How to punish Hate Crimes?

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How to punish hate crimes, whatever you decide that means, or anything else you choose to regard as a crime? Easy peasy: abolish the state, make your own group of vigilantes and brutalize whomever you want, with any excuse you want, or with no excuse at all

I'm of two minds about "hate crimes."

On one hand, I can see Fnord's point about it leading into "thought crime."

OTOH, I think certain crimes can have a damaging effect on a particular community or population as a whole.

In other words, as usual, I have no idea.

The motive for the crime is irrelevant. All that should matter is the action. Say a white man kills another white man because he's slept with his wife and another white man kills a black man because he hates black people. Both of those men should have the same punishment.

I don't think people should be punished for anything that they say. If they commit an act of violence out of hate, then that should obviously be punished, but if they merely say something hateful, then I don't think they are committing a crime. Especially if SJWs are deciding what is and is not "hate speech." The exception to this would be if they are inciting others to violence, making threats of violence, etc.

I disagree. The first person was wronged so I'd see that as a mitigating circumstance while the other was not. Additionally, the first guy is far less likely to reoffend as the person that wronged him is gone, while the other guy is a threat to anyone with black skin.

Hate crimes are a tricky subject. What is obvious though is it has gone far over the line. If it's used at all it should only be relevant when an actual crime has been committed, and only when it is clear and obvious, not because someone say has expressed dissatisfaction with the rate of immigration or black crime rates or cracked a racist joke in a tweet.

So you're saying we should charge people based on what they might do in the future?

Now, that's a very efficient system: everyone might do something bad, so just kill 'em on sight.

An interesting way of putting it. Tricky subject as I said, but prison is about more than punishment, you don't want to let people out if they're going to kill again.

Isn't that the main reason we have prisons at all? We don't lock people up to make them suffer, we lock them up because them doing one bad thing means that they're fairly likely to do another one and we want to a) stop them, and b) help them get better. At least, that's an optimistic view - of course in reality things don't function nearly that well. Chances of re-offending are heavily factored into sentencing decisions.

As for hate crime, it's a real thing and it needs to be punished. I think it's right that someone who deliberately sets out to attack someone based on them possessing certain characteristics is punished more harshly than they would be for random acts of violence. Hatred divides our society and makes us weaker, particularly by forcing out oppressed groups. This isn't "SJW speak", this is an opinion found throughout mainstream politics, although of course there are dissenting people within mainstream politics too.

One of the issues is that sometimes it can be very difficult to define a hate crime. Some recent court judgements:

- It was found to be an anti-Semitic hate crime to jokingly repeat Nazi slogans to make fun of your dog who looks like Hitler.
- It was found that using the n-word is always a racist hate crime, regardless of context (I am confident that this judgement could be overturned in another case)

How is a judge supposed to interpret a meme like Pepe the Frog? While there's nothing inherently racist about a cartoon of a frog, it's also well-known that Pepe has been co-opted by the far-right and functions as a de-facto symbol. The presence of Pepe in an image may potentially hint at far-right sentiments within the image, but it isn't inherently hateful and shouldn't be treated as such. As in the "n-word" case, I simply don't trust judges to be able to properly unpack the culture of people 40 or 50 years younger than them, which moves very quickly and is largely incompatible with a professional life in law.

I'm still in support of hate crime laws, and I think the current punishments are about right, but they have to be tightly defined, and there has to be a higher probability than is currently accepted that genuinely hateful sentiments have deliberately been expressed.

Even when black people use it? I don't think that'll go down very well.

Exactly!

It's bad enough that you're damning artistic works and defence lawyers (literally - the defence lawyer was told not to say the word in court) but this effectively criminalises thousands of young black people who are doing nothing wrong!

When hate crime laws were first signed in to existence, I was young and thought it was a violation of one's rights to punish them for the element of thought and that they should only be punished for the conventional crime, whatever it was.

However I have since re evaluated the situation and have changed my stance on it. I had initially failed to take in to account the fact that that intent has always been an integral part of law and the justice system. For example, we differentiate between homicide without intent or criminal negligence (an accident), homicide without intent but with criminal negligence (manslaughter), homicide with intent but unplanned (murder) and homicide with intent and planned (pre meditated murder). The first is typically not criminally prosecuted at all while the last is typically prosecuted with the death penalty or life without parole as sentencing options in the U.S. and so we have always punished people for commiting a crime under certain motivations.

I had also not considered that in hate crimes, the thought manifested as an action which has harmed someone. In that respect, the thought is like a firearm. It's not illegal for most adults to own a gun in the U.S. You can talk about your gun and show it to people, and in many areas, open carry, but you can't murder someone with it. If you do you will be charged with murder, and there may also be charges or sentencing related to the fact that you used a gun.

The right to not be punished for one's thoughts or beliefs ends when those thoughts or beliefs become a vehicle for a violent or destructive crime that has infringed upon the rights of others.

I am not a lawyer so I could be wrong about this but is not intent about the intent to commit the crime and not why the person intended to committed the crime? Where the why does come into play is as circumstantial evidence.

I'm not a lawyer either but I think there is a grey area which the idea of a hate crime has better resolved in to black and white.

I have no problem with local communities wanting to condemn those who destroy the peace and say horrible things about a group. That example of somebody saying "I HATE autistics!" for example was disturbing the peace and inciting public anger too.

I don't think the central or top-level of an entire country should have this.

The concept of a "hate crime" isn't valid. A person's rights are not any more violated just because a criminal "hated" them while committing a crime against them.

People tend to use this concept, though, as a "trojan horse" to push for laws that restrict so-called "hate speech." These are horrifyingly unjust laws and--thankfully--they have yet to take hold in the U.S.