-By Warner Todd Huston
Federal prosecutors filed “hate crime” charges against an Ohio man for beating a black man citing the suspect’s Confederate flag tattoo as evidence of his racial animus towards blacks, a report says.
The federal complaint filed in Toledo, Ohio, charges 33-year-old Charles Butler with a hate crime in the beating of African American Adrian Williams, 46. Butler, the filing says, is a racist who hates blacks because he has numerous tattoos of Nazi symbols and Confederate flags, according to TheSmokingGun website.
Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in the court filing that Butler and his accomplice, 25-year-old Robert Paschalis, were “white supremacists” and cited Butler’s Nazi-image-strewn Facebook page as evidence. She also pointed to Butler’s many tattoos to prove his racist intentions in the attack.
Under the heading “Evidence of Racial Animus,” the complaint lists the racist images on Butler’s Facebook page as well as his “numerous tattoos indicative of white supremacy, including the German War Eagle, a portrait of Adolph Hitler, a Swastika and a Confederate flag.”
When he was arrested after the May 18 beating, Butler defended his actions saying that Williams verbally assaulted him first calling him a “cracker” because he had Confederate tattoos and a “Don’t Tread On Me” sticker on his vehicle.
Williams, though testified that Butler and Paschalis started yelling at him from a truck as he was walking down the street and that the pair soon exited the vehicle and attacked him yelling racial epithets as they did so. At one point, Williams said Butler hit him with a baseball bat.
The victim had facial fractures and damage to his right eye, police reported.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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