GottaBigOne said:
Can someone explain to me why the classification of "hate crime" is needed? Should the motive of a crime really have that much of an effect on whether or not it should be punished harshly? Is it just to not punish some victims attacker as harsh as you could because the attacker's motivation wasn't racial,sexual, etc??
Violence is violence, murder is murder. "Hate crime" legislation is legislation against thought, against beliefs. It effectively says: "If you murder you get 25 years, if you murder while being a bigot you get 75 years. The extra fifty years is for being a bigot, not for an actual crime.
Actually, GBO, the criminal law is ALL about your motive when assessing the punishment for a crime. Whether that's good or bad is the legitimate subject of debate. But the law sees it so.
"Murder is murder"? Um, no. Killing is rarely murder, nowadays. More often than not, it's Manslaughter (or second degree murder, as Americans put it). And one of the ways that you can reduce murder to mansaughter or
even involuntary manslaughter (Murder Three to Americans) is through the homosexual panic defense. For years, it has been effectively
less of a crime to murder a gay man. So you can understand our enthusiasm for making it
more of a crime, even if in a brutally logical sense it's over-correction.
And though most of us see a jail sentence as punishment, the rarefied mind of the legal scholar sees jail more as a deterrent. The more serious the problem (that is, the more prevalent) then the more likely the sentence will be severe. That's why they no longer hang people for stealing a horse.
For years, we've had a crime on the books called aggravated assault, which could be invoked when, for example, you punched a clergyman. If the punch killed him, it wouldn't be aggravated murder (at least not in the jurisdiction where I dropped out of law school). Hate crime bills seek, amongst other things, to "correct" that.
What do I believe, personally? I believe that no matter how high the
maximum sentence, in practice few hate-criminals will spend more time in jail than their common-criminal counterparts. The legal system just don't work that way. (Unless mandatory sentencing is part of the bill. Is it?)
But it does send a very powerful social message. So I'm for it.