Attorney Joseph D'Amour will defend three Chicopee men charged with civil rights violations arising out of a brawl on Main street in Northampton, according to Bay Windows, a weekly newspaper for homosexuals. 

D'Amour, who has served as the Gay and Lesbian liaison for the City of Springfield and who helped get anti-homosexual prejudice covered by the state's hate crime law, says the suspects were leaving Northampton on Main Street and listening to a CD player.  The song they were listening to contained the word "faggot," and when two Northampton men heard this they gave the suspects the middle finger.  When the Chicopee men turned around to ask why the Northampton men made this gesture, the suspects allege that one of the accusers attacked them.  D'Amour says that when his clients complained to police, "they were basically laughed out of court." 

The Chicopee men have not been accused of "hate crimes," but of lesser civil rights violations, Bay Windows reports. 

The co-chairman of the Governor's Task Force On Hate Crimes, Dan Gorton, says that he believes the Northampton men and the police department's report of the incident, and that it was a hate crime.  "The most powerful and frequent indicator [of a hate crime] is epithets...  If someone were to call someone a faggot in the midst of an attack, it is very difficult to argue that homophobia didn't play some role," Gorton said.  Of the possibility that epithets may be used in anger during a confrontation Gorton said, "Those incidents are very rare and would not fit the situation of people driving by people on a street and shouting 'faggot'." 

According to Gorton, a crime can be considered a hate crime even if  it is not motivated by prejudice.  According to Bay Windows, he provided this example of such a case:  a fight could begin for reasons not related to the victim's sexual orientation, but if homophobia came out during the course of an attack, the crime could still be classified as a hate crime because prejudice against homosexuals becomes an additional motive for the assault. 
 
Bay Windows reports that Gorton went on to say that he would find D'Amour's decision to represent the Chicopee men "comical, if it were not such a serious issue...  Everyone is entitled to a defense, and [the Governor's Task Force] believes in due process and trials... but I think you can call [D'Amour] a maverick in the community who is taking positions that are out of step with what [homosexual] advocates would support."  Gorton concluded, "he has got his work cut out for him." 

The two Northampton men say that the Chicopee men began the confrontation, shouting anti-homosexual epithets as they drove by, to which they responded.  Further verbal abuse ensued when the Chicopee men cut the Northampton men off as they headed toward the police station, shouted more epithets, and began to kick one of them.  A Northampton policeman broke up the fracas. 
 

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