After a hearing lasting five hours on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate sentenced two women to the maximum prison sentence for their participation in the 2011 slaying of James Craig Anderson, one in a series of white-on-black attacks. The judge made sure to show the family and other supporters of the two white females that their presence in the truck that ran over Anderson was not an isolated incident, but just one occurrence in a strong of racist hate crimes.

The Associated Press reports that Wingate sentenced Shelbie Brooke Richards, 21, of Pearl to eight years in prison. Her guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit a hate crime and one count of concealing the crime by lying to Jackson police was what did her in. He sentenced Sarah Adelia Graves, 22, of Crystal Springs to five years in prison after her guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit a hate crime.

Judge Wingate, who in 1984 became the first African-American federal judge in Mississippi, ponders the reason for this rampant hatred displayed in these hate crimes. “I just wonder whether the hatred is just engrained for some particular reason…Then again, that’s what race hatred is all about: whites who hate blacks and blacks who hate whites. It’s just automatic.”

The sentences given to the women were the maximum sentences under the plea agreements they took. Wingate says he wishes he could have given them more time. Six white males sentenced for the same crime were given sentences ranging from four to fifty years in prison.