Quote (thesnipa @ Mar 31 2023 07:33am)
You just laid out how the intent is different.
i think the easiest hypothetical example is 2 cases of premeditated murder. man A has a cheating wife, he knows the man who's sleeping with his wife, he plans and murders the man. man B hates black people, he plans to kill a black person because he hates them all, drive around until he finds one and murders them. both could be charged as premeditated murder, one knew the victim, the other targeted a member of a group randomly.
the base logic is targeting someone based on their actions, the other is targeting them based on who or what they are. if you sleep with a man's wife that doesnt deserve a death sentence, but you did act and do something. man B's victim was just born black. but both could be charged equally.
What about man C, who hates people who wear funny hats, and plans to kill a funny hat wearing stranger, drives around until he finds one and murders one?
I think the boundary between 'crime of passion' and 'jealous premeditated murder' has already been explored by the courts and may or may not be treated as less heinous than a murder of a stranger. I imagine its gone both ways, either treating it as something which isn't an excuse, or having a jury sympathize with it. Like someone who is in a desperate financial situation and goes out and kills someone in a robbery. They might try to get a jury to understand their crime being motivated by 'necessity', while a prosecutor might denounce it as selfish and valuing property over life and so on. Or someone who is provoked in a bar fight they could have walked away from, versus someone who walks up behind someone in a bar and stabs them in the back.
I think those examples boil down to the heinousness of ambushing a stranger unprovoked, versus killing someone you were already entangled with. And we generally recognize unprovoked crimes against the public at random as being more heinous because they represent a threat to society at large, and we
all feel threatened by it. The gunman who opens fire on a crowd seems scarier to us than the gunman who shoots his ex-wife. And that's a distinction made without ideology.