Maryland ? Maryland granted a new safeguard to its most downtrodden residents Thursday, becoming the first state in the nation to extend hate-crimes protection to homeless people.

Lawmakers point to cases like the one in south Baltimore in 2001, where a group of young men embarked on what a judge later described as a “systematic cleansing” of homeless men in their neighborhood. Three victims were beaten to death and others were forced to relocate. Three men went to prison for the crime one of them dubbed “bum stomping.”

Such attacks on the homeless are becoming more common, advocates say. More than 800 homeless people have been violently attacked in the U.S. in the past decade, and at least 217 have died, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. In 2007, there were 160 attacks, the most in a year since the group began collecting such data in 1999.