Salt Lake County's district attorney is calling Utah's hate crime law "worthless" after authorities were unable to bring hate crime charges against a man who allegedly attacked a Latino father and son while yelling that he wanted to "kill Mexicans."

The suspect, Alan Dale Covington, is facing eight charges, including two felony counts of aggravated assault, but a Utah statute says hate crimes charges can only be applied to misdemeanors, The New York Times reported.

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"The statute that we have is such an untenable and unworkable statute that we have not had a successful prosecution of a hate crime for the last 20 years at the state level,” Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County, told the Times. “It is worthless. It is not worth the paper it is written on.”

The case is drawing new attention to Utah's hate crime law.

Jose Lopez and his son Luis claim that Covington beat them severely with a metal poll after yelling "something to the effect of ‘I hate Mexicans, I am going to kill Mexicans,' " Sgt. Brandon Shearer, a spokesman for the Salt Lake County Police Department, told the Times.

Police reportedly found Luis in critical condition with injuries on his face, "gurgling and coughing on his own blood," according to the charging documents.

Jose Lopez's daughter, Veronica, wrote on a GoFundMe page that doctors had to use a titanium plate to hold her brother's "shattered" face together.

"Whether this was a hate crime or not is not even an issue for me to bring to the table — I don't have a statute that allows me to do it," Gill told the BBC.

Covington is currently being held on a $100,000 bail.

State lawmakers have attempted to move legislation that would amend the Utah hate crime statute, but it has not passed so far.