Still, Williamson tried to escape, and Vallum chased her with a hammer. He then “delivered what he believed to be a fatal stab to Williamson’s head, as he thought he ‘hit brain’ with a blow from the pocket knife.” However, he kept their meetings secret from fellow members of the Latin Kings gang because the group’s manifesto prohibits homosexual activities.īut after a member of the gang found out about the relationship, Vallum arranged to meet Williamson in his car, the Justice Department statement continued. Vallum knew Williamson was transgender when they started a relationship in 2013, according to a statement released Wednesday by the Justice Department. His guilty plea was accepted by US District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. Vallum faces up to life imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. “They are often being investigated as run-of-the mill crimes.” “I don’t think the law is necessarily operating as it should, simply because we have a lot of work to do in this country around recognition of bias motivation,” Gupta said, noting that many bias crimes go undetected. Gupta acknowledged that this was the first prosecution for anti-transgender crime under the law, which has been on the books seven years, despite a rash of transgender homicides around the US the last several years.

However, prosecutors had never used it to bring charges against someone for targeting a victim for being transgender. It expanded existing law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. In the federal case, with records that were hidden from public view until now, federal prosecutors charged Vallum for allegedly violating the hate-crimes act, passed by Congress in 2009. It is important for us to have spoken out on the bias motive.' In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, argued that the state’s murder conviction alone was not enough, saying, “For this Justice Department, it is important for us to send an unequivocal message that violence based one’s gender identity constitutes a hate crime.

Joshua vallum