State Sen. Scott White (D-Seattle) isn't giving up on making sure that people who attack the homeless face harsher penalties. He has introduced legislation similar to a bill he put forward last year to make assaults on the homeless an aggravating circumstance ("Lawmaker to seek hate crime status for attacks on homeless," RC, Nov. 4-10, 2009).
The legislation would add up to five years in prison and an additional fine of up to $10,000 for those convicted of injuring the homeless, damaging their belongings or threatening harm.
Unlike last year's legislation, Senate Bill 5011 does not seek to reclassify an assault on a homeless person as a hate crime under the state's malicious harassment statute.
Revising the law turned out to be problematic, White said in an e-mail. With the revised bill, "we can still get the harsher sentence but don't have to open up the 'hate crimes' statute," he said.
Since 1999, the National Coalition for the Homeless reports, housed individuals have committed 1,074 acts of violence on homeless persons, resulting in 291 deaths in 47 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
In Washington state in the past 11 years, there have been 21 attacks, including 12 that were lethal.
David Ballenger was one of the victims. In 1999, three teenage boys attacked and killed the 46-year-old under a freeway overpass near Green Lake.
In 2009, White told Real Change that he proposed the legislation, in part, because he remembered Ballenger and what happened to him.
Last year's bill, introduced when White was a state representative, passed the House but didn't make it out of the Senate. Seattle has had a similar law on the books since 2007.