Topic title is one of the dumbest ever. You are so salty. False christian at its best.

Not always. some hate crimes show premeditation, whereas without the amplifier it can simply legally be classified as the lesser crime.

if man A punches man B because they got into an argument that shouldnt be the same as man C punching man D because he's asian. without a hate crime statute thats very possible. one isn't coming into the crime with any motivation, the other is, mens rea is important sometimes in motivation.

the issue comes in the loose application of the law with square pegs in round holes, imo. in any case its not as if it's being abused like stop and frisk in NYC, hate crime prosecutions aren't exactly common by % afaik, but id not be shocked to learn they're trending upwards.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Mar 30 2023 02:05pm

If prosecutions were politically agnostic, how would you distinguish that from just being evidence of premeditation, an element of the crime? Like 2nd degree vs 1st degree murder. There's a difference between showing that someone had a pre-existing ideological reason to hate someone, and showing that someone had a specific pre-existing intent to harm someone. If all you established was the former, its still not premeditation anyway, but if you establish the latter, its premeditation whether it was ideologically motivated or because he was banging your wife.

In terms of their application, I can guarantee you exactly how that black vs white scenario would play out in Minnesota with Keith Ellison at the wheel.
It amounts to a clear state sponsored viewpoint discrimination, a violation of the 1st amendment just handwaved by saying as long as we find an action to peg to the speech, we can open the door to criminalizing speech.

Start of hate crime bill introduction in the USA.
Pretty sad.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin

This post was edited by Hamsterbaby on Mar 30 2023 02:18pm

And to give the counterexample of how hate crime laws go towards intent-

say I'm standing on the sidewalk and a guy walks up and punches me in the head and screams he hates crackers. That's a hate crime (even though it wouldn't be prosecuted as a hate crime, refer to the bit about keith ellison). Now say I'm standing on the sidewalk and a guy walks up and punches me in the head and screams he hates people who wear funny hats. Well shit, my hat may be funny, but funny hat wearing isn't a protected class, hatred against funny hat wearers isn't subject to hate crime enhancements. But I got punched in the head just the same, the element of premeditation was just the same. An ideologically agnostic prosecution could establish a motive and intent existed without penalizing someone for holding one specific belief but not the other.

What hate crime laws do is say that the government is responding to a societal harm with enhancements tailored to weed out those offenders and discourage others. That's their stated purpose. The lawmakers cared about white supremacists, they didn't care about funny hat haters. But the harm identified is ideological in nature, so they are bills explicitly tailored to punish people for their viewpoints, ergo, infringing on the first amendment.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 30 2023 02:25pm

I think its very hard to apply correctly, as the bar that needs to be cleared to prove that premeditation isn't easy. typically would involve testimony of firsthand knowledge the person planned it, so very rare.

but, and like the indefinable porn quote stated, i have this wierd gut feeling that for some reason that if a person premeditates a crime that's obviously bad and worse than spur of the moment crimes, but if someone premeditates a crime against a group of people then executes it once they find someone from that group it's worse.

for a practical example, is Matthew Shepard's death not worse to you than some case where someone is beaten and killed but not because they're gay? philosophically, not legally.

well Matthew Shepard could be either a good or bad example because it can show how hate crime prosecutions could go wrong, if they had existed at the time. When the evidence points to it being a crime motivated by drugs and greed, and the gay angle just cynically applied after the fact by a desperate defense. There's some evidence they just wanted to torture him to reveal his stash, then concocted the gay panic defense try to build doubt.
which is also why it could be a good example- is that killing made any less heinous if its a product of avarice and dehumanization, than targeted based on sexual orientation? If someone beats you to death for $50 in your wallet, versus beats you to death for kissing your boyfriend in public, is one inherently worse than the other?

I don't mean that as a rhetorical question, the answer is no. I don't think an ideologically motivated murder is more or less heinous than any other. You can build cases with degrees of mitigating factors that we can sympathize with, like the trial in MN right now for a woman who killed the abusive boyfriend who was keeping her locked up- but that kind of mitigation should likewise be agnostic. Heck, in that case, the woman got the book thrown at her (25 years in prison) by the same judge who presided over the george floyd case, and I'm figuring it has to do something with her being a white woman who shot a black man. At least she's getting a new trial. That's where legislative intent collides with prosecutorial reality. We start saying that we think one type of murder is more heinous than another, and suddenly the thumb has been placed upon the scales of justice and innocent people get convicted and guilty people go free.

Murder is murder, violent crime is violent crime, we should stop infringing on civil liberties to get convictions, but be more draconian once we do.

Funny that people like you and are not posting "Just another day in America" topics when the shooter is trans

You are saying shit.

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=97836967&f=119

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=98296495&f=119

This was too easy