Can someone explain the difference between a white man killing a black man, and a black man killing a white man?
Are not both men equally dead? Are not both families without a father?
So why is one crime considered worse than the other?
In my mind all violent crime is hate crime. You don’t commit a violent crime against someone because you feel indifferently about them.
The idea of “hate crime” is just silly, and more importantly, it is a violation of equal protection. Why should the law punish one person for X years, and another X+5 years for the exact same crime of murder?
WASHINGTON — Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by nearly 8 percent, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.
Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.
Although the noose incidents and beatings among students at Jena, La., high school occurred in the last half of 2006, they were not included in the report. Only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting.
Bias against a particular group is irrelevant. Justice should be blind and equally applied. Why should Hispanics or Blacks, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Muslims, Gays and Lesbians, or Middle-Easterners have more protection under the law than your average white male?
By giving these groups special protections we are in effect saying that they are either more important, or less capable of protecting themselves than other groups.
Annie Apple
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Bill Sanford
Tue 11/20/2007
This is the result of years of PC thinking. If you don’t like this, just wait until Hillary takes office.
tom
Tue 11/20/2007
What have you got against white males? You seem to assume that they will commit the “hate crimes” against other groups, but will never be the victim of “hate crimes.” If they are the victims because they are white, or male, the law will apply to those who harm them. So as far as it goes, the law does not punish crimes against members of one group more than another.
Also, as things stand, killing white people brings tougher sentences than killing other people, especially when the killer is not white. That’s not required by law, but it is what judges and juries do. The stats are clear on that.
You have some of your facts wrong, but you may have a point with the idea that motive should not affect sentencing on crimes of violence. It seems inconsistent with our best traditions and at leat the spirit of the first amendment. I suppose that even bigots are entitled to their beliefs until they hurt someone, and if someone shoots me, it will make little difference whether he did it to rob me or just because he hates people who look like me.