Then cite a post that answered the specific question I asked, not some general thought experiments about why enhanced penalties are appropriate in some hypothetical circumstances. This specific question, if you need reminding, is whether (and if so, why) whatever harsh penalty would be assessed for a hate crime in this beating would be unjustly harsh if they were just doing it for fun.
I actually think that it is slightly less heinous for them to hate white people than it is for them to just think it is fun to inflict creative forms of violence on an unresisting and innocent victim without concern to race.
My apologies, I misunderstood. I thought your question was in some way related to the conversation that was happening in this thread. I didn’t realize you were talking about something else, entirely. Consider my last two posts retracted.
Mine was about this actual assault, as opposed to a hypothetical scenario involving some other less heinous crime. I’m the one sticking closest to the subject, bub.
This was a foolish slip on my part. I apologize to the OP and to the participating posters. I also received a warning in GQ the day prior to this one. I fully expected that one but that just means I should have been that much more conscious of my subsequent posting behavior. Which i wasn’t. I’m going to take a posting break from the board for a while, maybe a month, and get my wits about me.
With most phones now after a factory reset the first thing that happens on restart is a prompt to enter the password for the gmail account or the AppleID, depending on what kind of phone it is. Without that password you just have an expensive paperweight.
Because the joyride beating is one crime and the hate crime beating is two crimes.
The hate crime beating is everything the joyride beating is, plus it’s a attack on the entire group that was singled out.
Is it a bit of “security theater”? Yeah, a bit, it’s not simply a response to violence, but a signal that society will not stand for racist/sexist/something-ist attacks.
So…the message is also that society will stand for brutal beatings (including forcible removal of the victim’s clothing) that are purely about sadistic amusement and showing off for one’s peers? :dubious:
I don’t see any game going on here, “zero sum” or otherwise.
X is not a crime.
Y is a crime.
XY* is also a crime. It can be distinguished from the crime Y by having the additional component X, and in fact, the law finds crime XY* worse than crime Y, and so the punishment is worse for XY* than for crime Y. This distinction is completely normal. Concocting clever plans in your head to kill your rich Uncle Chuck for the inheritance money is not against the law, but killing your rich Uncle Chuck is big fat no-no. But the two can be put together: concocting a clever plan in your head to kill your rich Uncle Chuck, and then murdering him according to that plan, is a more serious crime than killing him spontaneously or negligently.
That is the kind of distinction that this thread is about. There have been posters in this thread who have offered reasons why they believe XY* is legitimately a worse crime than Y (with respect to hate crimes), and therefore deserves a worse punishment.
I’m not sure I buy into those arguments myself, actually, but I think I can understand them. But you have not responded to any of those arguments. Instead you have written things that are comprehensively non-responsive to the other posters in this thread. For example, this:
This is a strawman of profound intellectual weakness.
No one in this thread “stands for brutal beatings”. Society does not “stand for brutal beatings”.
The actual message of society is that brutal beatings are against the law. Criminals who are caught having committed brutal beatings are arrested and charged. Everyone in this thread wants brutal beatings to be against the law, and society in general likewise wants brutal beatings to be against the law. Second-degree murder is against the law, and should be punished. First-degree murder is a different and more serious crime, and should also be punished, even worse than second-degree murder. But the fact that first-degree murder is punished more severely does not mean that the “message of society” is that second-degree murder is perfectly okay. That’s not true at all. Second-degree murder is a serious crime, and is punished like a serious crime.
Oh for fuck’s sake, do you really believe there are no possible charges here other than hate crimes? Like maybe assault and battery? You can’t believe that.
I have made it clear that I don’t believe this or any other crime should be prosecuted as a “hate crime”. The penalty for doing this, regardless of motive, should be extremely draconian.
Since people seem to have skipped over my earlier post, can anyone who is objecting to the way this incident was charged state exactly what “hate crime” statute in Minnesota they should have been charged under? People keep talking about this incident as though ‘hate crime’ is a specific charge in Minnesota, but when I looked into it Minnesota doesn’t have a statute that defines a specific charge of ‘hate crime’. People are saying it should be considered ‘two crimes’ or that it should be charged as a specific thing but, AFAICT, in Minnesota it would always be charged as a standard crime with a sentence enhancement, and not as ‘violent crime + hate crime’ or ‘hate crime’.
It’s weird to see people upset that a prosecutor didn’t charge someone with a crime that doesn’t actually exist in the jurisdiction.
IANAL but that statute seems to be a sentencing enhancement not actual crime. A jury would have to find that bias was the motivation. An aggravating factor, as it were. I could be wrong and I wouldn’t be surprised if I were.
There is no mention of a hate crime charge in the article linked to in the OP. The suspects are all being charged with assault and other crimes. The only person who mentioned a hate crime charge was the OP himself, who as far as I am aware is not a prosecutor in Minnesota. Hate crime charges are difficult to prove and I doubt they’ll come up when there are so many easy to prove crimes here.