Undoubtedly David Ritcheson's wounds were deepened by the grotesque humiliation he suffered at the hands of the thugs: they violated him with a plastic pole and scarred him by pouring bleach into and over him. But that kind of extreme violence is also part of the nature of hate crimes, as I explained in Chapter 5 of Death on the Fourth of July:
While data and studies have given us a pretty clear picture of the typical hate-crime offender, no one has ever compiled a psychological profile of the typical hate-crime victim. This is partly because these victims are notoriously difficult to study; most of them are so traumatized by the crimes that they often refuse to participate in such work.
Mostly, however, it's because hate crimes can happen to literally anyone and can occur at any time, in no small part because of the random elements in the perpetrators' victim-selection process -- that is, most victims are complete strangers to the offender, chosen only because of their perceived membership in the target group. Nearly any race, religion or sexual orientation can inspire bias-motivated violence, and indeed one need not even actually belong to the target group to fall victim to a hate crime; witness the not-insubstantial number of heterosexual victims of gay-bashing.
That said, it is clear that in twenty-first-century America, minorities are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than anyone else. In 2001, for example, 10,898 of the 12,020 victims of hate crimes reported to the FBI were various kinds of minorities. A pattern of victimization risk also emerges from the data: race is the most common motivator, with African Americans the most vulnerable targets; Jews and gay men are the second- and third-most likely targets, respectively.
Perhaps just as significant, the data reveals that these are more likely to be violent crimes. Criminal-justice expert Barbara Perry points to FBI statistics that reveal wide disparities in the levels of violence between bias crimes and "normal" street crimes. "It is apparent that hate crime . . . is much more likely to involve physical threat and harm to individuals, rather than property," she writes:Consequently, such victims are also more likely to be at the receiving end of excessively brutal violence. To the extent that hate crime perpetrators are motivated by fear, hatred, mistrust, or resentment of victims, for example, they are more likely to engage in extreme violence -- violence which is beyond that necessary to subdue the victim.
If I need to add anything to this, you're not playing with a full deck.
2 comments:
That is the point, of course. You're making an emotional argument - not a constitutional one. The punishment should be conmeasurate with the crime, and I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who read of this crime who doesn't believe the perpetrators should receive the maximum sentences from a plethora of the most severe charges a prosecutor can devise.
One can say "The attackers should be put in prison for decades if not life," and still be against hate crimes law.
The two attitudes are not mutually exclusive. Why act as if they are?
We agree on the need for profound punishment for the criminals who committed these acts. We disagree on policy and law. If there's "something wrong" with me for that *shrugs* Emotion should not be the almighty arbiter of law. That's the one huge problem I have with modern liberalism. "Law, constitution, etc. Yes, yes, all very good. But what about feelings?!" Uh, no.
There is, without fail, an emotional component to any argument on public policy today (and probably always has been). Whether we like to admit it or not, even though we make these kinds of decisions as rationally as possible (in an ideal world), the discussions start from a basis of belief in what is best for society, which is an emotional decision.
As for hate crimes legislation, as Neiwert points out in his post and as I've pointed out myself here, here, and here, there are solid reasons for hate crimes legislation.
Short recap: these laws represent mandatory sentence enhancements based on motivation; this is nothing unusual -- motivation is generally considered in sentencing. In the case of bias crimes, harsher penalties are mandated because the crime is not only likely to be more violent and more shocking, but also affects an entire group. And we, as a society, have determined that prejudice based on certain factors is not permissible and will be discouraged as strongly as possible.
I'd like to know what a constitutional argument against hate crimes laws might be. I haven't seen one that holds water, and I've refuted a number of them myself.
As for tailoring the sentence to the ick-factor of the particular crime, that seems, to me, to lead to high potential for arbitrary sentencing, which seems to undercut the "equality under the law" argument. While I'm ambivalent about mandatory sentencing guidelines (fortunately now only advisory), you must admit that the trend has been toward more consistency in that area. This seems to fit that effort rather than not.
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