A Utah man has been sentenced to nine months imprisonment for calling a seven-year-old boy the N-word before injuring his father with a stun gun.
Mark Porter yelled the slur at the boy as he rode on a scooter in their apartment complex in Draper, Utah, last fall, before using a stun gun to zap the boy’s father, KSL-TV reported.
But the 59-year-old didn’t show any remorse in court as he went on a new racist diatribe before his sentencing on Thursday, telling the judge that he doesn’t want to live around black people because they’re “pimps,” “drug dealers” and dangerous people.
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FBI body camera footage from September shows Porter sharing offensive views on black people to agents.
“I just said, ‘Get out of here you little stinkin’ n*****,'” Porter told an agent while retelling the incident, Fox 13 reported. He also told the agents that “Hitler had the right idea” but had deployed it against the wrong people.
He also asked the FBI agent if he was a “white trash n***** lover,” and admitted to telling the apartment complex that he didn’t want to live around black people.
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U.S. District Court Judge Dee Benson said he didn’t want to be lenient with sentencing, but went with nine months instead of the prosecutor-recommended four years, saying the sentence was based solely on the altercation between Porter and the child’s father, rather than the racist remarks.
“He’s entitled to have those views. It’s not against the law to be racist, it is against the law to act on those racist views,” Benson said.
Utah NAACP Chapter president Jeanetta Williams said the punishment doesn’t send a strong enough message that hate crimes won’t be tolerated.
“His ranting will continue on,” she said. “I think that we have to be more careful about what people say and how they say it, and words do hurt.”
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Williams attended the hearing and said Porter’s offensive comments in the courtroom showed he wasn’t remorseful or apologetic.
Porter’s speech touched on the sexual assault case against Bill Cosby and his own sister’s marriage to a black man in the 1970s, among other things.
Rose Gibson, a lawyer with the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, argued his use of the stun cane, which has an electrified metal bar, amounted to aggravated assault.
“The incident was serious for the family. It was serious for the community,” she said.
— With files from the Associated Press