Acquitted of Murder Attempt : 3 Alleged Skinheads Convicted of Assault

Three alleged neo-Nazi skinheads from Huntington Beach were found guilty Thursday of beating a Laguna Beach man in a gay-bashing incident but were acquitted of charges that they were trying to kill their victim.

It was the first conviction in the state under a 1987 civil rights statute that outlaws crimes of hatred against a specific group, such as homosexuals, prosecutors said. The jury in Superior Court in Santa Ana also convicted each of the three men of felony assault.

Gay community leaders said the misdemeanor civil rights conviction represents an important social statement of opposition to crimes aimed specifically at gays and other minority groups.

Nationwide Trend

Orange County law enforcement officers, identifying a trend that apparently is nationwide, say some parts of the county have recently experienced an alarming rise in skinhead violence.

Convicted Thursday were John M. Moore, 23; Stephen J. Walther, 18, and Aaron F. Compean, 18.

Prosecutors and family members said the three men, who until their arrests sported shaven heads, steel-toed boots and Nazi swastika patches, belonged to a skinhead group that espouses hatred of gays, Jews, blacks and others.

Defense attorneys never denied that their clients went to a park in Laguna Beach one night last summer specifically to seek out and beat up gays. But the lawyers argued successfully to the jury that the defendants’ aim was not to kill the man.

Unprovoked, the three young men attacked Robert T. Joyce, 48, as he walked in a park area frequented by gays. The men beat him repeatedly with their fists and a lead pipe and left him battered on the ground. His wounds required 70 stitches.

2 Other Attacks

The defendants were also believed to have attacked two other gay men that same night, but difficulties in gaining evidence prevented the filing of charges in one of those incidents and led to the dismissal of charges in the other, prosecutors said.

The jury of seven men and five women convicted the three on assault charges that carry a maximum prison sentence of 4 years. Compean, who wielded the lead pipe in the attack, could be sentenced to several additional years in prison for his separate conviction on a charge of using a deadly weapon.

But to the disappointment of prosecutors, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty against the defendants on the most serious charge against them--attempted murder.

Jury foreman Robert L. Halley of Newport Beach said: “When (the defendants) broke off the attack, we felt they left of their own accord and were not frightened off by people coming down the path.”

The defendants looked at one another and smiled as the court clerk read the not guilty verdicts.

Barbara J. Walther, mother of one of the defendants, said after the verdict: “I feel a lot better. I had prepared myself for the absolute worst. I think what they did was so wrong, but I know it wasn’t attempted murder.”

Punk Music Fan

Walther maintained that her son, a commercial fisherman and one-time surfing enthusiast, was attracted to the skinheads several years ago as a way to gain attention and because of his interest in punk music, without even recognizing the group’s ideological hatreds.

“They didn’t know what they were getting into,” she said of her son and his friends.

Walther said that her son’s skinhead associations had worried her but that she had seen little sign of his intense hostilities before the Laguna Beach attack.

“It wasn’t an angry, violent, ‘I’m out to get someone’ attitude. It was mostly just the music,” she said.

But in the course of the trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas Avdeef portrayed the defendants as hateful vigilantes.

“They’re like sharks. They were in a frenzy” when they attacked Joyce, Avdeef said in his closing statement to the jury earlier this week.

“When does bashing stop and killing start?” Avdeef asked. “They didn’t stop at one blow; they went on and on and on.”