January 1

In Washington, D.C., on this date in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the first of two executive orders, collectively known as the Emancipation Proclamation, outlawing slavery.

On this date in 1993 in Tampa, Florida, two white men, Charles Rourk, 32, and Mark Kohut, 26, both day laborers from Illinois and both living together in a trailer in Lakeland, Florida, abducted at gunpoint a black man, Christopher Wilson, a Jamaican-born New York stock brokerage clerk, near a Bloomingdale shopping plaza as he was buying a newspaper. Rourk and Kohut then took Mr. Wilson to a field near Fort Lonesome in southeast Hillsborough County Florida where he was doused with gasoline and set on fire. Rourk and Kohut laughed and shouted racial slurs at Mr. Wilson as they drove away. Mr. Wilson, who was on vacation from his home in Brooklyn, New York at the time of the attack on him, was burned over 40% of his body. Rourk, 27, and Kohut, 33, were each convicted by a six-person jury (five white, and one black; three men and three women) of attempted first-degree murder and robbery on September 7, 1993; Rourk was also convicted of armed kidnapping and Kohut was also convicted of kidnapping on the same date. No hate crime charges were ever lodged against the men. Mr. Wilson testified at the ten-day trial which took place in West Palm Beach, Florida, after a change in venue, and his testimony was a critical factor in the convictions. Rourk and Kohut were each sentenced to life in prison in October 1993 for attempted first-degree murder. Rourk also received 40 years in prison for armed kidnapping and robbery, and Kohut was given 27 years in prison for kidnapping and robbery; those sentences will follow their life sentences. Rourk and Kohut could have received three consecutive life sentences. The Florida Department of Corrections had Kohut and Rourk transferred to New Mexico to serve their sentences out of fear that black inmates in Florida might seek revenge against them. Both were eventually transferred back to Florida (Rourk in 2006). On May 10, 1995, a three-judge appellate court panel in West Palm Beach, Florida upheld the convictions and prison sentences of Mark Kohut, 28, and Charles Rourk, 35. Jeffery Ray Pellett, of Plant City, Florida, and who was 18 years old at the time of the attack on Mr. Wilson, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the case. Pellett was sentenced to 22 months in state prison. Pellett, who testified against his two co-defendants, also pleaded guilty to a federal charge of aiding an armed carjacking and for that crime he was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in federal prison. He was initially released from federal custody in late 1998, and placed on five years probation. However, Jeffery Pellett was said to have violated the terms of his probation when he was arraigned on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm, improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon, and resisting an officer without violence in November 1999 by the Polk State Attorney's Office. The federal Bureau of Prisons has indicated that Pellett was released from prison most recently on July 3, 2001. In July, 2010, Kohut and Rourk went to court in Florida to seek a new trial.

On this date in 2009 in Joliet, Illinois, two white men—one with a previous hate crime criminal record—Jerry Bryant, 26, from Joilet, and Lucas M. Bailey, 26, from Wilmington, Illinois, allegedly attacked a 43-year-old black man because of his race outside the Marathon gas station at the corner of Larkin Street and McDonough Street yelling racial epithets at him as he was beaten. The victim was admitted to the Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center where he was treated for his injuries. Both suspects were charged with aggravated battery, mob action, committing a hate crime and resisting a police officer. Bryant was also charged with aggravated battery to a police officer; he was pepper-sprayed by a police officer after allegedly striking one of them. This was not the first time Bryant was charged with a hate crime: in February 2003, he was one of two people arrested by the Will County Sheriff's Department after a fight started outside a house owned by a black family in the Ridgewood area. At the time of the 2009 New Years Day hate crime attack, Bryant was on parole for a five-year sentence of theft for shoplifting from a New Lenox, Illinois, store in December 2006. In 2005, Bryant was sentenced to 39 months in prison after shoplifting numerous items from the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Morris, Illinois; and, he previously served time for robbery, aggravated battery and criminal damage to property.

In Buffalo, New York, outside the lesbian club, Roxy Bar, on Main Street in Buffalo's Allentown neighborhood on this date in 2010, Lindsay Harmon, 29, of Buffalo, was stabbed in her right eye (which partially blinded her), on her cheek, and on her arm allegedly by a woman who yelled anti-gay slurs at Ms. Harmon, who is a lesbian. Arrested was Suzanne Grover, 21, a former Buffalo resident who was living in Florida at the time of the attack on Ms. Harmon, an attack Buffalo police refused to classify as a hate crime. Grover was charged with second-degree assault; however, Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita did the right thing by seeking an indictment under New York State's Hate Crime Statute against Grover, but a Grand Jury later indicted Suzanne Grover of assault (but not as a hate crime). The attack on Ms. Harmon was the second anti-gay/lesbian assault on New Year's Day in 2010 in Buffalo, New York: a man thought to be gay had anti-gay slurs hurled at him before he was followed to a suburban mall parking lot where he was then beaten. The judge in the case issued a gag-order so that no further information about the attack, including the victim's identity, can be known.