Senate Passes Bill Expanding Hate Crimes Law

The Senate has passed a bill that would expand hate crimes to include attacks based on a person's gender and sexual orientation. The Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed on a 68-29 vote and will be sent to President Obama, who is expected to sign it. The House approved the bill earlier this month.

The federal hate crimes law, passed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., covers people who are attacked because of their race, religion or national origin. There were 7,624 hate crimes in 2007, almost 17 percent of which were based on sexual orientation, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The measure passed Thursday, tacked on to the federal Defense Department budget, would give the Justice Department the power to prosecute bias crimes against homosexual, bisexual and transgender people.

The act is named after Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming college student killed in 1998 because he was gay, and James Byrd Jr., a black man dragged to his death in Texas behind a pickup truck.