California: Activist Not Guilty in ‘Hate Crime’

Activist acquitted in fight with Rancho Penasquitos day laborers

A jury on Wednesday acquitted an anti-illegal immigration activist accused of beating up day laborers and shouting racial slurs during a brawl at a makeshift hiring site in Rancho Penasquitos in November.

John Matthew Monti, 36, was cleared on all charges, including three battery counts, three hate-crime counts, and one count of filing a false police report. The jury deliberated more than a day before reaching its verdict.

“I feel good,” Monti said after the verdict, which was read in a San Diego courtroom late Wednesday. He said he would return tomorrow to his job as a sixth-grade bilingual schoolteacher in East Los Angeles.

The case highlighted seething tensions between anti-illegal immigration activists and day laborers who for more than a year have confronted one another at hiring sites in North County.

Monti said immigrant rights activists orchestrated the case against him, calling it an “outrage.””It’s a hatchet job against me,” Monti said.

Monti is a member of an anti-illegal immigration group, Save Our State, and has ties to Jeff Schwilk, the leader of the Oceanside-based San Diego Minutemen. Both organizations have protested at day-labor hiring sites.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/09/27/news/top_stories/11_01_459_26_07.prt

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=181

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=782

2007-09-27