[Lafclaria]

4 Women in Assault Case Say They Acted in Defense

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: April 12, 2007

The lawyers for four lesbians accused in the beating and stabbing of a film director on a Greenwich Village street last August told a jury in Manhattan yesterday that they were defending themselves against an anti-gay attack.
The women felt they had no choice but to defend themselves when the filmmaker, Dwayne Buckle, now 29, made sexual advances to one of them and refused to accept their demurrals that they were gay, the lawyers said on the opening day of the trial of the four women in State Supreme Court.
“He was enraged that he had been rejected,” Michael Phillip Mays, one of the defense lawyers, said in his opening statement, “enraged that these young ladies told him that they were gay and that they were not interested in him.”
Mr. Mays said Mr. Buckle, who lives in Queens, boasted that he could convert one of the women to heterosexuality through his sexual prowess, and tried to choke her.
“These young ladies defended themselves,” Mr. Mays said. “They fought back. They didn’t acquiesce, they didn’t cower. If that’s a crime, then they’re guilty.”
The prosecutor, Sharon Laveson, told the jury that Mr. Buckle was punched, kicked, spat at and stabbed in the abdomen in “a vicious and unprovoked attack” by the women.
Ms. Laveson did not characterize the women as lesbians in her opening statement. The defense argued, though, that their being lesbians was precisely the point, and that if this were a case in which the women were the ones injured, it would have been a bias crime.
Mr. Mays said the women were part of a group of seven lesbians from New Jersey who had gone to the Village that night to listen to music and socialize.
They traveled in a group, according to Nina Remson, another defense lawyer, because they had been harassed over their sexual orientation in the past. “They were not Crips, not Bloods, not any sort of gang,” she added. “They were simply a group of friends.”
Mr. Buckle, the first prosecution witness, said he was handing out DVDs of his latest film, an independent production called “The Minority,” in front of the Independent Film Center on Sixth Avenue at West Third Street just before 2 a.m. on Aug. 18, when the women walked by.
“One was slightly pretty, so I said ‘Hi’ to her,” he testified.
He said that the woman’s friend, a heavier woman, “just started to dog me out.”
Justice Edward J. McLaughlin asked if he could, “perchance,” be more specific about the meaning of “dog me out.”
“Talking about how I looked, what I had on,” he replied. “The No. 1 thing she did say was I was never going to make it. I remember that crystal clear.”
Mr. Buckle, who has worked on many films, mostly as a sound mixer, said that insult to his career struck him to the core because he felt he had already made it. “I think I called her an elephant,” he said of the woman, Venice Brown.
He recalled telling another defendant, Terrain Dandridge, that she “looked like a man.” He told the jury that she had a “low haircut,” by which he seemed to mean extremely short, and that she was wearing a “wife beater,” or tank top.
Ms. Dandridge, he said, told him his sneakers were cheap. “I paid 100 bucks for them, so I knew they weren’t cheap,” he said indignantly.
As the dispute grew, Mr. Buckle testified, he was stabbed in the abdomen. He said he spent five days in a hospital, where he underwent surgery, and one month recuperating from liver and stomach wounds.
Prosecutors say Mr. Buckle was stabbed by Patreese Johnson, 19, the woman he first tried to approach. Ms. Johnson is charged with attempted murder, while the other defendants, Ms. Brown, 19, Ms. Dandridge, 20, and Renata Hill, 25, are charged with gang assault.
The defense argued that Mr. Buckle was actually stabbed by a man in a pink shirt who came to the aid of the women, and Mr. Buckle conceded under cross-examination that he could not be sure who had stabbed him.
Three other women in the group pleaded guilty to attempted assault in January and were sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/ny...12assault.html
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Whenever my girlfriend goes out, I am always worried for her safety. I tell her to use deadly force if necessary. Women should be allowed to defend themselves from assault, rape, robbery, etc. If some stranger grabbed my girls arm, she has every right to stab him in the abdomen.