What do you think of hate crimes?

[Kitschum]

I'm not opposed to hate crimes in principle, but I suspect they are ineffective and not very significant to society as a whole. Most "hate crimes" in this country (a few thousand every year) are rather petty things like threats, minor assaults, discrimination and defamation. About 2/3 of reported cases turn out not to be hate crimes at all on investigation, and even if they are identifying the perpetrator is often unsuccessful. All in all 9 out of 10 cases lead nowhere and if I'd guess a fair number are probably nuisance reports.

Serious incidents do happen if rarely. I remember a case from the mid 90s where a hockey player was walking home from a night out in an average Swedish city and ran into a skinhead who after a brief interaction stabbed him 64 times, killing him. This was just one year after hate crimes legislation had been introduced. The skinhead claimed the victim had propositioned him and was duly convicted for less than 1st degree murder and sentenced to only 8 years in prison. He's free now and must have been for a while. In fact one of the first Google hits I get for his name is his Facebook profile.

I'm not sure if he received a sentence "bonus" or not, but is that the outrage here if he didn't that he might have done 9-10 years instead? The real insight is that putting hate crimes on the books, given an otherwise unready or recalcitrant legal system, might not even do what it was supposed to, let alone be effective in protecting the victimized group any more than before.

[KrazyHorse]

By the way, the history of case law in which opinions constitute mens rea is pretty ****ing sordid.

I'm not sure you really want to bring that up...

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

I'm perfectly comfortable, actually. I don't make the laws.

[Pekka]

I sometimes wonder how prosecutors go about proving 'hate'. Yes, if there is witness testimony that the perpetrator was yelling epithets and that he had a history of association with hate groups, it's clear, but I suspect not every hate crime conviction is this obvious.

Yes, this is a good point. The evidence is going to be pretty weak, it's going to be "well he looks like a racist/homophobic/anti-semite/etc and yelled JEWWWWWW!!! so it must be a hate crime"... And what about other crimes, are they not hate crimes, excluding heat of the moment type things? How do you measure this hate thing and prove it existed in levels that made it significant?

I would understand that let's say there's a racist crime. A classic example: a neo nazi attacks a minority, bashes them in the street. An easy conviction, a hate crime. So I would take the hate part out, would I make the sentence lighter? No. I still see an element of "extra" here, this person was clearly a member of a group that is organized and plans these things. Kind of like if I see someone dealing drugs, OK, but if the dealer is part of mafia, then that's always a reason to think of it as more serious.

[David Floyd]

Yes!!! KH vs. BFB fight!!! I think I have my money on KH, but probably only because I tend to agree with his POV on this issue...

[Kuciwalker]

You're the only one arguing deterrence.

Deterrence is a red herring.

Some crimes deserve harsher punishment and society deserves to have some criminals seperated for longer periods of time.

a whole bunch of stuff I didn't read

Long story short any justification of this principle on grounds more rigorous than "um, because" will end up being based on deterrence.

[Kuciwalker]

Why is raping a 14 year old girl considered worse in the eyes of the law than rapping a 24 year old woman? What's this 'preventative measure' that Kuci is talking about. I don't think the laws is what prevents a sick pervert from raping a girl. And I don't see how hate crime designation is not preventative but supposedly stiffer penalties for rapping non-adults is, nor why preventative measures are even the reason for the stiffer penalties.

1) Is the rape of a 14 year old girl actually more punished than the rape of a 24 year old woman? I know that a wider set of acts counts as rape vs. a 14 year old girl, because of statutory rape laws, but I honestly don't know how that affects the penalties.

2) Regardless of (1), the general theory behind the distinction is that people who would have sex with children are sufficiently sociopathic and sexually deviant to merit additional confinement and other restrictions, i.e. the act reveals different things about their state of mind and the actions they would likely take if not confined.

edit: 3) I don't necessarily agree with the reasoning in (2), and suspect this is an issue that has not been sufficiently studied

[Elok]

By the way, I disagree with Elok wrt terrorism laws. In fact, anti-terrorism laws may be worse, because the authorities have very strong motivations to misapply them. Didn't they try to charge bin Laden's driver with terrorism or something?

Possibly, but the thread isn't about anti-terrorism laws, it's about hate crime laws. I actually don't know the nature of our terrorism laws beyond the Patriot Act stuff, I'm just saying that if a Klansman puts a burning cross on a Jew's lawn, I'd prefer he be categorized as a plain terrorist and receive a penalty of some sort based purely on the fact that he is attempting to intimidate. The nature of his dislike should not be factored in in any way. If, say, an anarcho-communist nut job left a dead pig on the lawn of a local bank manager with "it's time for all the piggies to die" carved in its flesh, I would argue for the same punishment. If somebody who was just laid off sends his old boss a death threat...similar crime, similar punishment.