could become a hate crime<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\nCriminal 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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But it makes\u00a0someone\u00a0<\/em>feel good.<\/p>\nWhich is becoming our new legal standard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58712,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58711\/revisions\/58712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}