CHARLESTON, W. Va. (CN) - Living in one of the 20 states where it is not a hate crime to attack someone for being gay, Angel Harless had been optimistic about finding justice when federal prosecutors indicted the man who knocked her unconscious last fall in a West Virginia bar.
After that trial ended on Aug. 29 in an acquittal for John Perry Taylor IV, her positivity has taken a sharper focus.
“Even though I am a little discouraged, I still see now more than ever the need for something to be done about it,” said Harless, sitting down for an interview about her case in the coffee shop at Taylor Books in downtown Charleston.
At Taylor’s trial, which ran for two days in Charleston, prosecutors laid out the case that Taylor wielded a glass bottle in an Oct. 7, 2017, attack at The Empty Glass, a favorite watering hole of locals in the city’s East End.
Harless took the stand using her legal name, Angela Portnoy, but jurors credited the defense of 34-year-old Taylor that the “bar brawl” erupted after Harless aggressively bumped into him.
Research shows that the attack on Harless occurred as America’s 10 largest cities saw a 12 percent spike in hate crimes from 2016. Though overall crime has been declining in the United States since the early 1990s, the rate of hate crimes in these cities has been on the rise for the past four years, according to a report released in May by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.
Along with attacks on Jews, Muslims and blacks, the FBI continually ranks anti-gay crimes at the top of what it groups as single-bias incidents in annual hate crime statistics.
Still West Virginia is one of 20 states that lack LGBTQ protections under hate crime laws.
One group fighting to change that is the organization Fairness WV, which backed a bill in the state Legislature last year that would add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity to the state law on hate crimes.
“Despite the support, our former House Speaker Tim Armstead, who was notorious for his anti-LGBTQ views, kept the bill from ever coming up for a vote,” Billy Wolfe of Fairness WV said in an email. “Now that a new speaker has been elected, we are hopeful for the prospects of the bill going forward.”
Wolfe called Taylor’s acquittal particularly frustrating in the wake of the 2017 ruling from the West Virginia Supreme Court that blocked state prosecutors from bringing hate-crime charges against a college football player.
Back in April 2015, former Marshall University football player Steward Butler punched two men in the face after seeing them kissing on the sidewalk in Huntington, West Virginia. Butler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery charges and received a six-month sentence last year after the dismissal of hate-crime charges was upheld.
“West Virginia’s LGBTQ community is hurting in the aftermath of this case,” Wolfe said of Taylor’s acquittal. “We believe this case, in addition to the Steward Butler verdict from last year, underscores the need to clarify West Virginia’s hate crimes law to make sure that sexual orientation and gender identity are added as protected classes.”
For Harless, Taylor’s acquittal highlights the need for more activism, political organizing, and strengthened ties between the LGBTQ community and straight allies.