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It was just before Christmas 2014 that Rusty Andrade, 35, and Maxwell Christen, 25, were attacked.

The verbal volley of gay slurs came out of the dark, followed by a flurry of fists and hard punches that put Andrade on the ground and Christen in a headlock before he also went down in the driveway of their homes near 300 West and 700 North.

Salt Lake City police investigated and cited two men from Wyoming. The case remains open, but no charges have been filed, in part because the state's hate-crimes laws are largely ineffective and unenforceable, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill has said.

"Everyone from day one knew it was a hate crime, but we have a law that doesn't work," said Andrade, an attorney who is still recovering from injuries both physical and emotional. "It's broken and needs to be fixed."

SB107, released Thursday, proposes to do just that.

Sponsored by Sen. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, the bill would stiffen the penalties for hate crimes by allowing prosecutors to enhance criminal charges if they can prove a crime was motivated by bias. The law would apply equally whether the victim was targeted on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or other classes.

State data shows that since 1992, police departments statewide have reported 1,279 hate crimes to the Utah Department of Public Safety. Of those, 49 percent of victims were targeted for their race, 20 percent tor religion, 17 percent for ethnicity, 14 percent for sexual orientation and 1 percent because of disabilities.

"I can promise you that 1,279 cases have not been prosecuted," Gill said. "I have been a prosecutor for 21 years and I have looked at things that I thought were definitely hate crimes, but I have not prosecuted any because I can't."

That's because Utah's existing laws limit a prosecutor's use of the law to misdemeanor crimes and lack a definition that includes a set of enumerated classes known to be targeted for bias crimes.

The only known case that was successfully prosecuted under existing law, in 2001, was tossed out on appeal after judges said the Utah law was more an "exercise of rights law," and not a hate-crimes law, he said.

Under SB107, hate crimes would be defined as offenses in which the victim is intentionally selected on the basis of "ancestry, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation," or the association of that person with others who have one or more of those characteristics.

The bill would also allow prosecutors to increase the level of a crime by one step for both misdemeanors and felonies, raising a third-degree felony to a second, for example. If the underlying crime is already a first-degree felony, the hate crime would be a sentencing enhancement,

It also includes protections for both free speech and association, so people's words, or their membership in an organization, could not be used against them unless prosecutors could specifically link those to an alleged crime.

In the past, Utah lawmakers have resisted legislation that included a list of protected classes, arguing that such lists create special rights for some Utahns.

Specifically, lawmakers also have historically opposed including "sexual orientation" on any list of classifications, fearing it would open the door to legalized gay marriage.

"That issue has now been settled," Gill said.

Gov. Gary Herbert said he hasn't seen the bill and hasn't met with the sponsor of it so he doesn't know exactly what is being proposed, but he expressed initial reservations.

"Hate crimes, it's hard for me to imagine anybody committing crimes, particularly violent crimes, without some kind of hate being behind it. Whether it should be amplified because it's a so-called hate crime as opposed to 'if I kill you, you're just as dead if I hated you or if I loved you' and I killed you," Herbert said.

"We keep creating categories. We're all Americans and if I do violence to you, whoever you are, I ought to be punished for it. I just see it that way. Male, female, religious, nonreligious, black, white, LGBT, straight. It just doesn't matter to me. If you do violence, you ought to be punished for it."

Rep. LaVar Christensen, R-Draper, is among those who opposed past versions of hate-crimes bills that included enumerated classes.

He had not seen Urquhart's bill on Thursday, but said the Legislature had debated such inclusions thoroughly and decided against such lists.

"I believe it would be a mistake to go down the road of expanded, piecemeal classes, which would seriously alter the existing body of constitutional law," he said.

Christensen said he is surprised to hear that Utah's prosecutors are not using the law and believes the existing statutes are sufficient to protect all Utahns.

"I see no need for a new hate-crimes statute," he said.

Urquhart acknowledges that he was among those who voted against hate-crimes legislation in the past.

"I thought a crime was a crime," he said. "I didn't think it through, I didn't get it."

But in the wake of the 2015 passage of nondiscrimination laws that protect both the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in housing and employment and religious freedom, he believes it's time to take the next step.

"It's going to parallel what we did last year with nondiscrimination," he said. "I hope it passes with the same enthusiasm."

Urquhart said he hopes there will be little opposition to the bill, despite the bill's list of classifications that includes sexual orientation.

"The climate is significantly different," he said. "We are a different state."

Troy Williams, director of Equality Utah, agrees, and has been working to build a coalition of support that includes organizations that represent religions, ethnicities and others, so that the bill won't be seen as protecting only the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

"The beauty of what we are doing is that everybody has an ethnicity, everybody has a race, everybody has a sexual orientation," he said. "So if a white Mormon guy is attacked because he is white and Mormon, he will be protected by this law."

Andrade and Christen plan to testify in support of the bill, as does Christen's boyfriend, Taylor Lamont, 34. who jumped into the fray during their Dec. 21, 2014, attack, trying to stop the fight.

All three expressed frustration with having to wait and wonder if their attackers will ever be held responsible for their actions.

"I'm trying to make this better," said Andrade. "I realize that even though it won't fix anything that happened to us, maybe it will for someone else. That will give me some peace of mind."

Robert Gehrke contributed to this report