Dragging someone along a road for miles is not an expression protected by the First Amendment. Saying “God Hates Fags” is. Dragging someone along a road for miles because you think God Hates Fags is a remarkably clear indication that you are more dangerous than the average murderer for reasons that are so clear to me I am having trouble understanding the contrary opinion.
What is the point of a justice system? The classic justifications for punishment–which are surely open for debate but which are so far not opposed with a complimentary theory–are retribution, deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation. How are we to strike a balance among these possibly competing interests without considering intent or motivation?
This is an excellent point. If a man hunts down and kills his daughter’s rapist, then it is significantly less likely he will offend again than if he kills a random black person because his daughter was raped by a black man; especially if he accompanies his crime with a cry of “black people should die because one of them raped my daughter.”
We all have one life. If someone takes it away ,it is the same crime if it is Bush, Gates or some homeless man. You do not know what the future holds for any one. The penalties should be the same.
I wonder if we should get less of a penalty for killing a 90 year old as opposed to a 20 year old. Is that the same thing. A 90 year old has a few short years to live. A 20 year old might have 75 years. What you have taken is smaller ,is it not?
Is it the same think to kill someone who is terminal with cancer?
Hate crimes are necessarily criminalizing expression above and beyond the conduct associated with it. The way you know that the intent behind the conduct was hate is by an expression of that hate. So you are functionally criminalizing the expression. Moreover, you’re doing it because of the impact that message has on a certain community.
If you’re arguing that those who commit hate crimes are more likely to be repeat offenders, I admit that I hadn’t really considered that, and I’m not sure it’s true. But it is interesting. I’ll have to think about that one more.
And that is why the police and the judicial system are not combined. The police is there to get rid of immediate threats, possibly killing people in the process, the judges are there to determine the consequences, with (in some places) the option of killing the convicted.
This is more or less the argument I was going to use. With the Kilroy graffiti, the congregation can repaint the walls of the synagogue, and the damage is completely undone. The memory of the doodle carries nothing more serious than the knowledge that some people are immature. But with the swastika graffiti, even after the paint itself is covered over, the memory of it can still be very painful.
I agree that the difference is not nearly as significant at the level of murder, though.
Even then, I think, it is not guaranteed that those who are spewing the hateful epithets are doing so because their aim is to terrorize the hated community, nor even that by doing so they even acknowledge the response they might cause. To ask reasonable mental responses from someone in the midst of beating someone up yelling a tirade of hatred doesn’t really seem all that sensible in my view.
I sort of disagree with this argument. It is the expression in conjunction with the action that is being criminalized; not the words alone, but the actions and the words. But i’m far from a Constitutional expert, let alone a law expert, so I don’t know if that makes a difference at all.
The difference between first & second degree murder is not motive; it is premeditation. I believe the idea that the more planning and preparation the murderer has done, the more evil the act, and the more chances were passed up to turn away from the course of action.
It goes to show the person’s motivations. Looked at from the level of “murder is murder” I can see how a person might feel it was irrelevant whether the person was killed for being gay or having a wallet likely to be overburdened with cash. But this is not really the issue. The question is why we drew the line at “murder is murder” when murder isn’t murder, an example I deal with after another quote.
As well, there are times when “death is not murder” and to understand those times we must admit there was simply no intent to commit murder. But we take it even further, as a matter of law; we admit that there are times where people were so negligent it was criminal, and times where they weren’t, meaning we really get into some details about the state of mind involved in an apparently criminal act. I don’t want to treat a hate crime the same as a non-hate crime for the same reason I don’t want to treat a non-hate crime the same as criminal negligence: simply, they’re qualitatively different. Where is that quality? --where we all admit it to be: in the motivation, the intent, the mens rea.
I wouldn’t personally argue that because it sounds like an empirical fact and I don’t argue over facts. Either it is true, or it isn’t. I’m more interested in what other distinctions are implied by your litmus test. My litmus test is “treat different classes of crimes differently” and one of the criteria for a class of crime is the intent of the criminal: who was the target of the crime? What was the purpose? Was there a purpose at all, or was it an accident? Was there a purpose at all, or was it just for the pleasure of doing it?
A husband that kills his wife might instill a little fear in all women; but if he suffered a momentary lapse of otherwise sound judgment, I’ll not be so interested in punishing him as much as the guy who hosts a website saying all women are whores and who has already been arrested for abusing his wife. I will run down the list:
[list=a][li]Well, the snap judgment guy deserves retribution, but [/li][li]it’s not clear that a heavy punishment will serve as deterrence for snap judgments which are by definition not rational, and [/li][li]protection of society is important to consider but clearly one has a track record of being a danger to those around him compared to the other, and [/li][li]rehabilitation is an important concern that I think only applies to the second case.[/li][/list] A justice system that ignores even these broad details is not one I would have faith in for long. A man that has committed a terrible act deserves to be punished but not for longer than is necessary.
Is it weird that doing something legal could make a crime worse? Not at all. It is illegal for me to assault you, but legal to buy a gun, and worse for me to assault you with a gun. Does this help clarify my position?
Motiveand intentare not synonomous. In the former case, you made no decision to cause the death of another person; in the latter case, you did. I’m not saying that intent is irrelevant. I’m saying that, in the latter case you give as examples, it shouldn’t matter whether you hate the bike rider because he’s a different race, because he slept with your spouse, because you happen to be the beneficiary on his life insurance, or because he offended you by frenching his boyfriend in public.
Certain forms of expression (such as threatening to commit assault) are indeed criminalized, and properly so. An assault which is prominently declared by the perpetrator to be motivated by animus against a clearly identified group constitutes a clear threat to commit similar assaults against other members of the group as the opportunity arises.
As I noted earlier, it is SOP for the criminal justice system to consider the perpetrator’s thoughts and intentions in determining sentence. Specifically, thoughts and intentions associated with a higher risk of future offenses weighs heavily in favor of more severe punishment.
This seems to be an argument that a motivation of hate isn’t a different crime. It’s not far to go to argue that motive doesn’t matter. Can we just reduce all first degree (premeditated) murder convictions to voluntary manslaughter and go home? Of course not. Motivation matters a great deal.
How are we going to know? Because of course you’re not going to say, “Oh, I saw him, and decided to swerve to hit him,” are you? You’re not even going to say, “Oh, I was driving recklessly.” Your lawyer probably won’t let you on the stand. No, whichever way it happens you are going to swear that you didn’t even see the guy. Until he swerved in front of you. And hope there are no witnesses.
I do have some problems with hate crimes the way they are currently implemented. If I call someone a nigger, that’s not a crime. If I call him a nigger, then kill him, that shouldn’t be a worse crime than just killing him, because the added element isn’t something that’s normally illegal. However, if I kill someone, call him a nigger, then drag his corpse back to the black section of town and leave it hanging from a lamp post as a warning of what happens when black people enter Whiteyville, that’s more than just a regular murder: the actual intended crime there is the terrorization of a community. In a way, the actual murder was incidental. I don’t have a problem with treating that crime as a significantly worse form of murder than just whacking someone for their wallet, because their only one victim of a mugging. A terrorist threat against a community is a crime against every member of that community. It seems entirely logical to me that a crime with a larger number of victims should be more strongly prosecuted than a crime with fewer victims.
The entire concept of a “hate” crime is retarded. What are the rest of crimes: love crimes?
However the principal danger is that it brings a society closer to allowing the government to enforce Correct Thought. For the period of time where the nitwits promoting the notion of Hate Crimes and reasonable government co-exist, the downside is not severe. Should there come a time when an oppressive government rises to power and the definition of what qualifies as a Hate Crime changes to something less in tune with the sentiment of the masses, the notion of Hate Crime will come back to bind us.
Intent and motivation are reasonable things to take into account in evaluating the crime on an individual basis. Defining a crime as a “hate crime” is not only stupid but dangerous.
Criminal trials address questions like this all the time. The prosecution puts a witness on the stand that testifies I threated to kill my victim two years ago. Or they introduce my diary where I wrote “Well, that’s a loose end tied up.” several days after the accident.
So you see no difference between a crime directed at a person as an individual and a crime directed a person because he is the member of a group?
If some guy on the next block gets murdered for sleeping with someone’s wife, I don’t feel personally threatened. After all, I’m not sleeping with his wife. But if some guy on the next block gets murdered because he’s white … that’s a threat to me as well. A crime committed because of group identity is a threat to an entire community, not just the person who was directly harmed.
We’ve already established that intent matters. If the intent of a crime is to threaten a group as well as hurt the immediate victim it deserves to be punished more harshly.
It’s no different than laws that punish cop killers more harshly than people who murder civilians. An assault on a cop isn’t just an attack on a person, it’s also an attack on civil order itself.
Under the Supreme Court’s current doctrine, it would be unconstitutional to criminalize threats against general groups. So I don’t think that can be used as the justification for hate crimes, as you suggest.
Of course. I understand that argument because it used to be my own. The problem is when the criminalized intentions are not content neutral. Would you agree that it would be unconstitutional to have greater penalties for those who kill Democrats than those who kill Republicans?
ETA: erislover, let me know if that is responsive to your post.