Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala

Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala (c. 1983 - July 14, 2008), commonly known as Luis Ramirez, was beaten to death in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His assailants, Derrick Donchak, and Brandon Piekarsky, allegedly baited Ramirez into a fight using racial epithets. Ramirez was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. His killers were acquitted of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and ethnic intimidation and convicted only of simple assault, in what some observers have called a race-based jury nullification. Other commentators characterized the verdict as the result of a flawed prosecution case based on ambiguous and confused evidence.
This has been a cause of outrage to both the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a statement, Gladis Limón, a staff lawyer for MALDEF stated: "The failure to hold these defendants responsible for their atrocious crimes denies justice not just to the Ramirez family," Limon said, "but also to the entire community by failing to deter similar crimes in the future."
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell requested that U.S. General Attorney General Eric Holder should pursue civil right charges in this case. Governor Ed Rendell in his request stated: "The evidence suggests that Mr. Ramirez was targeted, beaten and killed because he was Mexican," Rendell said. "Such lawlessness and violence hurts not only the victim of the attack but also our towns and communities that are torn apart by such bigotry and intolerance." Currently, individuals and organizations that are outraged by this verdict are asking for people to sign a petition (that already has more than 50,000 signatures) requesting that the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice file federal hate crime charges against the assailants that fatally beat Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. This petition states that the Justice Department must send a strong message that violence targeting Latinos or any ethnic or minority community will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The beating occurred in the evening of July 12. Ramirez died the morning of July 14 at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania.

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