March 12, 2016
Source: Bigstock
The victim was a black homosexual called Mark Carson, who was walking in the street at night with his best friend. According to the prosecution case, Morales had insulted them as he walked by them, and they turned to him to protest. He then shot Carson in the head and ran away. Carson’s friend had called the police and a description of Morales had already gone out over the police radio. Morales passed a policeman, who recognized him and called on him to stop. Morales continued and went round a corner. The policeman followed him and Morales drew his gun to shoot but fumbled it and said, “Shit, shit, shit!” It was remarkable that the policeman did not shoot him.
Morales was accused of what is now called a hate crime, namely that he killed his victim purely because he was a member of a group deemed especially vulnerable. The jurisprudence of hatred seems to me to be of dubious justification, but the prosecutor undoubtedly made out the case, assuming she was not making up the evidence wholesale, that Morales acted out of deliberate and concerted malice. Though not obliged to prove motive, she suggested that Morales acted from spite and deep unhappiness about his own sexual ambivalence. He had tried to prove his own lack of prejudice by introducing evidence in his own favor that he had had sexual relations with a transsexual woman.
It was riveting, the best free show in town, if it is not too disrespectfully frivolous to call it such. The crime had been committed three years earlier (Morales did not deny that he had killed Carson, but claimed both that he acted in self-defense and that it was an accident, that is to say that it was a warning defensive shot gone wrong, a clever resolution of a contradiction); in the intervening period, Morales had learned some law in order to be able to defend himself. It was a pity that it took him a murder to apply his intelligence.
There were many interesting details that I have omitted and I wished only that I had attended the whole trial. I found it slightly disconcerting that I could be so easily swayed from one opinion to its opposite in so short a time. Was this rationality, or was it mere susceptibility to the last thing that I had heard?
