Mark Carson Murderer Found Guilty of Hate Crime

Justice was served Wednesday.

The man who gunned down an unarmed gay man in New York City's Greenwich Village and then cackled and bragged about it to police was found guilty of murder as a hate crime. The New York Daily News reports.

It took a jury in Manhattan Supreme Court one day to decide that Elliot Morales, 36, murdered Mark Carson in 2013, and the crime was motivated by his hateful bias towards gays. Morales now faces up to life in prison.

Wednesday's verdict brings to a close a bizarre trial where Morales, who acted as his own attorney, argued that he murdered unarmed Carson in self-defense after shouting anti-gay slurs at him. Adding to the strangeness of the case was Morales' star witness, a transgender woman with whom he claimed to have had a sexual relationship.

"Mark Carson was nothing to the defendant but a subhuman faggot," Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey told the jury during closing arguments last week. "It was not alcohol that led him to kill Mark Carson. He was not justified in killing Mark Carson - it was irrational hate."