LogFAQs > #963960180

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Have you ever seen any crime show ever? When someone gets killed for any reason, all the people nearby get super paranoid for their safety.

And hate crimes go beyond that.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Terrorism is a crime too. If hate crime = crime + terrorism, the current law specifically targets that.

Pedantically, a terrorist act only counts as terrorism if the goal is to effect political change. There's a lot of wiggle room in that definition such that it's not strictly limited to government responses, but there's still a key element of wanting formal policy changes that give in to the terrorists' demands. The aim of terrorists is to directly coerce their desired outcome out of those with the power to give it to them.

The changes hate crimes want to enforce tend to be more informal than that. They're not pushing for it to be illegal for black people to live there (for example), they're pushing for black people to feel so unwelcome and fearful that they all leave. It's less a matter of direct coercion and more a matter of intimidation.

Are they similar concepts? Yes, and I get where you're coming from when you point that out. But as it stands now, most hate crimes don't meet the legal definition of terrorism, so trying to bring that charge in as an exacerbating factor wouldn't work. Establishing a variant charge that does capture the nuance aims to fix that. By and large, those committing hate-motivated crimes represent more of a danger to the public than those committing more individually-motivated crimes do, so having a more serious charge available to account for that makes sense.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

It sounds to me that their shared identity is the problem here, not the actions of the perpetrator.

"There's a serial killer murdering every black person he can find! We need to hide!"
"Have you tried not being black?"

In an Internet full of unbelievable demonstrations of more profound stupidity than any sane person would ever have dreamed possible, I think that might genuinely be the most impossibly idiotic thing I have ever read. My God have mercy on us all.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I'm less bothered by their motivation than I am by what they did in pursuit of that motivation.

The issue is that the motivation dictates how much of a threat they continue to be. This is not a new concept: murder (in all its forms) is already divided by various "degrees" and variant charges that reflect the circumstances of the killing under the rationale that somebody who deliberately plans to kill somebody is going to be more dangerous to society than somebody who kills somebody out of carelessness. There's a lot more to consider than "you shot one person, go to jail for X years," which is why trials and lawyers and juries and sentencing hearings exist.

The vast majority of murder (et al) trials don't focus on determining whether or not the accused killed the victim. That's usually pretty readily established. They focus on the extent to which the killer needs to be held responsible for that death if society is to be protected from them. Many factors come into that decision, and motivation is absolutely one of them. Treating hate as an exacerbating factor is completely consistent with that.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

But because the perpetrator and victim are of different races the perpetrator is charged with a hate crime even if it wasn't racially motivated.

That's generally not what happens. A hate crime may be suspected, but unless there's evidence suggesting it's a factor (such as Arbery's murderers shouting racial slurs after killing him), it's rare to see that turn into a conviction. Perhaps you should look at more real-world data instead of basing your understanding of the situation off of a South Park clip.