Man who threw boiling water on gay couple gets 40-year prison sentence

Aug 26, 2016

A Georgia jury deliberated for all of 90 minutes before sentencing a truck driver who threw boiling water on a gay couple to 40 years in prison.

Martin Blackwell was found guilty of eight counts of aggravated battery as well as two counts of aggravated assault. He was not charged with a hate crime, because Georgia is one of five states that does not have hate crime laws. The federal government is also considering whether or not to charge him with a federal hate crime.

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Anthony Gooden had only recently told his family that he was gay, and he had been dating Marquez Tolbert for about six weeks.

However, when Blackwell saw Gooden and Tolbert asleep on a mattress together, he went to the kitchen and filled a pot full of boiling water to throw it on the two of them.

“They were stuck together like two hot dogs … so I poured a little hot water on them and helped them out,” Blackwell told police, according to the incident report. “… They’ll be alright. It was just a little hot water.”

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Blackwell claimed that the two men were having sex at the time of the attack, though Vickie Gray, a friend of Tolbert’s, said that they were simply asleep after a long day of work.

Both men were hospitalized with severe burns and scarring. Tolbert spent 10 days at Grady Hospital undergoing surgery to replace his skin and Gooden was in a medically-induced coma for a couple weeks.

The 40 year sentence was the maximum amount of time Blackwell could have received for the charges.

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