Hate Crimes?

FreeEnterprise wrote: you stated that agentwhale is a newspaper editor and reporter... (high school or college papers aren't "real" papers...)

UCF is bigger than many towns in this country, and Whale's paper has greater circulation than many of what you consider "real" papers.  I would suggest that your characterization is entirely incorrect.  He is not just in the journalism club.

Anyway:

750.147b Ethnic intimidation. Sec. 147b. (1) A person is guilty of ethnic intimidation if that person maliciously, and with specific intent to intimidate or harass another person because of that person's race, color, religion, gender, or national origin, does any of the following: (a) Causes physical contact with another person. (b) Damages, destroys, or defaces any real or personal property of another person. (c) Threatens, by word or act, to do an act described in subdivision (a) or (b), if there is reasonable cause to believe that an act described in subdivision (a) or (b) will occur.

Great example.

Items a, b, and c are already crimes, regardless of motivation.  This law, like almost all other "hate crime" laws, does not create a new crime, but rather provides for stiffer punishments for crimes committed with certain motivations.

Most hate crime rules are not set apart as in your example, but are simply listed as aggravating factors along with other aggravating factors.

As Whale pointed out, you first have to commit a "crime".

Every jurisdiction in this country has aggravating and mitigating factors for various crimes.  These range from witnessing your wife cheat on you to hiring a hitman.  Penalties can vary depending on the nature of the victim, your motivation, your method, and a bunch of other things.

Legislatures have decided that race-based crimes are particularly injurious to society, just like murder for hire is more injurious to society than doing the killing yourself.

There are centuries of precedent for this approach to sentencing.  You may think that ethnic motivation should not be an aggravating factor, and there are certainly arguments to be made for that position.  But to declare these laws out of line with the rest of the system is simply incorrect as a matter of legal history.

adrenalinejunky wrote: i dont pretend to know our legal system well enough to make such a statement regarding whether its precidented. but i still think its retarded. and wow racism is retarded, i dont see how this is much of a solution.

It's tricky stuff.

I'll start with the premise that racism, and racial issues in general, is still a major problem in this country.  Assuming that to be true, we would like for our legislatures to try to help with that, since helping society is part of their job.

Further assuming that increasing penalties for certain crimes decreases the frequency of those crimes, these laws would reduce frequency of ethnically-motivated crimes.  This is good.  However, there is also an obvious backlash against perceived special treatment, as evidenced in this thread.  Does the former outweigh the latter?  I don't know, and don't know that it is knowable.

I am also very torn on these sentencing rules.  I think they could have been helpful, but I think that they were marketed very badly.  With different presentation I suspect they could have been a good thing, but now I tend to believe that their very existence increases tension to an unacceptable level.

Random comparison:  In New York, if you kill a cop you might get the death penalty.  If you kill your wife you generally can not get the death penalty.  Is that "fair?"  Is that any better or worse than ethnic hate crimes?