Skip to main content

Just in case you missed my point earlier....

Hate speech as a crime is an oxymoron in a society that values freedom of expression sufficiently to enshrine it in the Bill of Rights.

But there are plenty of morons out there who support the idea.

Hate crimes rest on the rather dubiously assumption that it is somehow more wrong to commit first degree murder against my neighbor because he belongs to an ethnicity that I dislike than it is to kill him because he kicked my dog.

Intent, with relation to criminal guilt, is primarily useful to establishing the difference between willful acts and acts committed through culpable negligence, or to be offered in extenuation or exculpation. Other than that, your intent cannot make you any more or any less guilty of a crime.

If you had trouble with that paragraph, you probably think hate crimes are a good idea.

Comments

The Last Ephor said…
Silly me always assumed that all murders had an element of "hate" in them.
Anonymous said…
Steve: But isn't "intent" always considered at trials for various crimes? That's why there's murder one, two, three, manslaughter, etc.

I've come to understand, if not necessarily agree, with the argument that hate crimes are just another form of "intent." My main hassle w/them is that they're ridiculously selectively applied.
hube
Intent in the sense you are using it is whether or not the person intended to commit murder or did so in a fit of passion--not the reason why the murderous impulse existed in the first place.

Hate crimes change this into an editorial judgment about motivation rather than actual intent to commit the crime.

We are talking completely different uses of the word "intent" in legal terms.
Anonymous said…
Hate crimes change this into an editorial judgment about motivation rather than actual intent to commit the crime.

Indeed. This sentence says a mouthful.

But I guess I tend to vacillate between a full understanding based, say, on the following scenario:

A guy burns a cross and claims this is merely a protest for what he feels is an erosion of First Amendment liberties in the US. Besides charging him with arson (are there degrees of such?), they charge him with a hate crime for obvious reasons.

Those who favor hate crimes would argue that the image of the burning cross is obvious and despite the man's claims it is clear racial intimidation. I presume you would say this is a mere editorial judgment, and, since the man said what his intention was and there was nothing in the man's actions and/or history to doubt it, charging him with a hate crime is ridiculous.
Jim Fryar said…
Hate crimes are essentially a judgement on the public approval rating of what can be as little as a perception of the possible motivation for the crime.

In other words hate crimes are nothing less than criminalizing non PC thinking.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?