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traillius
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Personally, I think all violent crimes are hate crimes, thus there is no need for hate crime statutes. What do you think. See the poll, and leave a comment.
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Cristiano
Guest
In general I think that the idea of hate crimes is just a ploy to ensure criminal conviction for crimes that go against the politically correct ideas in vogue. However, we must also remember that crimes are also classified on the intention, a premeditated murder has a different gravity than a killing based on impulse and tan a killing based on negligence. What I do not like about hate legislation is that the gravity is associated with intent based on hate of a few and ill defined categories.
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Jerry_Westerby
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if the legislature wants to punish some offenses more than others, or make the prosecutors job easier, I don’t have a problem with the idea per se, so long as standards of due process are met. each hate crime law should be evaluated on its own.
for example, if the government wants to hammer the klan by making it easier for prosecutors to secure convictions for crimes of violence against blacks, great. its a matter of social policy that governments are entitled to set.
Westerby
for example, if the government wants to hammer the klan by making it easier for prosecutors to secure convictions for crimes of violence against blacks, great. its a matter of social policy that governments are entitled to set.
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Jerry_Westerby
Guest
a bank robbery that turns into a shootout isn’t a hate crime in the way that two guys dragging a black behind a pickup truck is.
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DarkLight
Guest
Notably, part of the purpose of the original hate crime laws were to allow the federal government to prosecute some crimes that would normally be under the state. The idea was to avoid holding trials for things like klan activities in front of juries pulled from heavily racist (or otherwise bigoted) states.
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Jerry_Westerby
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are you thinking of criminal prosecutions for civil rights violations? those are almost the equivalent of the hate crimes statutes. very cool tools.
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DarkLight
Guest
Yes those. That was the basis for modern hate crime laws - as an adjunct to civil rights legislation. The idea was to prevent people from re-enforcing the old discrimination rules by private terrorism - e.g. intimidating people away from voting, or threatening children for going to integrated schools. Later they got extended to any crime committed against a person because of their membership in a protected class.
I think that’s the most important aspect of hate crime laws. In many cases, hate crimes have an aspect of terrorism to them. To cite a fairly recent example - the guy who painted a swastika on a jewish student’s dorm wasn’t just attacking the one guy, but implicitly making a threat against all jewish students (and possibly others).
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Richard320
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I’ve always felt like these were just feel-good legislation so some elected official could boast about how tough on crime they were without actually doing anything. We get the same thing with added penalties for gang-related crimes. Murder, Assault, Arson, they’re already pretty serious felonies.
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sedonaman
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I disagree with this and “hate” crimes laws in general because they are an attempt to enforce the law selectively. Whites intimidating blacks outside polling places are punished; blacks doing the same thing are given a pass. The law should be neutral with regard to race, etc.
What you are advocating is also guilt by association. A person should actually have to have committed a crime before being deemed guilty.
"There are countries where hyping race and ethnicity has led to slaughters in the streets, but you cannot name a country where it has led to greater harmony.” – Thomas Sowell
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Jerry_Westerby
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Bill_Martin
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There should be no hate crime laws. They only exist to make people feel good and are way too loosely defined to be enforced properly. The action should be punished, not the motivation, lest we enter the arena of thoughtcrime.
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austenbosten
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I don’t like hate-crime laws, I think they actually pit groups against each other. Rather than treating crimes as being committed by individuals against other individuals or society, the labeling of crimes as “hate crimes” I feel causes one groups to feel persecuted by one another and thus will drive people to commit more crime.
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Jerry_Westerby
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every prosecution and law should be evaluated on its own merits rather than lumped together with all possible prosecutions. otherwise you’re arguing “by association” which is an extremely weak argument, even for here. I’d be happy to discuss white intimidation and black intimidation, but only specific instances and then after you explain how recent incidents of voter intimidation are comparable to murders because of race, church bombings, and actual beatings which are the core of traditional hate crime prosecution.
I haven’t advocated anything of the sort, I gave one example of a klan lynching, and said if the legislature wanted to punish klan lynchers more than other murderers, or wanted to make it easier to prosecute them, that it was ok by me. if you have reasons why the legislature shouldn’t make the prosecutors job easier vis a vis klan prosecutions, I’d like to know your reasoning.
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Jerry_Westerby
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yeah? the typical criminal statute already requires the jury to find an intention to commit an act, occasionally the intention to commit a specific act. this concept is hundreds of years old. mostly, actions without intent aren’t crimes.
so this “thoughtcrime” argument is bogus.
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Bill_Martin
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Finding an intention to commit the act is not at all what hate crime laws are about.
The need for an intention only differentiates between a crime and an accident. It’s the difference between a murder charge and vehicular manslaughter.
Hate crime laws declare something that is not illegal, can easily be selectively enforced because it cannot be proven, and cannot really be defined to be a crime and can allow people to be punished for them.
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revert_jen
Guest
Please, tell us what you really feel…
You can tell intention from actions and capability. Intention only means that you meant to do what you did. It’s generally assumed that actions are intentional unless there is evidence to the contrary, because the majority of non-trivial human actions are intentional, assuming the person in question is not insane or otherwise impaired (in which case you have to prove the insanity or impairment.)
The difference with hate crimes is that it is an attempt to punish selectively based on the reasons for the crime. One problem with it is that I feel that a lot of hate crime legislation implicitly blames the victims of other crimes. You know, “it’s not so bad to shoot someone specific (e.g. a wife) as someone random, because it was probably partly the specific person’s fault.”
But I find this an interesting position:
Of course that specific example is true, but it is outside the discussion. You can punish someone more harshly for dragging someone behind a car than for shooting someone without having to resort to hate-crime laws. The actions themselves are different.
So, if what you are saying is relevant to this discussion, what you are really saying is that it is worse for someone to be shot because he is black/gay/Jewish/Catholic/whatever than for him to be shot for being a random person at a bank.
It may be true morally. There is something more evil in killing someone because of his race or religion than because you are greedy and don’t feel like working for your money. But the nice thing in the moral arena is that the Judge ther is the only being who actually knows what a persons thoughts and motivations were for sure. Humans are usually lucky if they know their own motivations, much less anyone else’s.
But take the example where the shooter in a bank robbery shot an innocent bank customer. And say that in this case the victim was an African American. Mabe he did it because he didn’t like African Americans. Maybe it was just random. The only way to know is to prove in a court of law what the guy was thinking when he did it. Not only is that pretty difficult to do with any confidence, it is pretty much like punishing thought crime. OK, Joe, the first 15 years of your sentence are because you shot that guy. The 10 years after that are because of your thoughts when you did it.
And in any case, in the legal arena, the person is just as dead either way. He suffered the exact same amount. And assuming that people don’t distress them further by suggesting it was a hate crime, the survivors feel the same pain. Why is the punishment different? Only because of the difference in the way the criminal thought about what he was doing.
So how is the thoughtcrime argument bogus?
–Jen
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Sky_Pilot
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“Hate Crime” has no clear statutory definition.
It’s being used as a knee-jerk, lump-it-all-in term to justify what someone might consider “Socially Distasteful.”
We must be really, really careful defining these matters.
Free speech is increasingly under fire by those who don’t like the message and scream “Hate Speech!”
It’s being used as a knee-jerk, lump-it-all-in term to justify what someone might consider “Socially Distasteful.”
We must be really, really careful defining these matters.
Free speech is increasingly under fire by those who don’t like the message and scream “Hate Speech!”
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Jerry_Westerby
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you’re not up to speed on criminal law, and it would take more time than its worth to explain how far wrong you are. if you’re really curious, look up “general intent crime”, “specific intent crime” and “strict liability crime”.
murder is always illegal. first degree murder typically requires that a jury find that the defendant acted with a specific kind of intention, which juries do all the time.
two white guys who drag a black man behind a pickup truck are guilty of murder, whether they are guilty of a hate crime against blacks is something a jury can figure out based on the facts, for example, if they’re arrested wearing klan hoods, with klan hate literature and have been boasting about killing black men. if the legislature decides to punish klansmen for killing blacks more than the usual murder defendant gets punished, its ok with me and more important, within the rights of the legislature.
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Bill_Martin
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The legislature is wrong. Hatred is not illegal.
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traillius
Guest
consider:
case 1) a neonazi shoots a black person in the head, after shouting racial epithets.
case 2) a black man shoots and kills another black man, in the commission of a drug deal gone bad.
Is either victim’s life worth less than the others?
no.
But under hate crime statutes, the life of the victim in the second case would be considered less important legally, in terms of punishments meted out to the respective perpetrator. If you were the family of the second victim, how would you feel, if you were told that the first criminal gets more time than the one who took your family member away?
" Mrs Washington, your son’s killer will receive 20 years in jail. "
" But what about that other guy? He got 53 years in jail."
" Hate crimes statutes, Mrs. Washington, demand that the punishment be harsher. ( i.e. Your son’s murder is not as important, because the murderer was black and not racist)
case 1) a neonazi shoots a black person in the head, after shouting racial epithets.
case 2) a black man shoots and kills another black man, in the commission of a drug deal gone bad.
Is either victim’s life worth less than the others?
no.
But under hate crime statutes, the life of the victim in the second case would be considered less important legally, in terms of punishments meted out to the respective perpetrator. If you were the family of the second victim, how would you feel, if you were told that the first criminal gets more time than the one who took your family member away?
" Mrs Washington, your son’s killer will receive 20 years in jail. "
" But what about that other guy? He got 53 years in jail."
" Hate crimes statutes, Mrs. Washington, demand that the punishment be harsher. ( i.e. Your son’s murder is not as important, because the murderer was black and not racist)
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