Do hate crimes punish freedom of expression?

Politics and religion
21

Vegas Robb

That terms falls under “It might mean this, but it’s commonly perceived as that.”

Perhaps. In recent parlance it’s becoming more popular as a catch all for all non-whites. At least that’s the way I’ve been interpeting it.

About hate crimes. I know anecdotes are meaningless, but I’ll share one with you guys. Discard as you please.

There’s a neighborhood in Queens, NY which is “known” to be unfriendly to black folks, near JFK airport named Howard Beach. I went to high school with many kids who came from this area, and they made sport of reminding me to never come to their neighborhood. And then the Howard Beach incident happened, where a black teenager went there to look into buying a used car from an ad he saw in the paper. He ran into a group of white youths, who confronted him (and his two buddies). They were badly beaten, and the teenager who was looking for the car was chased onto a highway where he was hit by a motorist and killed.

Many years later, I and my brother were going to a computer show at the JFK airport Ramada hotel. I got lost while driving, and ended up smack in the middle of Howard Beach. When I realized where I was I started to sweat. I was very nervous, and I almost felt like I had commited a crime just by being there. I was very worried that someone would spot me and “bad things” would happen. My brother kept his cool a bit better, and between the two of us, we spotted a gas station and found directions to get back to the hotel. I didn’t stop sweating for some time.

Perhaps hate crimes don’t have an effect on society at large, but they certainly had one on me. It’s this effect on non-participants that is being punished. And so I don’t mind the laws so much.

Funk.

22

I’m not qualified to comment on the legal aspects, but the logical aspects of hate crimes work as a sort of corollary to degree of crime. Feel free to correct me, but first, second, and third degree crimes generally fall under the motivation and planning aspect of the crime. A “crime of passion” can carry less of a punishment than a premeditated murder, even if the actual crime, murder, is the same. Likewise a change in charge, from murder to manslaughter, if the killing was completely unmeditated and mostly accidental.

Hate crimes make some thing like first degree murder into “first degree murder +1”, in that they are premeditated, but without any justification. I.e., if I plan to kill my wife for cheating on me, and then kill her, I’d most likely get first degree murder, because I plotted to do it for some time. However, I had justification, although certainly not justification to kill. As Chris Rock said, “I don’t approve of what O.J. did, but I understand.”

If you do something awful to someone based on a motivation that is completely invalid, your only beef with that person is some intrinsic characteristic that has nothing to do with you or your well-being, then you move another step up the sociopath ladder, and need to be punished/removed from society to a greater degree than someone who had a good reason to target the victim.

I don’t know how much sense any of that made, but it boils down to someone being a dick for no good reason being a worse person than someone who had a reason.

H.

23

If that’s the case, then extra charges could be laid for virtually all crimes. By this logic, there should be liquor-store hold-up laws, too. After all, every time someone hits a liquor store and gets away with it, more people are moved to rob them, sending a chill through the liquor-store owning community.

I’m with Ben on this one. I’ve never seen the need for additional hate-crime charges, for making one offense greater than another because of the victim. Just make sure that the offenders are punished to the full extent of the original law, and if those punishments aren’t severe enough, up them. Intent and the actions of groups against gays, minorities, whatever, can be handled with criminal conspiracy charges, as that is separate to actual crimes of violence, etc.

24

Hasn’t everyone felt like that at one time or another, though? Accidentally gone into a neighborhood where they felt scared or unwelcome for whatever reason? I know that I have in a couple of US cities, including one time walking in Boston in 2004 where my wife and I were threatened for, well, being white in the wrong neighborhood by a group of huge guys hanging on a street corner (hard to mistake the intent when someone gets in your face calling you “a cracker motherfucker” on the “wrong motherfucking street” so you’d better get “your cracker ass” moving, while his buddies push in behind you). Needless to say, we gave up on the idea of walking over to Fenway Park.

Anyhow, I sure wasn’t comforted by the knowledge of hate-crime legislation at the time.

25

Hispanics yes, Asians…probably not. At least, that has been my experience with that wording in NYC. Not in the self-classification sense mind you (Who calls themselves a ‘person of color’?), but how laws worded that way seem to work themselves out.

26

Toddy, in the area around Fenway, I wouldn’t be safe either. I make a great distinction between a “bad neighborhood” and an “unwelcome neighborhood”. There are some bad neighborhoods that I’ve gone to that I wanted to leave the second I’ve gotten there. Ones where crime is rampant, and if you don’t know somebody who lives on the block you’re visiting, you’re fair game to the jackers. There are other neighborhoods that are from a crime statistic standpoint great places to be, except if you’re unwanted. I percieve a huge difference between the two.

Funk.

27

It’s in that last paragraph that I think you start to stray. I don’t believe that racist thoughts generate independently within everyone who holds them, I think that they propagate through speech, writing and images. Saying that the only people who are swayed by such comments are people who already holds those views is therefore untrue. This holds especially true for more impressionable people, like children.

The problem with racism and reason is that many people aren’t reasonable, and many reasonable people can hold racist prejudices. Saying that no harm is caused by racist statements, because any reasonable person wouldn’t believe it, is also therefore untrue. At least in my opinion :).

I can accept your specificity definition, but to me that is a legal issue, and doesn’t affect the basic principle. If someone says that black people are thieves, this has a negative effect on individual black people, just the same as if someone had said the same thing about them personally. The only difference is in degree.

While I don’t much like litigious culture as it is, I could see the logic behind a group of people, say Jewish or Black, who took a class action agaist some person or group that denigrated them. Maybe that’s a better way of dealing with racism than making racist commentary illegal; if you can prove that you were harmed by the statement you can claim compensation.

I’m in danger of dragging this off topic. Sorry.

As to hate crimes, I don’t really care that much. I’m not going to get hot under the collar defending someone who has murdered, just because he is going to get a few extra years on his sentence for murdering someone because they are black. My only real worry about hate crimes is that it is too easy to label something as a hate crime, when it was just a crime that happened to be carried out against a minority.

28

With respect to established legitimacy, law should always precede action. Therefore, if Howard Beach wants to be “nigger free” they should establish community laws that prohibit black people from entering the community and if they do, would be required to immediately leave upon request. In the absence of these laws, it is a crime to act in detrimental fashion toward someone based on his race.

The situation as it now stands is that a larger governing force (the one acting on behalf of the United States) holds racism as illegitimate in any part of the United States, preventing and overriding any laws from emerging to allow racism. Therefore, Howard Beach has no RECOURSE but to apply violence on blacks, since they cannot form laws which give them the community they desire.

Violence is the resort of people who cannot create and therefore LIVE INSIDE law. Law prevents violence (at least with respect to established legitimacy) insofar as it gives control over the environment to the people who live in it.

29

That is the very basis of libel and slander law, isn’t it?

I don’t think anyone (except perhaps his parents) shed too many tears for the nut who hatcheted the people in the bar and then blew away the girl in the car with him and a cop …

Bingo!

30

You can’t extricate the legal issue, though, because that is the issue. I mean, if your point is just that it’s not nice to make nasty, untrue generalizations about groups of people, then I agree. But putting hate speech in the same category as slander implies that it should be treated as such under the law, and that’s where I disagree. And the degree is a big difference, because while Person A (who has no prior prejudices) might decide to avoid hiring me for a job if Person B falsely tells them that I am a thief, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Person A would stop hiring all black people if Person B told them that all black people were thieves.

It’s true that this sort of general nastiness might have an effect over time on a very impressionable person (like a child), and I also agree with you, in general principle, that people shouldn’t do that. But there’s a big difference, in my mind, between “people shouldn’t do X” and “the government should prevent people from doing X,” which is the core issue here. There are specific qualities that make hate speech different from slander, and those qualities are why one is illegal and one isn’t (or shouldn’t be), even if we all agree that both are undesireable.

31

Brian, what you describe is the extreme, separatist variant of libertarianism as described in Democracy: The God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

32

Even if the stereotypes were true, it would not justify the behavior.

During the Protestant Reformation*, States regularly apply modified penalties based on the identity of the victim, these are what we call, “Crime of the Month” statutes. If a referee had his ass kicked for a bad call at peewee hockey in Scranton, some headline grabbing legislator will pass a law making the penalty for assaulting a referee double the penalty for attacking a regular person. In Wisconsin, there are already special assault statutes for;

Vulnerable Adults,
People 62 years of age or older,
People with disabilities known to the actor,
Public Transit Vehicle Operators,
Public Transit Vehicle Drivers,
Public Transit Vehicle Passengers,
Law Enforcement,
Department of Commerce Workers,
Department of Workforce Development Workers,
Department of Revenue Employees,
Judges,
Witnesses,
Hospital Employees in the emergency department,
Techincal College District Officers,
School District Officers,
Jurors,
Public Officers,
Parole and Probation Agents,
Persons Subject to Certain Injunctions,
First Responders,
Ambulance Drivers,
Unborn Children,
and, of course, the family members of every group except the unborn children.

Every several years, all these categories get swept away, and the law of battery returns to normalcy, albeit, usually with a higher across the board penalty. It’s a sad day in America when the words, “Hey, Kraut Dyke!” can turn a simple shakedown into a fucking penalty circus. The simple fact is, people who walk into anywhere for any reason and start killing people are very, very, very, naughty, and the justice system should not indulge them by making their offense somehow political or noteworthy, they should be lumped with all the other psychopaths and sickos because murder is murder, and starting a racewar is as ugly and small a reason as money for drugs.

*Sorry, I ran out of transitional phrases a while ago.

33

I still don’t see it, Ben. If John says that Jane is a thief, then Joe might be less likely to employ her. But if John says Jane is black and all blacks are thieves, then Joe might still be less likely to employ her. The difference is that it affects many people, in a smaller way.

I’m no legal expert, so maybe I’m missing the big picture here, but I don’t seem to be alone in this opinion. Certainly it seems that even the Supreme Court once viewed libel this way also.

U.S. courts have not always privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the safety of African Americans and other people of color. A pertinent Supreme Court case was decided in 1952 after two race riots in Illinois in which more than one hundred men, women and children were killed, forcing another 6,000 African Americans to flee the state. In that case, Beauharnais v. Illinois, the head of the White Circle League distributed a leaflet declaring that African Americans would terrorize white neighborhoods with “rapes, robberies, knives, guns and marijuana.” The pamphleteer was convicted when the court decided that libelous statements aimed at groups of people, like those aimed at individuals, fall outside First Amendment protection.

Well, that’s according to a law professor at the University of Dayton, at any rate.

34

A lot less likely, unless Joe is a gullible idiot. I mean, Joe would also be less likely to employ Jane if John told him that she’s an evil alien, but I doubt Joe would garner much sympathy as the victim of that deception, which is why “a reasonable person might believe it” is one of the legal tests for slander. Or at least, that’s my understanding (caveat: I’m not a lawyer).

35

I’m not sure I follow what you mean by the difference between belief and criminal intent here. When I kill someone in a drunken bar fight, I’m not “believing” anything about them. If I plot for 3 months to kill them and take all their stuff, I certainly don’t appear to “believe” that their continued life is more important than me taking their stuff - and that’s why the punishment is so more severe, right?

If society thinks it’s worse when people kill because they don’t value the life of other citizens than when they just happen to be drunk, then “you don’t value the life of specific racial categories” doesn’t seem much of a stretch. Especially when there’s few cases of “generic murder epidemics” breaking out, but quite a few of racial murder epidemics.

36

Jason- The default crime is murder, that the crime was ‘of passion’ is a mitigating factor. Mitigating factors can group an event all the way out of the “crime” area. We aren’t punishing you for believing that someone’s life was less important than their stuff, we are easing off the punishment because you were in a drunken bar fight.

Also, racial murder epidemics? Can you get racial murder by kissing somebody that already has it?
Anyway, I’ll accept that as true and as a problem worthy of government intervention. Are then hate crime laws an attempt to remove bigots from society? Are they expected to deter racists?
Last page someone relayed an anecdote in support of Angie’s point about how hate crimes spread fear when some black dudes got the crap kicked out of them in an unfriendly neighborhood. Would those guys being in jail for 8 years instead of 6 make him feel better about driving through that neighborhood?
Should we start throwing the book at black muggers to make soccer moms feel better about driving through the ghetto?

37

Good point on the mitigating factor thing; I’m really not up on how the legal backing there works. I think the mitigating vs. what society is punishing are linear transforms of each other, though.

You do know massive race riots regularly broke out in this country until the late 1970s, right? White people, usually riled up by the kinds of “hate speech” under discussion and in response to some incident, would lynch, shoot, and destroy the property of blacks. Racial murder epidemics sounds about right as a description.

38

You do know that massive race riots still occur today, right? Black people, usually riled up by the kinds of “hate speech” under discussion and in response to some incident, would lynch, shoot, and destroy the property of whites. So is that also a racial murder epidemic? And are leaders such as Jesse Jackson et al guilty of hate crimes?

39

If Jesse Jackson screams kill whitey, yes.

40

No. Premeditation is a mitigating factor in a trial because it demonstrates a clear intent to commit a crime, not because it demonstrates what the accused does or doesn’t believe. (Additionally, the connotation that you have assigned to the word “belief” is so broad that you have rendered the word meaningless). If the person in your example honestly did believe that their victim’s continued life is more important than him taking their stuff, but planned and executed the murder anyway (for whatever reason), they are still guilty of first-degree murder.

Or to put it another way, premeditation has nothing to do with why the accused comitted their crime. It’s only concerned with whether they did it on the spur of the moment, or planned it out in advance.