Liberal heads just exploded.
Via VICE:
A Mississippi man was sentenced to 49 years in prison Monday in the first-ever federal hate crime conviction for the murder of a transgender woman.
Joshua Vallum, 29, was convicted of murdering his 17-year-old ex-girlfriend Mercedes Williamson in May 2015. Prosecutors said that Vallum had planned Williamson’s murder after a friend had discovered she was transgender. He persuaded her to get into his car in Alabama, and then drove her to his parent’s house in Lucedale, Mississippi, where he used a stun-gun on her, stabbed her and beat her to death.
Vallum was a member of the Latin Kings gang, and testified he was scared that gang members would kill him if they discovered he had dated a transgender woman, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
“The taking of a human life because a person has a particular gender identity is particularly heinous and cannot be tolerated in an enlightened society,” U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. said in his sentencing. Guirola also fined Vallum $20,000, but declined to give him a life sentence, citing abuse he suffered as a child.