More on Hate Crimes
Back on Monday, we had a pretty good discussion going about hate crimes. Frequent Lean Left commenter LarryE expands on this theme:
The usual (flawed) understanding of “hate crimes” legislation is that it would make the hate itself, rather than any actions based on the hate, the crime. It’s that misunderstanding that leads people to fear that “hate crimes” will lead inexorably to “thought crimes,” to people being prosecuted strictly for their opinions.
The thing is, I don’t know of anyone who’s proposed anything approaching that, i.e., proposed a law to make hate itself illegal. “It’s now illegal to be a bigot.” Besides the Constitutional issues, it’s absurd on its face to seriously entertain the notion of being able to simply outlaw racism or ban sexist or homophobic remarks or whatever – or at least it’s absurd to think any such law would actually achieve any of those ends or even be enforceable. So let’s drop that particular misconception and focus on the real argument, one which, as is explicit in the very phrase “hate crimes,” refers to “crimes motivated by hate.”
The whole thing is worth a read.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Well, that’s true if we’re fucking morons incapable of basic reason. Especially if, for example, said fag’s wallet wasn’t taken. But hey, let’s just pretend that it’s all voodoo, and we can’t have any idea why anybody ever does anything. At which point we’re simply powerless to even differentiate between intentional and accidental.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I know, I know, pipe dream.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of “vigilante justice,” but I guess “pipe dream” works, too…
July 31st, 2008 at 11:11 pm
The defendant claims he heard sirens, or got spooked.
Or took his wallet afterwards. Cause, you know, hate crimes never result in theft afterward.
But thanks for the vulgarity.
Yeah, we all know encouraging police officers to enforce the law, and for folk to protect themselves within the extent allowed by the law, that’s “vigilante justice.” Yep.
July 31st, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Robb:
I just want you to agree or disagree with the following statement –
I agree with it.
Agree with it, and you cannot agree that hate crime makes sense since it will give certain groups MORE protection than others.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. ANY group that is specifically targeted for intimidation by another individual or group should be so protected. It just so happens that in practice, certain groups are targeted in this way far more often than others. So it’s not that some groups are more deserving of protection than others, it’s that these groups are more in need of such protection. It’s why the president gets armed security when the average Joe doesn’t — it’s not that the president is more deserving of such protection, but rather that he’s more likely to be attacked.
So it goes for hate crimes. And if some group should emerge specifically targeting WASP males for violence and/or other intimidation, they should be prosecuted under hate crime legislation to the fullest extent of the law, and to the same extent as any such group that targets non-whites. (In fact, if history tells us anything, it’s that such a group would be punished by far and away more severely.)
I don’t want to protect the Nazi scum.
Not at all. But you would enforce a legal standard that would hold Henry II blameless for the murder of Thomas Becket. After all, the King didn’t do anything. He didn’t threaten anyone. He didn’t specifically ask anyone to do anything at all. No action, no explicit threat, no crime, right?
gattsuru:
The defendant claims he heard sirens, or got spooked.
Or took his wallet afterwards. Cause, you know, hate crimes never result in theft afterward.
All the sorts of things that could be fleshed out before a Grand Jury and at trial, no? See, when the prosecutor decides to charge the perp not just with assault, but with a hate crime, said prosecutor is seeking a more severe charge with a more stringent burden of proof. So s/he’s taking a risk, unless s/he’s pretty sure s/he’s got a good case on that.
But, of course, if you ascribe to the “let’s let people unconditionally get away with all manner of shit because we’re deathly afraid of slippery slopes” school of jurisprudence, I suppose that’s your prerogative. 🙂
But thanks for the vulgarity.
People who can’t handle occasional cursing can go fuck themselves. 🙂
Yeah, we all know encouraging police officers to enforce the law, and for folk to protect themselves within the extent allowed by the law, that’s “vigilante justice.”
Well, the whole “citizens’ arrest” thing is what tripped the vigilante justice switch in my mind, but whatever.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:45 am
gatt, the police are paid to do full time as a job what it is the duty of all others to do when confronted with criminality. They are not the ONLY ONES allowed to stop crime or detain criminals. Though, they say they are and though that is the politically correct stance it is not true.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:22 am
At least in Ohio, the matter is a separate charge; you can argue hate crime vandalism and just get vandalism. Please don’t tell me you’re so optimistic as to believe that an additional charge that makes any degree of questioning on-topic isn’t tossed around often.
After all, it’s not like they would be convicted of other crimes more easily, according to what you say. We’d be letting people off scot free without these hate crime statutes that don’t make previously legal acts illegal.
And, hey, it’s not like a country with a similar legal code, constitutional protections, and demographics could possibly be a good canary in a coal shaft on a legal matter. For my next joke, I must be planning to suggest that past events are a predictor, even an unreliable one, of future events in the same circumstances! Crazy!
It’s still within existing legal codes, often explicitly. It still involves normal judicial oversight.
So, does “vigilante justice” actually mean the dictionary definition of “taking the law into one’s own hands”, or do you just replace the word with “legal actions tgirsch doesn’t like”?
August 1st, 2008 at 9:37 am
Yu-Ain Gonnano: I was trying to point out to mariner that when he said “Punish criminals for what they do, and don’t worry about what they think.”, it wasn’t reflected in the non-controversial area of intent. Motive is another example of “what they think”, and I did not intend to conflate the two, rather, to imply they are of a similar nature not evident in simply “what they do”.
Robb Allen: Actually, hate appears to have been a, if not the motive for the Beltway Snipers, we just didn’t know it for a long while. (“We” as in I was living in Arlington, VA then, and that was “my” Home Depot at which the FBI worker was shot. Not a fun time.)
straightarrow: For “pure hate” prosecutions in the US, check out the one in Idaho. Wife is taking pictures of a soccer match (she may do this for the local media), black (African?) coach very unreasonably objects and assaults her. Husband gets no where near the two in the crowd, but is understandably loose with his language. He’s prosecuted, every courtesy is extended to the coach, including not prosecuting him for an assault in front of a bunch of witnesses.
The powers that be in Idaho are so sensitive about its image as a haven for white supremacists/separatists that, well, I’m not sure I’d want to live there.
August 1st, 2008 at 10:40 am
tgirsch, I get the impression that you do not agree with the statement made that hate without assault = 0 years. If you truly believe that hate alone is a punishable crime, then you have de facto stated that you believe in policing people’s thoughts. Anyone who claims they don’t hate a certain type or class of person is lying to themselves. It’s human nature to fear and hate the “other”. We work hard to suppress that hate, and for most of us it is not a problem to suppress any urge to act on that hate, but it is there. If hate without action is a punishable crime, then anyone can be punished at the whim of the government. “Atlas Shrugged” hit that nail on the head.
Tacking on extra punishment for hate is a short step from punishing the hate alone. Not liking how someone feels about others is no justification for punishment. Our justice system was built on the idea of penalizing illegal actions. Judges and juries are brought in to look at each case, and this has worked for over 200 years as a method of determining the correct punishment, based on circumstances. The murderer who killed because of pure malice will likely get a more severe punishment than the one who killed his wife’s lover when he came home early. Thankfully, the law is not yet on the “Zero Tolerance” bandwagon.
I say again, tacking on extra punishment for “hate crime” status diminishes similar crimes against victims that were not motivated by hate. Motive is used to prove guilt, not to determine the punishment. If hate without assault = punishment, we had all better lawyer up.
August 1st, 2008 at 10:46 am
Mike M:
tgirsch, I get the impression that you do not agree with the statement made that hate without assault = 0 years. If you truly believe that hate alone is a punishable crime, then you have de facto stated that you believe in policing people’s thoughts.
I don’t know where you’d get that impression, because I’ve been pretty consistent in stating that hate, in and of itself, is not a crime. So have the people I’ve linked. We’re not advocating for punishing thoughts or opinions, we’re advocating for punishing criminal actions taken. We’re simply advocating that when such criminal actions are taken, we shouldn’t ignore the circumstances under which they occurred, nor should we ignore the broader impacts of those actions.
Tacking on extra punishment for hate is a short step from punishing the hate alone.
See Xrlq’s “aggravating circumstance” comment, above.
I say again, tacking on extra punishment for “hate crime” status diminishes similar crimes against victims that were not motivated by hate. Motive is used to prove guilt, not to determine the punishment. If hate without assault = punishment, we had all better lawyer up.
You’re ignoring intent. The only difference between murder and manslaughter is intent. If we can draw a distinction there, why not also in the case of hate crimes?
If hate without assault = punishment, we had all better lawyer up.
You spend a lot of time on the “hate without other crime = crime in and of itself” idea. Too bad absolutely nobody is arguing this point. It’s a lovely straw man, but that’s all it is.
August 1st, 2008 at 10:51 am
The big problem, as I see it, with hate crime legislation is that (barring an admission by the perpetrator) there is virtually no way to know what the motivation is. IF hate crime laws were only outlawing those acts that were intended to target an entire class of people for further illegal actions against them (along the lines of “inciting a riot” laws) AND it could be shown that that was the actual intent of the act, then and only then would they be useful and reasonable.
Unfortunately, the way they are currently written/enforced makes something as “innocent” as using a particular slur over another one when you are leading up to a fight, as you’re trying to intimidate or insult the other guy, into a Hate Crime instead of just the crime of picking a fight.
If I’m mugging or carjacking someone and want to scare them into giving me what I want, I can call them anything I want without it adding onto my sentence, unless I happen to use an expression that involves their race, gender, sexual preference, age, religion, or whatnot. Then I get extra time. Was the crime motivated by hate? No. Was hate a factor in whether or not I committed it or who I chose as a victim? No. Do I get an additional punishment because it’s a Hate Crime? Yes.
That’s just not right.
Take the oft discussed here example of painting a swastika on the side of a Jew’s house. Is that a threat? Could it just be my way of expressing my perception of my pure Aryan race’s superiority over Jews? Perhaps I’m a Navajo painting it up there as a sign of healing because my good friend, the resident Jew, was sick. Even if I hate Jews, painting a swastika on a Jew’s house does not necessarily mean that I want people to do anything illegal to Jews. It could just be my way of expressing my hatred, and should be treated as no different than if I had painted any other graffiti on the house.
IF you could prove that I was doing it as an act of terrorism, then fine, go after me for that. If you can’t, though, then it should not have any additional punishment associated with it.
And if you think that thought crime will never happen here, I’ve got a little treat for you. In SC, it is illegal to do something that you think is illegal even if it isn’t.
Did you get that? You are guilty of committing a crime if you did something that was not against the law, if you THOUGHT it was against the law when you did it. According to this law, if you didn’t see the sign raising the speed limit to 70mph and you were doing 70mph, you could be charged with violating the law. Imagine the scenario: you’re in a 70mph zone and get pulled over because you’ve got a tail light out. You blurt out that you are sorry that you were doing 70 in a 60 zone, but that you were in a real hurry to get to the airport to catch a flight. You could be arrested for violating the “I thought I was doing something illegal” law. Even though you were not exceeding the speed limit.
For those that are wondering, we have that law because some sick perv got caught trying to hook up with a minor online. When he went to what he thought was the young girl’s house, it was an undercover cop living there pretending to be a minor online. Since the law said that it was against the law to do such things to a minor, and the person he had been communicating with was not actually a minor, he got acquitted.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:25 am
Harold–thanks for the example.
I was looking for a good way to differentiate between hate crimes as described in theory and hate crimes as prosecuted in practice.
I don’t know what my response is, but I see several choices.
(a) agree that hate crime laws may be good in theory, but a slippery slope in practice, and should be discouraged in general
(b) agree that hate crimes laws are good in theory, and generally applied well
(c) disagree that the law should pay a high level of attention to the group which the target of the crime belongs to, and promote prosecution of the individual crime (thus disagreeing with hate crime laws in principle)
(d) wonder why the heck hate crimes are such a big issue
I notice that not many have responded to my challenge above.
Under the current definitions of hate crimes (as described and enumerated by the FBI), incidences are fairly rare. Large numbers of jurisdictions report no incidence of hate crimes in the average year, and the reported numbers show a rate approximately 1% the rate of generic violent crime.
Whether or not we need a special law, don’t these numbers show that hate crimes are the outlier, the rare event?
Admittedly, they get lots of attention in the press. (If it bleeds it leeds; if it is unusual, it is sensational.) However, do they deserve the attention paid to them in law, policy, and the press?
August 1st, 2008 at 11:51 am
If one accepted your logic here, then there’s no difference between hating Terrell Owens and hating black people as a group.
Not exactly. There is a difference. I just believe there should be no *legal* difference as hate shouldn’t be illegal whether it’s for an individual or a group.
Secondly, if you want to follow your logic that the threat is a threat against more than just the individual, it seems that the logical answer would be to charge the perpetrator with multiple counts, one for each person who can reasonably be expected to have been threatened. For example, there are 10 Jewish people living in the neighborhood where the swastika was painted, charge the perp with 10 counts of threatening.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:54 am
Harold, I would say that “intent” in the legal definition isn’t an example of “what they think” but rather “what they attempt”. What is attempted is a “what they do” and not a “what they think”.
August 1st, 2008 at 2:07 pm
The one strawman I keep seeing is the misdirection provided by the “intent is used to determine which charges apply, so hate crime prosecution is ok.” (Very loosely paraphrased.)
That position is inherently flawed. Determination of intent is rightfully done to make a decision on appropriate charges to be levied. If one hits and kills a pedestrian with his car accidentally, manslaughter. If done because the driver was changing his cd’s and not looking where he was going, perhaps negligent homicide. If done on purpose, murder. Hence, determination of intent has a rightful place in the process. No one can successfully argue that.
A case in point is the dragging death of Mr. Bird (Byrd?) in Jarrell, Tx. The proper charges were brought, conviction obtained, death sentences applied.
If we somehow divined that they killed Mr. Bird because he was black or retarded and called it a hate crime, what would we do? Execute them twice?
There were calls and protests for the imposition of a hate crime law in Texas following this trial. Why? The mechanism of determining the intent of the killers and charging them with pre-meditated murder was sufficient to achieve as close to justice as we can get.
Why would we dilute the seriousness of this crime with a politically correct charge that robs every citizen of the country of his right to an opinion, no matter how pure or obscene. The actions should be the determining factor in punishment when the proper charges are levied.
The rest is just posing for the crowd. And a dangerous pose it is.
The misdirection comes when some here try to equate determination of intent prior to levying of charges to prosecution and/or added punishment because of thought or perceived thought. The selection of charges is a sufficient mechanism for determining the proper punishment should a conviction be obtained.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:57 pm
So, you’re saying the exact same thing I’m saying. Threaten a group or individual – get punished. Perfect!
The fact that it will help Jews, Blacks, Whites, Lounge Singers with Rosacea is a bonus. No need to single anything out.
As long as you do not predefine any specific groups, I’m cool with it. But I don’t think that’s what you’re after. You seem to want to have laws that state threats against Groups X, Y, and Z carry more penalty than groups A & B. I see no difference between that and giving special water fountain privileges to the same groups.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 am
Robb:
Actually, I think we’re pretty close to being on the same page. I don’t think any particular group should be exempt from hate crime protection. At the same time, like it or not, we’re a lot better at recognizing hate crimes against certain groups, because there’s a long history of such crimes against those groups. That makes them easier to identify, but it doesn’t make less-publicized hate crimes less worthy of the same sort of protection.
August 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hey man, as long as everyone benefits equally from it, I have no problems. But I still think that threats are threats and there’s no need to confuse the issue with calling it a “hate” crime. I mean really, how many crimes happen out of pure love?
August 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I don’t know, when it comes to language, I say call it what it is. When you have crimes that are motivated by bigotry, and targeted against certain groups of people because of their race/religion/whatever, then why not call a duck a duck? Why pussyfoot around and say it’s “just” a threat no different than any other? Even when you include all groups, as I suggest we should, you’re still talking about a difference in kind when you’re talking about threats against individuals, versus threats against entire groups or classes of people. Call it what it is, I say.
August 3rd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I think every state with a death penalty should remove financial gain from the list of special circumstances that qualify for it. Then again, even states that don’t have the death penalty, still need to clean up their law books to make sure that crimes motivated by financial gain are not punished any more harshly than the same crimes would be without that motive. After all, financial gain is not a crime, so how can financial gain + crime > crime?
While we’re at it, let’s get rid of laws against bribery and prostitution, both of which rest on the shaky premise that legal act + legal act = crime.
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Or make that legal act + legal act + legal act = crime, as the quid and the quo for bribery and prostitution aren’t crimes even if they co-occur, unless the “pro” can also be proven. The basic point stands, though, as trading stuff for other stuff isn’t generally a crime, either.