Not entirely hate crime related, but I’ve never really understood this line of thinking, as it weights the value of human life on a sliding scale depending on who the victim happened to be. It also lead to laws such as what used to be the case in the state of New York where 1st degree murder (and thus open for the death penalty) would only apply in special circumstances, i.e. the murder of a police officer, judge, fireman, or an especially heinous murder - as if there were any other kind of murder. The simple fact that the victim was in a certain class would automatically bump up the punishment that the same crime inflicted upon any other member of society would give. While I’d agree that factors should be considered in sentencing, laws are sometimes put in place before that even becomes a factor that affects sentencing.
Putting protected classes into special values in the legal system is just a bad idea as far as I’m concerned. Is the life of a police officer really inherently worth more than that of a coke dealer? What if the coke dealer was young and stupid and making a mistake with his life, had barely begun to deal coke and in a few years would have cleaned himself up? What if the police officer was corrupt to the core and was himself dealing coke and was killed in a drug dispute? These factors don’t get involved; one was a police officer and the other wasn’t. In the end, a human life was snuffed out and a murder was committed. The value of the victim to society shouldn’t come into account as far as I’m concerned. Should a stripper being raped be worthy of a lesser sentence than a housewife being raped?
Almost all crimes are directed at persons because they are members of a group.
The two commonest groups that come to mind for violent crimes are the weak and the potentially wealthy (wealthier than the thief). But there are lots of others.
I’m with you on a lot of this. But we do draw these categories all the time. And we sentence people for murder based on their motivations all the time.
The rationale behind higher penalties (or higher degrees of murder) for killing police officers is not necessarily an idea that a cop’s life is more valuable, but instead that it is more necessary to provide a disincentive to kill cops, as criminals are more likely to consider killing cops in the first place.
And with sentence enhancers for hate crimes (which I stress again, I am not in favor of separate categories of hate crimes, just the ability to boost sentences, and absolutely not in any form of mandatory way), it is a reflection of decisions we have made as a society. Yes, as someone posted earlier, criminals pretty much always pick on groups - the weak, the rich etc (though the wealthy are significantly less likely to suffer from crime). But we have determined that certain forms of groups, for historical reasons, are targeted not for practical reasons (like weakness or relative wealth) but instead for reasons that we find abhorrent to the societal structure we are attempting to maintain. And we make these decisions all the time - we think it is worse to smash a gravestone than it is to smash a garden gnome of equal value. Now that gnome might have been the dying gift from the person’s mother, but we make an overarching judgment. Moreover, we think it is worse to smash a Jewish gravestone (I honestly don’t know if Jewish graves have headstones) and paint a swastika on it than to get drunk and smash a gravestone at random.
We don’t just look at the bottom line results of an action in criminal law; we also look at the motivation behind it.
I believe that people who commit hate crimes do so because, at some level, they believe society approves. They might believe that, in general, murder is wrong, but not if the victim is a Muslim because we all know they’re terrorists, right? Hate crime legislation is there to make it very clear that we, as a society, do not approve.
Isn’t hate crime legislation a violation of equal protection?
We criminalize certain behaviors, because they threaten the rest of society. Thus the rest of us are protected by locking up an assaulter. And we punish certain kinds of crimes more severely, because we judge that some kinds of crime present a greater threat than others. We punish premeditated murder more severely than impulsive murder, because (presumably) someone who has had a chance to consider what he is doing, and still goes ahead and does it, presents a greater threat to the rest of us than someone who got carried away and committed the murder.
Assuming therefore that the greater the punishment, the greater the protection, then is it not the case that we are offering greater protection to one class than to others with hate crime legislation? If you get five more years for killing a black man out of racial animus, then black people are being offered a greater level of protection than would otherwise be the case.
We treat crimes differently because of motive all the time, even when the intent is same. I used to work for the federal courts; if you intentionally killed me for reasons related to my job, it was a capital murder and you could get the death penalty, but if you killed me in cold blood just to see what it was like to kill someone, it would just be murder, not capital murder. If your motive for killing me was that someone else paid you to do it, it’s capital murder again. If you intentionally killed me because you caught me in bed with your wife, it can be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter. If you intentionally kill me to facilitate If you intentionally assault a district attorney in retaliation it’s a felony, but if you intentionally assault that same district attorney for mouthing off to you in a bar, it’s a misdemeanor.
The intent in each of these crimes was the same, and the outcome was the same. The intent in each was to commit the homicide or assault, and the outcome in each was that the person was equally dead or assaulted. The seriousness of the crime is determined solely by the motive, and the law has made those kinds of disctinctions for a long time. Should we do away with all crimes that distinguish between different motives?
In my opinion hate crime legislation is attempting to make certain thoughts a crime. The act of murder, rape, assault, etc was already illegal, you just make the thought motivation behind it illegal as well. This is insane, Im not going to say that its a slippery slope, because I do not think it is, but I do think it is ridiculous to say that someone should be punished harder because he killed a homosexual because he was a homosexual than one who killed a homosexual because he wanted the homosexual’s money.
Both those scenarios require thought. Would you agree there should be no difference in sentencing for pre-meditated murder for profit and killing someone in anger?
Crimes sometimes consist of otherwise legal actions, which, when placed together, create an offense.
There is nothing illegal individually about timing the comings and goings of bank employees, buying ski masks, buying a shotgun, and writing a note which says “put the money in the bag.” Discussing with friends how to rob a bank is not illegal. Throw these legal actions, some of which are free speech, others of which are protected by other amendments, together, though, and you are potentially looking at time for attempted armed robbery.
Yes, but then everyone in my neighborhood will be bloody well terrified. “Gods of Earth & Air!” they’ll say. “This meth epidemic is out of control! Which of us will be next?”
Admittedly no one will actually say “gods of earth & air,” as the only person who says that is the dead one, and some of my neighbors may say “Wetll, at least we don’t have to hear that stupid semi-curse anymore now that the dweeb’s dead.”
No, the crime occurs when you plan to take the shotgun into the bank and point it at the clerk and/or pass the note about the money in the bag. The planning is criminal in itself, even if you never get to the bank.
Those of us who lived through the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, DC area may remember that those attacks put the entire metropolitan area in fear. And whether or not they started out that way, by the end of their run, the snipers were clearly doing it for that purpose. Indeed, John Allen Muhammad was convicted of something like “homicide committed with an intent to terrorize the government or the public at large.” Were these hate crimes?
But whatever the consequences, it still wasn’t the meth addict’s intent that your neighborhood is going to be scared of getting killed in their bed, and their babies too.
All I’m saying is that you can make a good argument that crimes that intent to cause social disruption should be treated harsher than crimes that have the same physical consequences but don’t.
For one, this is why negligent maintenance of a gas pump resulting in an explosion is treated differently from a bombing of the same gas pump and then sending a video to the local TV station saying you’re going to blow up some more motorists for <insert some bloody reason here> . As far as I can see, “hate crimes”, when defined reasonably, should be viewed as terrorist acts. Now you can still make the case that terroristic intent shouldn’t be cause for harsher sentences, but you’d have to convince me.