“The victims state that he has been told previously to stay off the property. While talking to the suspect, the victims said that he stated, ‘Fuck you, I’ll fuck you up,’” the report notes.
The June 26 incident is not the first time Jamerson has drawn scrutiny for profanity and run afoul of police, both here in Atlanta and when he lived in St. Louis.
Jamerson worked his “Ambassador of Mirth” character in St. Louis before moving to Atlanta, where in 2004 the Central West End Business Association stopped paying him as a street performer after complaints of profanity in his act, targeting business patrons and passersby he thought came to the area from the suburbs.
Atlanta men sentenced for Ga.’s first federal anti-gay hate crime
Christopher Cain and Dorian Moragne, who were convicted in Georgia’s first federal anti-gay hate crime case, were each sentenced June 26 to 10 months in prison and three years supervised release, according to the public affairs department the U. S. Attorney’s Northern District of Georgia Office. The two were also given 16 months credit for time served in state custody.
The cell phone video of the brutal anti-gay beating of Atlanta resident Brandon White, posted to a hip hop website last year, made the attackers seem particularly callous.
In the video that went viral, the young men, who were said to be members of the Jack City gang, were shown jumping an unsuspecting White as he exited a convenience store in southwest Atlanta and repeatedly called him “faggot”; one assailant also threw a tire on him.
Cain and Moragne, both of Atlanta, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes charges April 18. Georgia does not have a hate crime law, and the federal hate crime law that includes crimes based on sexual orientation — the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Protections Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009 — has stringent requirements for federal jurisdiction.
It was the cell phone video that allowed federal prosecution.
“The Hate Crimes statute confers jurisdiction if the defendant used an instrumentality of interstate commerce in connection with the offense,” U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates told GA Voice. “Under the law, a telephone is such an instrumentality.”
New HIV case map shows ongoing high infection numbers in South
The Rolls School of Public Health at Emory University has released an update to AIDSvu, a compilation map of reported HIV/AIDS cases collected from 20 cities across the country.
Emory says the map is the most detailed picture of new HIV/AIDS cases publicly available. Data is collected from a variety of sources and is compiled into a single map.
“Our National HIV/AIDS Strategy calls for reducing new HIV infections by intensifying our efforts in HIV prevention where the epidemic is most concentrated. AIDSVu provides a roadmap to identifying those high-prevalence areas of the HIV epidemic and showing where the local testing resources are located,” said Patrick S. Sullivan, principal researcher for AIDSVu, via a media release.
High rates of HIV/AIDS cases in the Southeast are immediately noticeable, which is in line with CDC numbers.