essay on hate the crime not the criminal
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Explanation:
Nominally speaking, I hate “hate crime” laws.
By Jim Hennigan
It wasn’t until May 2007 that I gave much thought to the notion of so-called “hate crime” legislation and why people feel so strongly about it. That was when Sean Kennedy was killed in Greenville, South Carolina, the town I called home. More significantly, May 2007 was when it seemed like everyone who followed the local news formed an opinion about “hate crime” laws.
South Carolina was one of four states that did not – and does not – have hate crime laws on the books. Depending on how you leaned, Sean Kennedy’s death was either an opportunity or a threat that could upset that status quo. That’s because Sean Kennedy was a young gay man who – according to the police warrant issued at the time of the attack that resulted in his death – was beaten because “of the defendant (Stephen Moller) not liking the sexual identity of the victim.”
I would not have given “hate crime” laws much thought at the time except for this observation: the way people chose sides was counter-intuitive to what I would expect.
People who are otherwise hard-liners when it comes to law-and-order were tripping over themselves as they rushed to queue up in opposition to “hate crime” laws while, at the same time, these laws had their strongest advocates among people who typically complain that our criminal laws are already too draconian and overreaching and that our prisons are too full. I needed to know why “hate crime” legislation produces this role-reversal. Was it the product of well-reasoned thinking or was it grounded in the kinds of philosophical accommodations people make to rationalize a desired outcome?
Even though I was personally predisposed to thinking these laws were okay (if only because I figure tougher criminal laws are almost always good), I found the opposition arguments to be surprisingly seductive. So that’s where I cautiously entered the debate, intent on peeling away the layers of the rhetoric coming from all directions, in order to reach the core of what these laws are about.
There are three main arguments against “hate crime” legislation. First, a “hate crime” is, by definition, a “thought crime” in that any added loss of liberty or property beyond the baseline crime is a penalty imposed for nothing more than one’s thoughts. Second, these laws don’t fill in any gaps in the law because they create a new class of crimes for activity that is already illegal. And third, they violate the Constitutional principle of “equal protection under the law,” by giving preferential treatment to certain classes of people when those people are victims of crime.
A “hate crime” law worth enacting must do more than survive these objections. There must be some valid societal purpose behind it that distinguishes it from a capricious law that increases a criminal sentence for crimes that are committed, say, during breakfast.
Let’s start with the objection that I found to be the most compelling of all: the Orwellian undertones of increasing a sentence because a criminal acts with hate. Such laws could easily be the raison d’etre of the Thought Police in a futuristic science-fiction novel. George Will has written often on this point. He doesn’t hate “hate crime” laws because they might lead to the enactment of thought crimes in some future world. He contends that they are thought crimes because of the added criminal sentence that is attached as a result of nothing more than what a criminal was thinking during the commission of a crime.
But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s not really a thought crime. The veneer of George Will’s claim was stripped away when I heard James Dobson, attempting to restate Will’s objection in arguing that “hate crimes” should not cover sexual orientation. Dobson was alarmed that such a law would “muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality.”