[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Hate Crime legislation is nothing more than political correctness brought to an extreme. In order to prove it you have to prove what the perp was thinking when he committed the crime. This involves bringing up quasi-relevant things from their past, statements, opinions, jokes etc. and making them legally relevant to their crime.
Besides making a ridiculous amount of extra work for the legal system, it does nothing but force the issue onto the slippery slope of direct evidence vs. emotional feelings, and emotion will win that fight every time!
And its ultimate end will be what its called, namely to make hate a crime. In a way it already has. And that scares me. In America it is not illegal to hate blacks, Jews, or gays and it never ever should be! But the people who support this think that it should. They think that the way you end something bad is just to make a law against it, regardless of how impractical, unenforceable, or fundamentally wrong it is big-picture wise.
Not to mention the unintentional but inevitable side-effect of making the lives of minorities legally not equal, but more valuable than non-minorities.
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As people have pointed out in some detail already, both motive and intent figure into the definition of a crime. On April 13, 1990, a large, strong man broke several of my ribs and plunged a blade into my chest, taking several thousand dollars from me. He was never prosecuted for it.
And if I have my way, he never will be; I’m very grateful to him. You see, he was a cardiac surgeon doing a bypass operation that saved my life.
The degree of a crime, or even its criminality, is often dependent on what the intent of the person committing the putatively criminal act was.
Likewise, there are several reasons for the sentences imposed at the end of criminal trials. Sometimes it’s purely punishment. Sometimes it’s the rehabilitation of the offender. But very often it is for deterrence. Not only will the man sentenced for the crime be prevented from committing another crime, but the severity of the sentence imposed will, according to theory, cause others who might be considering the commission of that crime to have second thoughts.
Now, the basic character of a hate crimes law is that it functions as an aggravation condition in the criteria for sentencing. Tom, Dick, and Harry each severally held someone at gunpoint, and were charged with assault. But Tom drew his gun on a policeman whom he mistakenly thought in the dark was a burglar ransacking his house, when in fact the cops had been called by the neighbors. Dick acted in the heat of an argument with Pete. And Harry did it because he hates Japanese, and Sakuro had the misfortune of crossing his path while he was angry.
Take note that the same crime was committed in each case. Most people would feel Tom should be let off lightly or have his case dismissed, because he acted in a case of mistaken identity. Dick of course gets a normal sentence for drawing a gun on someone else in an argument.
But let’s look at what Harry did. He’s not being sentenced for hating Japanese people. He’s privileged to be prejudiced against them all he wants, in thought and, more or less, in word. He’s being sentenced for holding someone – Sakuro – at gunpoint. But not because he hates Sakuro in particular; rather, because Sakuro is Japanese. Law-abiding people of Japanese descent should not have to be afraid of being assaulted by people like Harry, according to the conventional wisdom of American society. So the sentencing criteria are defined in a manner that says, “We want to deter people who hate on the basis of race, color, creed, etc., from committing crimes on the basis of their hatred for groups identified on the basis of race, color, creed, etc.”
It’s a deterrent. It’s imposed on an actual criminal act, in the example an assault, not for “thought crime.” It judges on the basis of intent in exactly the same way as premeditated murder is distinguished from manslaughter.