Hate Crime Legislation vs. Free Speech

Great Debates
61

This is not strictly what is being proposed. Judicial direction for the penalty phase would satisfy me, provided that it passed legal muster. Frankly I don’t care whether “new crimes” are created or not so long as the perpetrators are given their just desserts.

Your slippery slope argument strikes me as being extremely self-serving. Claiming that “well, we already do that now” imposes logical consistency on alarmists and hysterics who are afraid that the government will take away their right to think dirty thoughts and masturbate in the dark. They do not complain that motive is an existing criterion, so where it the consistency in complaining about it with reference to hate crimes? The fact that motive is crucial certainly does not mean that the slope is already slipping, but that individuals who espouse “thought crimes” arguments require a healthy dose of reality.

62

I was referring to the guy who announces his intentions while killing the witness. Sorry for the confusion.

KellyM

The point that you raise has already been dealt with at length in this thread.

63

Hardly.
Freedom of speech has a prerequisite: freedom of ideas. They are not synonomous, that much is certain, but the slide is greased here, and goes both ways.
My question, would it be illegal to say what it would be illegal to do?, is one step along a path of, would it be illegal to think what it would be illegal to say? That is, though these three things (action, speech, thought) are not the same they are chained together.
If you eliminate the thought you surely eliminate the action and the speech as Orwell not-so-gladly pointed out.

On the other path, you can eliminate action without eliminate speech. I am personally grounded in, as far as justice goes, punishing the person for an action and no further. Because of the myriad ways in which a person may attempt to mask an action it is sometimes necessary(read: practical) to make a higher level of abstraction from objective facts…that is, to include motivation. Motivation does not necessarily imply speech. It may include any number of other factors.
Speech may be present in motivation, however. That is, one may confess the desire to do such an act, then lo!- the act is committed. In lieu of objective, physical evidence that speech may be used to determine motivation.

I will not accept the tenet that speech itself can ever, ever be a crime. To do so eats away at the very process of Democracy. It should, as I suggested, be used for clarification purposes in “beyond a reasonable doubt” but no more.

Now, “speech” can be much more loosely defined than just words. It may be described as “external meaning” in that an action portrays a message in place of words. Flag burning (which is pretty bs to me), writing, pictures, and so on. Unfortunately, a criminal act may even be the medium of expression. But I am telling you to reexamine the case here…to criminalize expression (that is, to necessitate the use of expression in determining the sentence of a criminal) can have very paradoxical consequences.

If there was ever a slope we want to avoid it is this one, even if we have no intentions of sliding down it.

64

I just start off by saying that I am against hate crimes and againt Hate Crime laws.

I do feel that it is the state trying to be the thought police.

The real problem with hate crimes is not that are being commited or that they intimidate a larger group of people but that Police departments and DA don’t prosecute these crimes with the same zeal as other crimes.

Case in point
2 years a gay friend of mine was robbed. A man (drunk or stoned) jumpend into the passenger side of his car and stuck a knife in his face and demanded money and then took his cash and some of his cds. My friend (Bob)found some police and related the incident only a few minutes later. Bob was very upset and scared from the incident and when he is like this he is a bit more flamming. The cops literally laughed in his face and simply did not care about a fag being ripped off.

Serial killers frequently target prostitutes. The best explaination is that: one they are easy to lure to a place where you can kill them, and two cops don’t look into their dissaperence or death as much as say killing a housewife.

I shouldn’t have to go into the facts about how crimes against blacks in the south didn’t start to be investigated and prosecuted until the federal government started doing it. The police themselves commited crimes and commit crimes against racial groups. These people must be arrested and prosecuted. Not for hating some group but for their crime.

It is when a crime goes unpunished that a group of people feels threaten by that crime.

Gay people do not feel threatened by the death of Andrew Sheaperd. It is the fact that crimes like that go uninvestigated by police and unprosecuted by the state that they feel threatened.

Zebra

65

Nitpick, Zebra.

Andrew Shepard is the President in The American President. Matthew Shepard is the young man who was killed cos he was gay.

66

Oops!