Another Silly Hate Crimes Bill

On Wednesday the House of Representatives passed the laughably named Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. The purported prevention is what amuses me. Who are the bigots who refrain from killing only because they face harsher punishment than murderers who don't care what their victim's race or religion is?

In the video below, Rep. Barbara Lee condemns "hate-motivated violence." But isn't almost all violence motivated by hate? Lee and a majority of her colleagues apparently believe an emotion that obviously could apply to anything, applies only to "race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability."

Even if crimes spawned by anti-cop bias, greed or revenge were less reprehensible than crimes motivated by special hate, it's not exactly easy to get inside someone's head and determine why they did whatever they did. Sociopaths tend to be unstable in more than one way. Can we really trust prosecutors, judges and jurors to know which of a perpetrator's demons caused a dirty deed to be done? Should we really burden our justice system with such a costly and time-consuming exercise when the end result is so pointless and unreliable?

Jeff Norman blogs at CitizenJeff.com.

Comments

[JohnMayer]

Hate Crimes legislation that mandates harsher penalties for a specific crime such as murder when motivated by hatred make no sense to me. If anything, I tend to feel that cold-bloodedly killing a teenager for his fancy basketball shoes or iPod is WORSE than killing out of hatred, which, after all, might be considered a form of insanity.

However, creating a new class of offense under the label Hate Crime for distinct forms of criminal behavior intended to intimidate a particular group of people, to make them, for example, fearful of exercising their civil rights, seems perfectly valid to me. Also, forming special task forces to infiltrate groups motivated by hatred such as skinheads or the Klan is quite appropriate. [Which prompts me to say a word in honor of my late friend Delmar Dennis, who infiltrated the Klan in Mississippi and made the finding of the bodies of the victims of the Freedom Rider murders, and the prosecution of their killers, possible. He paid a great price for that courageous act, losing everything he held dear. He once told me that no one had ever thanked him.]

[Marco]

Not silly. Not at all.

Besides, we evaluate people's intentions for crimes all of the time with different degrees of murders, etc.

You seem to be missing the point. When somebody is assaulted or killed for being black (or white), female (or male), gay (or straight), or Jewish (or Christian or Muslim) it is sometimes only because of that particular quality. It is in the commission of those crimes that "hate crime" gets added to the mix. If somebody is being killed just for being black, the killer is attempting to send a message to all black folks that they had better watch out. Same goes for killing gay people and for women. Not all crimes against gay men or Jewish people are hate crimes, but they sure are if the killer is targeting the person just for that quality. Enhancing the punishment of a 'hate crime' also sends a message right back to the killer and anybody who might think what the killer did was acceptable. And I don't find anything silly about that.

A good friend of mine was murdered by a man who hated gay people in 1991. He targeted gay men in a Minneapolis park that my friend lived across the street from. He was attempting to send a message to gay people that they needed to shut up and go away. I find nothing wrong with our judicial branch negating that message by using that hatred as justification for expanding a convict's sentence.

[AntiSocialite]

How could you ever possibly claim to know the true nature of any crime that you didn't commit?

Furthermore, serial killers almost always look for specific traits in their victims but most would argue that their psychological condition is more to blame for the killings than hate, which is about as ambiguous a term as any. What about people who commit crimes in a specific geographic area? Are they sending a message to the people of that area... if so it must be a hate crime. If you can't see the potential for abuse in these laws, you really aren't looking hard enough.

Peace

[Marco]

I see the potential for abuse, of course. But I unlike many people actually trust our judges to use their judgment.

Besides, just because the ambiguity of a case could be abused or molded to form a particular­ly-perceiv­ed outcome, are you suggesting that we should just abandon the effort completely in cases where there is no ambiguity as in the case of my friend who was targeted for being gay according to the evidence he faxed to local news and police in an effort to terrorize people who were gay.

[Jeff Norman - Huffpost Blogger]

Basing punishment on the severity of a crime is much different than trying to analyze how a criminal feels about certain segments of the population.

The message you think is sent by enhancing punishment for so-called hate crimes is not necessarily received how you want it to be received, if at all. Last night on CNN somebody was complaining about jurors who decided NOT to enhance the punishment of a convict, apparently because they weren't convinced that the crime had been motivated by the SPECIAL type of hate prosecutors had argued was involved. The guy said the jury's decision sends a message that it's okay to target some group of people, I forget which. So a whole bunch of time and money was wasted, and in the end, the message you claim is inherently sent, by these hate crimes laws, wasn't sent at all. The opposite message was sent.

And how do we decide which segments of the population deserve special protection? What about cops, for example?

And where is the evidence that hate crime laws are effective?