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Your guess on keith is (descriptively) correct, ctrl-f jew. Do hate crime laws serve any meaningful purpose, though? They are generally 'reasonable corollaries' to existing laws. And a doubled fine or two extra weeks in jail isn't going to deter a racist litterer, nor will a ten-year instead of five-year sentence deter someone who's assaulting people on the basis of their race. Similar laws might make sense in the context of, like, constant race-based white nationalist vs black nationalist gang warfare, but that doesn't happen in western countries nowadays. But by the same logic, hate crime laws aren't really an obstacle for dissidents, because 'burning crosses on lawns' or 'random terrorist attacks' isn't an effective strategy today anyway.
That same argument could apply to different degrees of murder or even felonies in general. Clearly there’s some value to creating a continuum of punishments. I find it reasonable to rate crime+intimidation slightly higher than the crime alone.
Is stereotypical intimidation not effective?
If I had a cross burned on my lawn, I think I’d be fearing for my life. That’s a sign someone really wants you dead or gone. Flyers, less so, but more due to history. It’d still be really unsettling.
I've heard that argument, yeah. But to be honest it moves me more towards "maybe we shouldn't have degrees of murder" than "maybe hate crime laws are good". I just can't agree that it is just to have laws where it's already illegal to do X, but if you do it to the wrong person then it's double secret illegal (TM).
There are different degrees of murder to reflect different degrees of moral culpability. Moral culpability, of course, at the heart of Western ideas of criminal justice. See People v. Sanchez, 98 N.Y.2d 373, 407 (2002) ["This consequence violates a fundamental principle of the criminal law, which seeks to punish defendants in proportion to the blameworthiness of their offense."]. Certain forms of murder are also punished more harshly because they are deemed more dangerous to society, such as, in New York, murdering a police officer, murder for hire, and murdering a witness.
The argument re hate crime enhancements is similar: Those who select victims because of their race, gender, whatever, are deemed more culpable, and in addition "this conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm." * Wisconsin v. Mitchell*, 508 US 476, 487-488 (1993).
And note that "if you do it to the wrong person" is not the issue; a hate crime enhancement depends on the motive for the crime, not the identity of the victim per se. Note also the races of the victim and defendants in Wisconsin v. Mitchell.
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Sure. You can use them to make trivial offenses that many people are guilty of (though they generally go unprosecuted or occasionally result in a fine) into serious offenses when committed by people pushing political views you dislike, thus effectively criminalizing expression of those views.
I don't think that happens enough to matter, in the specific case of hate crime laws. The case for something like that is much stronger for 'hostile work environment' / 'hiring discrimination' - I still think those are an effect, rather than a cause, for the most part, but just in terms of 'number of people affected' or 'amount of right-wing behavior suppressed' they have to be 10,000 times as impactful.
(also, even w/o hate crime enhancements, prosecutorial discretion still exists)
That's the whole point of the Florida law (which is aimed at the "Goyim Defense League"), and also the Virginia law against burning things on a highway which is being used against the tiki torch protestors. It was originally intended to be used against the Klan of course.
If you mean it was meant to outlaw cross-burning, you are mistaken. Virginia has a separate law specific to cross-burning. That law appears to date to 1950; the law in question appears to have been enacted in 2002.
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Lol that is literally the only thing that happens with hate crime laws. Take that littering one for example - how many stories have you heard of where some bigot dumped a bunch of racist flyers on someone's lawn to intimidate them? Never, because that's a dumb way to intimidate someone. But still! It could be used to intimidate someone! We need a law in place! Cut to 6 months later and some guy is getting arrested for passing out flyers calling George Soros an asshole. Every piece of hate speech legislation gets used this way, to add ambiguity to the system, because that is precisely what they are designed for.
A whole third of the US population despises Soros, every other day there's a new Fox article calling him out. Enough to matter is the point, are hate speech laws actually materially preventing any right-wing progress or activism? Not that I know of. Something can be bad, yet also not effective at being bad.
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