Mindreading
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Killing a police officer could become a hate crime. That’s a bad idea that is part of a larger trend of bad ideas. Punishment should depend on the act, not the motivation. I oppose the law.
Criminal law is intended to deter bad acts. Swift and certain punishment of the first bad actor will deter others from committing that bad act. Anything that makes swift and certain punishment less likely diminishes the disincentive and thereby weakens the overall purpose of criminal law.
Example: Street Thug A shoots and kills a police informant. Street Thug B shoots and kills a plainclothes undercover police officer. Why should Street Thug B’s crime be worse than Street Thug A’s crime? Murdered is murdered. How will adding an extra year to the sentence deter Street Thugs from shooting people?
Hate crime laws put the jury in the position of divining what was in a person’s heart at the time of the crime. “Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men?” is a catch phrase for a vigilante, not a blueprint for justice.
Even worse, the notion sets some classes above others for arbitrary and political reasons which leads to rent-seeking and long-term fragmentation of society into special interest groups clawing to be above each other in the hierarchy of rights and punishments. In ancient times, a Lord could kill a Commoner by paying a nominal fine, but a Commoner who killed a Lord was tortured to death. America was specifically intended to put a stop to that. Hate crime legislation is a step backwards in time, it sends us in the wrong direction.
Joe Doakes
But it makes someone feel good.
Which is becoming our new legal standard.
May 9th, 2016 at 7:57 am
I hate everyone equally, but some are more equal than others.
May 9th, 2016 at 9:45 am
A few years ago after one of our men’s ministry breakfasts I gave a ride home to an acquaintance, a black gentleman a few years older than myself. He wanted to know what I thought about “hate crimes”, and I said I was uncomfortable with prosecuting people for their thoughts as opposed to their actions. He said he had grown up in the south, and his family had personally experienced assaults from the Klan, so he knew how evil hate was and that it needed to be dealt with in the strongest terms.
After a few moments I said, “The actions were evil, and no doubt the Klansmen justified these by saying, ‘You know what those people are like.’ That didn’t make it right.. Are we all to base our actions on what we ‘think’ other people are like?” We both did a lot of chin-stroking after that.
May 9th, 2016 at 9:50 am
Hate crime legislature is but a step towards Morality Squads
May 9th, 2016 at 9:58 am
The morality squads are already here, and roaming the college campuses with administrative sanction. They don’t wear black robes and carry long-switches (these being too quaint), but it’s the same strain of mutated reason.
May 9th, 2016 at 10:45 am
You don’t understand. If I murder someone, it’s because I hate myself. There should be no penalty for hating one’s self. There should be therapy.
May 9th, 2016 at 11:19 am
Therapy via electric shock, of a million watt variety.
May 9th, 2016 at 11:34 am
Looking at this plan, it strikes me that if carried to its logical conclusion, an altercation between a favored group criminal and a police officer would, no matter how minor, end up getting both sent to Old Sparky. Or what JPA said.
Or to use the picture provided by NW, if southern juries had done an adequate job prosecuting assaults by the Klan, I’m guessing there wouldn’t have been nearly as much pressure for hate crimes laws.
May 9th, 2016 at 12:45 pm
JPA: In the future, the electric chair may be preferred over leftist “therapy.”
May 9th, 2016 at 12:53 pm
Along with everything NW said, the thing that bugs me most about “hate crime” statutes is that they are just another piece of prosecutorial discretion.
Since determining peoples’ intent is so very subjective (barring someone obliging enough to attack a synagogue while wearing an SS uniform), the prosecutions will depend entirely on the prosecutor’s motivations.
If you trust your prosecutors’ discretion as little as I do mine…
May 9th, 2016 at 1:04 pm
Prosecutorial discretion can sometimes be an oxymoron.
May 9th, 2016 at 1:06 pm
What does this accomplish that a jury and prosecutor could not accomplish with existing laws?
If killing a cop is made a hate crime, why isn’t killing a teacher a hate crime?
If a person kills a female Black cop, could they charged with a triple hate crime?
Suppose a cop is suspended while being investigated for committing a hate crime. Is targeting and killing him/her still a hate crime?