In March, we wrote about the racist attacks on the Utah women’s basketball team when they checked into their hotel in Coeur d’Alene in Idaho for the NCAA Tournament.
The games took place roughly 30 minutes away in Spokane, Washington, but because of the lack of hotel space, the team had to make the move to Idaho.
And that’s where the incidents began.
“We had several instances of some kind of racial hate crimes toward our program and it was incredibly upsetting for all of us,” head coach Lynne Roberts said. “In our world, in athletics and in university settings, it’s shocking. There’s so much diversity on a college campus and so you’re just not exposed to that very often.”
It got so bad that the team relocated to a different hotel the night after arriving.
KSL.com reported that players, team members, cheerleaders and the school band were called the N-word and harassed by a group in a vehicle as they walked around town.
“We all just were in shock, and we looked at each other like, did we just hear that? … Everybody was in shock — our cheerleaders, our students that were in that area that heard it clearly were just frozen,” said Utah deputy athletics director Charmelle Green, who is Black. “We kept walking, just shaking our heads, like I can’t believe that.”
The school filed a report with the police, who investigated their claims.
Earlier this week, over a month after the incident was reported, Coeur d’Alene attorneys declined to charge an 18-year-old who used racial slurs against the team.
The Spokesman-Review writes that the accused high schooler, Anthony Myers, “admitted he used the N-word and referred to a sex act when yelling at the players with the desire to be ‘funny.'” That comes directly from the written decision released on Monday by Chief Deputy City Attorney Ryan Hunter.
Prosecutors stated Myers’ language was racist and misogynistic, but they weren’t criminal. Even more infuriatingly, his words were deemed to be protected speech under Idaho law.
Investigators had collected evidence, including interview accounts and video surveillance, which proved that racial slurs were used and were audible. According to The Spokesman-Review, five witnesses gave descriptions of the language and the agitators who harassed the group from Utah.
But in the end, despite the hurt, humiliation and fear the visiting group felt, it didn’t matter.
“I’m disappointed that there isn’t some kind of accountability,” said Coeur d’Alene Mayor Jim Hammond. “I’m not going to second-guess the prosecutor who made that decision, but I’m disappointed there’s not some form of community service that child can perform to be held accountable.”
In his decision not to charge Myers, Hunter wrote:
“As to the first requirement of specific intent to intimidate or harass, there is insufficient evidence that Anthony Myers acted with a specific intent to intimidate or harass any specific person; on the contrary, the sum of the evidence supports that Mr. Myers’s intent was to be funny.
“To be clear, the statements of the other occupants of the vehicle and of Mr. Myers himself all support that he – as a white male – thought it would be funny to shout his willingness to have anal sex with a Black female despite his expressed hate for Black folks, which he made abundantly clear by deploying the N-word. Setting aside the rank absurdity of that claim and the abjectly disgusting thought process required to believe it would be humorous to say something that abhorrent, it nevertheless undermines that he had the required specific intent to intimidate and harass.”
Regarding his decision not to charge Myers with disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct, Hunter said:
“What has been clear from the very outset of this incident is that it was not when or where or how Mr. Myers made the grotesque racial statement that caused the justifiable outrage in this case; it was the grotesque racial statement itself.
“Thus, any attempt to prosecute Mr. Myers for either disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct would inevitably rely on the content of what he said to establish either crime, which would clearly violate Mr. Myers’s free speech rights as contemplated under both the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and … the Idaho Constitution.”
While they declined to charge Myers criminally, Hunter stated “Our office shares the outrage sparked by Anthony Myers’s abhorrently racist and misogynistic statement and we join in unequivocally condemning that statement and the use of a racial slur in this case, or in any circumstance. However, that cannot, under current law, form the basis for criminal prosecution in this case.”
The University of Utah declined to comment about the prosecutor’s decision.
