At the Aug 7 trial for Randall Leon Thompson, the person accused of leaving three death threats against me in my university voicemail, was placed under supervised probation for a year, but was spared jail time.

The judge said he found his behavior disgusting and was inclined to throw him in jail, if I strongly objected to the deal negotiated by the attorneys.

For a moment, I had the power to send Mr. Thompson to jail. I had good reason to do so; the threats he sent in May 2011 were vicious and laced with racial venom. His tirades were in response to my purported role in defending TUSD’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) department, which has since been dismantled as a result of the district complying with the anti-Ethnic Studies HB 2281.

These threats came subsequent to one posted on YouTube against the UNIDOS students who had taken over the Tucson school boardroom several weeks before. That threat urged viewers to “shoot them in the head,” but was dismissed by the Tucson Police Department as “a joke.”

The reason I did not exercise the judge’s option is because I don’t consider Mr. Thompson to be the intellectual author of the threats against me. True, he vocalized them, but he, like many in this state, have been goaded, and manipulated, often by the state’s top politicians and others who exploit racial or cultural divisions within society (for an insight into hate from above, see stories re former State Senate President Russell Pearce’s emails, along with Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s communique’s).

That daily spewing of hatred towards Mexicans and Mexican culture, disguised as “a war against ‘illegals’” is a form of dehumanization that permits these politicos to spew out their hatred. They do this while claiming that they are not aiming their disdain at actual peoples, but rather simply at “lawbreakers” (The MAS struggle has nothing to do with migration, illegal or otherwise). The hatred spewed out by Mr. Thompson, is little different from what one reads in the comments section in the daily newspapers.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: Dr Cintli: Prosecuting Hate Crimes to Fullest Extent of the Law.