Nicholas Minucci, 20 years old, is going to jail and he could be in there for the next 25 years. I'm glad of that.

Last year Minucci, who is white, used a baseball bat to rob Glen Moore, who is black. Moore was walking with friends through Howard Beach, the neighborhood that saw horrifying white-on-black violence in the 1980s. Minucci stole the Air Jordans, Polo Shirt and Prada shoes that Moore was carrying and beat Moore with the bat while using what the attorneys referred to as "the N word."

As far as I can tell, no one is disputing the baseball/robbery part (although the defense argued that Minucci was concerned about auto theft in the neighborhood and was making a sort of vigilante style Citizen's Arrest.) The real concern in the trial is that N word.

If someone spraypaints "I hate you!" on the side of my property, he's a vandal. But if he paints, "I hate you, you faggot." then he has committed a hate crime and the penalties are greater.

From today's NYT:

Mr. Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, argued vociferously during the trial that Mr. Minucci meant the word not as a slur but as a benign form of address commonly used today among young people of various ethnicities.

For the sake of argument, let's just agree that yes, lots of folks do call one another Nigga and they don't intend it as a slur. I myself find it distasteful and don't say it but I understand the phenomenon.

But it does seem that hitting someone with an aluminum bat while robbing him kind of mitigates that "benign form of address" notion, no?