Federal attorneys for Payton Gendron, 22, had argued that the 10 firearms offenses should be dismissed for lack of a legal basis, or failure to state an offense.
Gendron's public defenders contended the charges should have been dropped because a person can violate the Hate Crimes Act in ways that do not require use of force, including an act of self-harm, and as a consequence, a violation of the statute is not categorically a crime of violence.
U.S. Judge Lawrence Vilardo of the U.S. District Court, Western District of New York, was unconvinced.
Sonya Zoghlin, one of Gendron’s public defenders, didn’t return a message requesting comment on Friday.
Her client is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for his conviction in state court stemming from his livestreamed shooting attack, which also resulted in injuries to another Black person and 2 white people in and outside of Tops Friendly Supermarket on May 14, 2022.
Last week, Gendron’s attorneys had argued in court that the federal charges against him should be dismissed because there weren’t enough Black and other diverse people on the grand jury that indicted him. The court’s answer to that claim is pending.
For the self-harm argument, the lawyers focused on the statute’s wording that a defendant must “willfully” cause bodily injury to “any” person because of the race of any person, and death results.
Gendron’s attorneys had cited in their motion a U.S. airman who set himself on fire to protest the war in Gaza outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in 2024. Had he survived, they argued, he could have been subject to federal hate crime offenses.
Defense counsel also offered the hypothetical scenario of a person intentionally setting himself on fire to announce racist ideology, with the unintended consequence that an emergency responder or bystander caught fire and died.
Government prosecutors had said that such a scenario was impossible because one can never violate the Hate Crimes Act by intentionally injuring oneself.
Vilardo agreed, holding that Congress refers to victims when defining and limiting bodily injury, suggesting the political body “contemplated someone other than the perpetrator being the object of the bodily injury.”
Vilardo’s decision, which observed the “substantial and skilled briefing and oral argument on both sides,” had also found it worth noting that the Department of Justice was yet to prosecute someone under the Hate Crimes Act for causing bodily injury only to himself, with Gendron failing “to identify a single real-world example that even comes close to matching the factual pattern of his hypothetical.”
Gendron’s motion had also contended that a person can violate the Hate Crimes Act by an omission not involving the use of force, and by an act involving only de minimis force.
But his lawyers conceded that a U.S. Supreme Court holding in March—Delligatti v. United States, which rearticulates how federal law understands the use of force, breaking down the barrier between acts and omissions—forecloses on his omissions claim.
Federal investigators said Gendron drove about 200 miles from his home to target the predominantly Black neighborhood. His motive was to prevent Black people from replacing and eliminating the white race, and to inspire others to commit similar violent acts.
Investigators said he fired approximately 60 shots from a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that had writings with racial slurs, and the statement, “Here’s your reparations!”
Source: New York Time Law Journal, Staff, August 21, 2025
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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