Hate Crime or Mitigating Factor?

I have been watching a court case on CourtTV, now known as TRUTV. The case goes as follows:
Allen Andrade met Justin via a social networking site, on which Justin presented himself as a heterosexual woman. They interacted for 3 days, during which time Justin performed oral sex on Andrade. At some point, Andrade killed Justin "Angie" Zapata after discovering that "she" was actually a he. Andrade beat Justin to death with a fire extinguisher found in Justin's apartment.
Once arrested, Andrade gave a full confession. He was also tape-recorded in jailhouse conversations with his girlfriend, friends, and other inmates referring to Justin by the pronoun "it". He also made statements such as, "Gay things deserve to die."
The prosecution hopes to use these statements, along with the fact that Justin was transgender to increase Andrade's punishment by prosecuting it as a "hate crime".
Andrade's defense is using a "transpanic defense", arguing that when Andrade discovered that he had been deceived by Justin, he flew into a rage and murdered him. They believe that this qualifies as a mitigating factor.

To begin with, I would like to address the included charge of a hate crime.
1. Surely everyone can agree that there is a gigantic difference between finding a transgendered person and killing them just because they are transgender, and being deceived into a sexual encounter which leads to the discovery of the transgender's biological sex, which drives you to kill the transgender person. A hate crime occurs "when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership in a certain social group." Andrade did not target Justin because of his transgender status. It just so happens that the subject of Justin's deceit was his gender, hence Andrade's anger over finding that he was transgender. In fact, it could be argued that Andrade was targeted by Justin because of his heterosexual male status.
2. Yes, Andrade made anti-gay comments in jail.
Two points as far as this goes:
A)a person is allowed to be homophobic or transphobic and not have murdered a gay or transgendered person for that reason. I might hate women, and I might have murdered a woman, but that does not in any way, shape, or form prove that I murdered the woman because of her sex.
B) This is a murderer. A murderer called a transgender "it". To expect an uneducated murderer to know the politically correct pronoun to use for a transgendered person is ridiculous; and, to expect Andrade to use said pronoun out of courtesy for the transgender that he just murdered out of rage is ridiculous. Dude was talking to his girlfriend and other prisoners! He was probably feeling extremely insecure about his masculinity at this point, and he was trying to convince those around him that he is not a homosexual.

Next, I would like to explain why I not only disagree with this being charged as a hate crime, but also think that the circumstances of the case should be a mitigating factor.
1) Justin deceived Andrade. He pretended to be a heterosexual female when he was, in fact, a homosexual male. His MySpace made no allusion to his true sex. He interacted with Andrade for three days, at no time revealing his transgender status. He initiated oral sex on Andrade in order to interact sexually while still hiding his male genitalia. I fully believe that Andrade was actually molested. Sexual abuse, also referred to as molestation, is the forcing of undesired sexual acts by one person upon another. If given true and accurate information, Andrade would never have participated in the sexual encounter. He was tricked and deceived into engaging in an undesired sexual act.
2)I believe that sexuality is so personal, that a heterosexual man realizing that he has unknowingly had a sexual encounter with a transgender male produces the same biological rush of adrenaline, hate and contempt as many other circumstances that commonly qualify as mitigating. A common mitigating factor is finding your spouse in bed with another man and murdering them both. I believe that the physiological reaction that Andrade must have had was equal, if not greater, to the type experienced by a spouse being cheated on.
3)Andrade is Hispanic. He was brought up in a culture with an idea of machismo. This is a strong or exaggerated sense of masculinity stressing attributes such as physical courage, virility, domination of women, and aggressiveness. Justin's actions went right to the core of Andrade's identity. Justin should have understood how strongly people feel about their sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender; after all, he obviously felt very strongly about his own orientation and gender!

I can't help but wonder what leads people to ignore the obvious mitigating factors in this case. My best guess comes from sociology, and the problem of attribution.
Attribution Theory is concerned with the way people explain the behavior of others and themselves. It seems that when looking at the behavior of others we give internal or "dispositional" attribution. This means that we assign behavior to a person's morality or character. When we look at our own actions, however, we assign external, or "situation" attribution. This means that we assign our own behavior to the circumstances that we find ourselves in.
In this case, we are assigning Andrade's behavior to a homophobic and hateful character. We are not considering the situational impacts at all. However, if we can just think for a moment of what we would feel like if we had done the murdering, we would probably be saying something like, "Deep down, I am not a bad man, but a transsexual just performed oral sex on me. I snapped."
It is of vital importance that we consider situational factors before assigning complete fault to internal flaws.
None of what I have just said excuses Andrade's actions. He is a murderer, and he deserves to go to prison. I do, however, feel very strongly that this was not a hate crime, and instead should be viewed as a mitigating factor. The law has incorporated mitigating factors for a reason; it believes that certain circumstances should result in a reduced charge or a lesser sentence. This includes evidence that the defendant was under extreme mental or emotional distress. I find it hard to argue that Andrade wasn't.

Is That All She's Got?

As an assignment for my social research methods class, I was required to conduct 20 hours of phone surveys in the CATI (computer assisted telephone interviewing) lab.

This is just about as close as you get to hell for a girl who hates to use the phone even to order a pizza.
The problem is, you not only have to get someone to not hang up on you right away (as soon as they realize they don't know you), but you have to get them to agree to take a 25 minute survey over the phone. WTF, Purdue? It's like Mission Impossible.
Those first 10 hours of calling were awful. People thought I was a telemarketer (do those even exist anymore??) and accused me of all sorts of things, including abusing senior citizens.
I finally got my shtick down half way through the calling. All I had to do was act like a timid, helpless girl and people were lining up to take my survey.

Everyone wanted to rescue me from my horrible job and help me overcome my anxiety over calling. They all started calling me "honey" and "sweetheart". By the end of my survey, I had about a 50% chance than the person I called would agree to take my survey; most wanting to talk for a full hour, telling me stories and asking me questions.

Normally such a blatant use of gender, femininity, and voice pitch to manipulate a person into doing what I wanted would make me feel like I was spitting in the face of feminism, trying to hide my successful and intelligent self in order to make others like me.

Instead, I am starting to see that we all have unique weapons in our arsenal of charm. I was giving a cynical performance; I fooled everyone I talked to. It was I who had the upper hand, who, at any moment, could have shattered the facade that I presented to get them to take the survey. I wasn’t sincere or actually scared or intimidated by them; I let them feel important in order to take advantage of them, there’s nothing weak about that.

It makes me angry to think that some people would try and make that skill less than what it is; that because it’s feminine, it must be less potent or less respectable an attribute than a more masculine alternative.

I think that is vastly undervaluing femininity, which doesn’t seem feminist at all.