New York Judge John Hubbard sentenced Zachary Kowatch, 23, to five years of probation for attempted reckless endangerment in the first degree, a Class E felony, on Aug. 30.
Kowatch had pleaded guilty on Oct. 21 to swerving at a Jewish teenager and yelling antisemitic insults at him in the village of Fleischmanns, in Middletown, N.Y., on May 9.
“I have another one almost identical going on right now, and I don’t understand what’s the matter with people,” Shawn Smith, acting district attorney in Delaware County, N.Y., told JNS.
Joseph E. VanBlarcom, 20, faces charges for allegedly swerving his car at Jews while yelling bigoted slurs on July 29, also in the village of Fleischmanns. He awaits trial where he, too, faces a Class E felony of aggravated harassment in the second degree as a hate crime.
Smith told JNS how the police charge against Kowatch of reckless endangerment in the first degree as a hate crime wasn’t strong enough.
Still, said the DA, “for the rest of his life, he’s going to be stuck with a felony conviction. And if he violates probation, he’s got an alcohol problem, I think that was pretty clear. If he can get that under control—and turn over a new leaf and live a law-abiding way—then that works out. And if he doesn’t, then he’s convicted of a felony.”
Smith said every community “deserves to raise their children in peace. Mr. Kowatch violated that peace, and he has been held accountable.”
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, disagreed.
“Unfortunately, we see time and again that prosecutors under-charge bias crimes targeting the Jewish people, including in the case of Zachary Kowatch,” he told JNS. “An aggressive prosecutor could have charged him with a more serious offense: second-degree attempted murder.”
Filitti called the sentence “a sweetheart plea deal” and “a slap on the wrist for a person who was so motivated by Jew-hatred that he could have easily killed two people—and arguably may have intended to do so—and a slap in the face not just to the victims but to the Jewish community.”
Expressing skepticism at the possibility of rehabilitation, he told JNS that “it’s easy to believe that doing right by the Jewish community was outweighed by the cost of bringing Kowatch to trial.”
