Careful, folks – even if the OP title contains a direct insult, this remains Great Debates, and the rest of us are better off not resorting to direct insults.
(Note that I’m not junior modding, just asking for fewer ad hominems in the thread).
John Corrado, I’ve been thinking about your last post and about the differences between intent and motive and intent and action.
You say that “intent is action.” While that’s very fine in a Way-of-the-Samurai manner, I think that’s actually the exact opposite of how the words are usually used. In a legal context, it’s clear that they’re completely different.
Look at an example I gave previously. I’m in a bar, and I tell a guy, “That Mr. Magoo is gonna get a surprise tomorrow on his way home from work!” Certainly I’ve not committed a crime there.
Alternately, let’s say that I run a stop sign the next day, hit Mr. Magoo, and kill him. Absent any other evidence (i.e., absent the bar-conversation), my action is considered involuntary manslaughter.
However, if it comes out that I’d had that conversation in the bar, then for the exact same act I’ll get tried for first-degree murder. My action isn’t any different; it’s just that a previous (legal) action, a conversation in a bar, reveals that my intent was different.
The same action is tried different depending on the actor’s intent.
Given that, I don’t see a relevant difference between basing a crime’s punishment on intent and basing a crime’s punishment on motive: they’re both basing it on the perpetrator’s thought processes.
However, I’m not sure we even need to bring in intent. Hate crime legislation is, IMO, best defended on two principles:
- Hate crimes have a worse effect than other crimes, inasmuch as they specifically cause terror to a subsection of the citizenry; and
- Those who commit hate crimes often intend to cause this terror.
As for the first one, there is a debate about whether the outcome is really worse: does a mugging of a woman carrying a purse really terrorize a smaller group of people (or terrorize them less) than a mugging of a Jewish woman in a Christian town would, even if the mugger claims to be targeting Jewish women? However, that’s a debate for criminologists and politicians: if we base hate-crime legislation off of such effects, then we’re not basing it off of the political beliefs of the criminals, and we can circumvent the argument about “though crimes”.
The second one is much less debatable. Who doubts that when a mofo burns a cross in the yard of a mixed-race family, they’re trying to terrorize miscegenists in general? If that’s what someone’s trying to do, then clearly we’re dealing with intent, not just motive; intent is surely actionable under our current legal system.
Of course, far fewer crimes can be considered hate crimes if we focus on intent. I’m pretty okay with that: I’d like to see (and I think we do see) fairly rigorous guidelines before something can be considered a hate crime.
I’ll close by saying that I’m talking here about increased sentencing guidelines for acts that would be illegal even without the hate-crime aspect. As far as I know (I could be wrong, and would appreciate correction), these are the only kinds of hate crime laws in the United States. I’m quite unprepared to defend the hate crime laws in other countries if they don’t conform to this model – viz France’s laws against Nazi propaganda.
Daniel
