Anthony Fortunato, 21, and John Fox, 20, were accused of selecting Mr. Sandy as a robbery target.  They were convicted of manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crimes last month in a joint trial before separate juries.