An appeals court recently upheld a trial court’s decision to convict a man who racially intimidated a Black police officer during an incident in which he wore a white hood and called her the N-word.
Trenton Whitaker-Blakey was found guilty of felony intimidation in May and sentenced to 30 months in prison after an encounter in Muncie, Indiana, with a Black female officer on Jan. 18.
According to court documents, the police officer, who was dressed in “business casual” attire with her “gun and badge” over her blouse, parked her unmarked vehicle in the city hall parking lot. When she exited the car, a man suddenly “popped up” from behind a marked police car about 10 feet away from where she was standing.
The man, authorities later identified as Whitaker-Blakey, was wearing a backpack and a “white hood” over his head with eye holes cut out. He stepped a bit closer to the Black officer, then uttered the slur “n****r.”
Court documents stated that after the encounter, she walked to her office and reported the incident to her supervisor.
After police reviewed surveillance footage, they located Whitaker-Blakey later that day, who confessed to using the slur and wearing the hood, which authorities learned was a pillowcase. However, he said he only wore the hood because it was cold outside, and he claimed he never directed the slur at the Black officer but at a group of white men across the street.
Whitaker-Blakey also admitted he had gone to a “meeting” with a white supremacist group, but he was not part of any white supremacist organization.
During Whitaker-Blakey’s trial, the officer testified that the white hood resembled a Ku Klux Klan hood and made her “think about lynchings and murders of Black individuals — rapes of Black women — basically any bad thing that could happen to a Black person.”
During the 27-year-old’s sentencing, Judge Douglas Mawhorr stated that the circumstances surrounding Whitaker-Blakey’s interaction with the officer indicated that he wanted to make her feel like he was “going to commit a crime against her – injure her – make her fight – make her do something against her will which is defend herself. That’s why it was a threat.”
The court also did not side with Whitaker-Blakey’s claim that he was wearing a white hood outside because it was cold or that he directed the slur at anyone other than the Black officer.
“If you’d stated that to not just a black female, but to any black person in the manner in which you did – that is a threat, and I believe it was your intention to cause that threat because of the way you conducted yourself,” Mawhorr said at the sentencing hearing in May.
Whitaker-Blakey appealed the conviction, arguing there was “insufficient” evidence proving that he intended the officer to be “placed in fear that the threat would be carried out.”
The Indiana Court of Appeals rejected his appeal in a 3-0 decision on Dec. 11, stating that his actions proved he “expressed an intention to unlawfully injure” the cop.
“Before assessing the merits of this case, we note that it is undeniable that the word ‘n****r’ used conventionally – namely as an insult – continues to be an oft-heard feature of the soundtrack of American racism at its most base and violent,” the appeals court affirmed. “The use of such a racial slur ‘flows from the fountain of purpose to injure.'”
After the appeal was rejected, Delaware County Prosecutor Eric Hoffman released a statement, calling the facts of this case “very disturbing” and adding that “bigotry, hatred, and intolerance have no place in our society.”
