But the choice isn’t hate crimes laws or no hate crimes laws. Hate crimes laws would exist whether this bill was signed or not. The choice is hate crimes laws that include sexual orientation as a protected class or hate crimes laws that exclude sexual orientation as a protected class.
Anyway, I think this is a great thing, and I think that these hate crime laws are a good thing generally. They serve as a counterbalance to local bigotry. If a minority group is so discriminated against in a certain area that they can’t receive equal protection of the law from local authorities; if, for example, there’s a community that is so prejudiced against blacks or gays that crimes targeting blacks or gays aren’t being prosecuted, these laws let the federal government step in and get justice for the victims.
It would`be exceptionally difficult to make this into an abridgment of speech issue. The standard for that is already pretty high, and since the decision was based on the actions of a hate group to begin with I don’t see how this would create any notable changes, except to have the law overturned on precedent if it were challenged on the basis of the “imminent lawless action” standard.
Sorry I had to disappear from my own thread for a bit. I’m jumping back in now to say that I agree with Captain Amazing 100% here. I also wanted to comment on this:
There have been a couple of variants on this opinion posted, and they seem to suggest that “non-hate” murders will not be punished severely enough because of this legislation. I completely agree that both of the murders above are vile, despicable acts, but just because the person convicted for the hate crime might get 5 extra years jail time does not mean the person convicted of a “non-hate” crime will not be punished severely. S/he should and will under existing laws.
But if I attack a random person, aren’t I terrorizing an even larger group? (The entire population) whereas if I only attack young black females then a smaller group is being terrorized. Under this thought, shouldn’t a hate crime be a lesser penalty?
That bridge has been crossed long, long, LONG ago. Murder of public officials (whether a president or a police) is a more serious crime. Murder committed by a hitman is more serious than a common thug. I happen to agree that assault by bigots that is directly because of their odious views is more serious.
If I am assaulted because I am walking through a bad part of town, that sucks, but I think that’s one matter. If I am singled out because I’m a man, or I’m straight, or whatever, then I think the assaulter is a worse person with more despicable motivations, and ought to be punished more seriously. So yes, I believe the worse the person, the bigger the punishment.
Since someone asked, here’s the text. I’ve snipped out quite a bit, but this is the key part:
Also, there was a statement that some conservatives have attempted to argue that this law would violate the First Amendment by stopping ministers from talking about the immorality of homosexuality, for example. That is a lie, because law also says:
If you attack a random person, even if they’re a gay black female cripple, then it isn’t a hate crime. If you attack them because they’re a gay, black, etc then you’re not only victimizing them but sending a message to the gay black female cripple community at large, and it is a hate crime.
You said if you attack a random person not protected by the hate-crime legislation for a similar purpose, then your right, there should be a harsher penalty. Of course, general terrorism is already a crime with harsher penalties (indeed, one that a few years ago has arguably led to a suspension of your constitutional protections and being disappeared into Gitmo).
If we hold punching a person to be a crime, it’s because we believe that punching a person is morally wrong, and is sufficiently wrong that the government must act to prevent it. We do not hold it to be a crime because it might cause fear in other, uninvolved persons. Criminalizing an act because of the fear it might cause is a dangerous road to go down, because anyone can claim to be afraid of anything. That type of thinking would lead our justice system away from the straightforward understanding of ‘crime’ as immoral action, and towards an understanding of ‘crime’ as anything which causes certain emotions.
There’s also another reason why it’s harmful to treat hate-motivated crimes as their own separate category. By giving such crimes huge amounts of publicity, society tempts individuals to use crimes of this type for manipulation. Perhaps it’s because I was at Claremont during famous hoax perpetrated by Kerry Dunn, but I think we’re asking for trouble when we have one type of offense a massively greater amount of attention than others.
The act isn’t criminalized because it causes fear, but because in addition to the already criminal assault or murder, it contains an implicit and very real threat against a whole class of people.
On a yearly basis, how many individuals are using accusations of these crimes for publicity, and how many people are actually being injured and murdered in hate-motivated attacks? The FBI has the latter right here. There were 7,624 hate-related incidents in 2007, and the number has been increasing. How many hoaxes were there in 2007?
Is it illegal to assault another person (barring questions of self-defense and the like)? Of course.
Is it illegal to make a threat of violence to another (speaking of a serious, intentional threat, not the casual comment that would be overlooked by most people)? Most people would say yes.
If someone cpmmits both crimes, against different people, is it appropriate to charge them with both? Again most people would say yes.
Now, hate crimes as incorporated in most penal statutes penalize just that – an assault which is also a threat against others.
If Sam Straight assaults Gary Gay because they disagree who should win Saturday’s football game, that is not a hate crime. If he assaults Gary for the specific reason that he is gay, and that can be proven, then it’s an implicit threat (and sometimes an explicit one) against all gay people, causing them to live in fear. As such, it’s considered an aggravating circumstance.
I used to agree with this. Then I came to realize that sometimes murder and assault are also terrorism. In addition to prosecution for hanging a black man, a lynch mob should be prosecuted for trying to keep black folks “in their place.” It is not the murder or assault victim that is the victim of hate crime, it is all the other members of their class that were sent a message by the killing or beating.
In short it is the “sending a message” to “those people” aspect that hate crime laws are attempting to address, NOT the hate in the hearts of the perpetrators.
As for the OP, it is well neigh time this applied to Gays. Today homosexuals have far more reason to fear for their safety than Blacks or Jews.
Sorry for assuming. I would. I know many who would as well. And I believe that enough people would since we have distinctive “crimes of passion” that allow defense attornies argue, and sometimes succeed, for lighter punishment. I can’t name any off the top of my head though
I don’t believe all premeditation is the same. That’s like saying all crimes that end with a death are the same, or all crimes with similar motives are as well.
That’s fine, but why? To argue the devil’s advocate point, why should a bunch of people who beat up some guy premeditatively be punished different from a bunch of guys who beat up someone on a whim? The end result is still the same.
To answer that, it’s because I think the law is there for reasons such as justice and deterrence. The premeditated crowd is more dangerous because it thought about breaking the law and still went ahead with it. The whim crowd may not be bad people, but something made them snap. It could be a comment, maybe the guy was looking at a guy’s wife funny, whatever. Either way, they snapped suddenly. For them, it seems that they are more a product of their environment rather than intrinsically bad. At least to me, that’s what the law is saying
But if they beat you up after premeditation, they would get harsher sentences than if you insulted one of them and they snapped with no premeditation.
I think there’s a general misunderstanding of how these hate crime laws work. Sentencing is not a zero sum game. A racist being sentenced longer does not mean someone else’s sentence will be lighter because of it. I see this mistake too many times, including in this topic, where people will make the erroneous assumption that harsher punishment for racists (using that as an example) means that they are treating other criminals less harshly
But think of the racial element as something extra tacked onto the original sentence and it becomes, at least to me, more palatable. Non-racists aren’t being treated less harshly, they are being treated just as harsh as if we had no hate crimes law. It just follows that such legislation makes racists’ sentences harsher.
If Bob’s a murderer and Dave’s a racist murderer, both would get 25 years without hate crimes law. But with such a law, Bob’s sentence isn’t being reduced to 20 while Dave’s jumps to 30. Bob stays the same. Dave’s simply increases to 30 regardless of Bob’s sentence. Harsher punishment for a worse crime. I don’t see how that’s unfair at all
Just because i disagree with you doesn’t mean i misunderstand how hate crime enhancements work. It simply means that i disagree with you.
Your second sentence makes no sense at all. The fact that a hate crime enhancement is added onto another crime does, in fact, mean that (in your example) non-racists are being treated less harshly. They are being treated less harshly, for committing the same act, as someone with racial motivations. By making racists’ sentences harsher, you are making non-racists’ sentences relatively less harsh, and the “relatively” part is important in a society where treating people equally under the law is an important principle.
Polycarp, in my opinion your argument about the issuing of threats is completely inappropriate. To argue that the threat implicit in a hate crime is the same, in a legal sense, as an explicit threat of, or incitement to, imminent lawless action, is to broaden the definition of “imminent” and “threat” so widely as to make them effectively useless.
There is no reason to extrapolate this. No one is suggesting that ‘non-hate’ murders will not be punished. The point is that hate-crimes are stupid and divisive for no reason. Murder is bad. Murdering a faggot is not worse than murdering someone for their kicks.
I don’t really see how using violence against a person of a particular group specifically because they are part of that group could not be read as an attempt to threaten the rest of that group. If they start lynching Irish-Catholics in my neighborhood, I’m certainly going to feel threatened, and I don’t really see how they people doing it could have any other intention.
Plus its not like people woke up one morning and passed these laws, the first hate crime bill was passed in the 60’s in response to the fact that their were, in fact, targeted campaigns of violence against blacks to attempt to intimidate them from exercising their rights. For decades the gov’t did a very poor job at stopping this, and the hate crime law was an attempt to put that to right.
Again, the law does not make it a worse crime to murder a homosexual then a straight person. It makes it a worse crime to murder a person because they are gay or straight, kill a gay dude for his wallet and you’re, well, still in a lot of trouble, but not because of hate-crime laws.
Murdering someone who is gay or black for kicks is no worse than murdering anyone else for kicks. Murdering someone because they are a member of a specific subgroup is, IMHO, worse than murdering someone for kicks. One is undirected violence from a societal POV. The other is directed violence intended to advance an agenda. It is more dangerous to social stability and as such should be responded to with greater force by society.
I’m not sure, as a general matter of logic and reason, that “They’ve been around since the 60s” is a very compelling defense. An evaluation of whether hate crime enhancements are reasonable or not should not rest on the simple question of longevity. There’s plenty of pretty stupid legislation that’s been on the books for considerably longer. Marijuana’s criminalization in the United States began in earnest about a hundred years ago, but i don’t consider that a very good reason for keeping it illegal now.
Also, it seems to me that, like so many examples people give in order to support hate crime legislation, the example you give actually serves to undermine your own argument. If people were, in fact, conducting " targeted campaigns of violence against blacks" (and they were), then it seems to me that hate crime legislation is sort of unnecessary. The violence itself is what should be punished. We should be punished for the violent actions we commit, not for the thoughts behind the actions.
To step sideways a little, i even have some problems with the “imminent lawless action” ruling of the Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio. While i understand why this ruling was made, and have some sympathy with the motivations of the justices in this case, i think that rulings like this essentially reject the notion that humans are rational beings who should be held responsible for their own actions. If i’m standing in a crowd and an agitator tries to incite me to “bash the homos” or “kill the blacks,” the responsibility for not acting on this incitement should be mine, and only mine. I don’t think “He told me to do it” is a reasonable excuse for transferring criminal liability to person who has done nothing but speak, and for that reason, as with hate crime legislation, i think that we should only punish the actions themselves.
Where have I suggested treating hate-motivated crimes as their own separate category? I don’t support hate crimes laws in general, as I said as early as post number 2. What I do support is the use of motive as a sentencing enhancement factor, as has been done throughout legal history.
I’m not saying charge people with something different. But penalties have ranges for a reason. And that is to allow the judge to take the factors of the crime into consideration when setting the tariff. Your comment wanting sentences to be as equal as possible was what I was responding to, and I still think it is foolishness in the extreme.
I will assume that the purpose of enhanced sentences for hate crimes has the effect of deterring hate crimes. An extra five years for beating up a gay person, for example, will make it that much less likely that the perp will beat up gay people in the future.
Having assumed this, what is the purpose of not imposing the same sentence on an ordinary mugger? Will that not have exactly the same deterrence effect? Obviously we want to protect everyone from being beaten up, not just gay people (although gay people shouldn’t be beaten up either).
It depends on how you define the group being threatened. If gay bashing is a threat against all gays, then mugging is a threat against everyone with money in their pocket or purse.
I can see punishing a crime more severely based on the crime’s degree of violence, degree of culpability (premeditated vs. heat of the moment), and the extent of the damage to the victim. Punishing it more severely based on the group to which the victim is presumed to belong seems to go against the spirit of “equal protection”.
You’re misrepresenting the law. If a gay guy beats up a straight guy, it isn’t a hate crime. There has to be evidence that the straight guy was targeted because of his sexual orientation.
But let me ask you a question: do you favor more stringent punishment of people who assault policemen or other public officials, as opposed to a janitor or salesman? If you do, how does this additional punishment fit into your view that the crime should be based on the degree of violence, culpability, and damage?