And if you don't know, you shouldn't be able to convict of a hate crime. But like I said, a "true" hate crime doesn't come out of nowhere. It is a deliberate attempt to intimidate or harass a specific people group. To demonstrate that something is a hate crime, a pattern of behavior would need to be demonstrated.Speaker to Animals wrote:But you can't determine the motive of "hate" without making assumptions about a person's mentality based on speech that was expressed, and you can see the exact same exacerbating factor in this case resulting in two different outcomes depending upon the identity of the accused. What's worse, you have to assume that just because a white guy painted a swastika it meant his motives were hateful. It might not be. You don't really know. What you really do is just read the description of the crime; white guy? check; swastika? check; hate crime.
If I paint a swastika on my buddies house as a joke, that's not a hate crime. If I paint it on my ex's house for revenge, THAT'S not a hate crime. In both cases I picked out a specific person who has committed a specific offense against me. If I paint it on a random black church though, and there is no other motive than that I hate black people (as demonstrated by a pattern of anti-black statements and behavior), THAT'S a hate crime. I am making NO assumptions about the felon based on race, and indeed haven't mentioned it in my narrative.
I don't CARE what the race of the offender is. It can be a black American citizen who has a problem with recent Kenyan immigrants. Doesn't matter. If the reason for the targeting was the victim's people group rather than any specific characteristic of the individual, then that's a hate crime. And I'm fine with that being hard to prove. But I do think in cases where it is obvious there is a valid place in treating them differently. And the reason is because a person committing hate crime is highly likely to continue doing so. The "motive" for their crime is something that isn't going away, and an important part of a justice system is protecting people from walking around in fear, which is the PURPOSE of a hate crime.
