One argument against hate crimes legislation involves denying that one can ever know about someone’s intent. Kathleen Parker writes:
>WASHINGTON — The fallacy of hate crime laws — the prosecution of which requires a degree of mind-reading not yet available to most Earthlings — has been cast into stark relief the last few weeks after an interracial rape-murder that has bestirred white supremacists and led to death threats against an African-American columnist.
Many crimes involve judgments of intent. Intent is a state of mind. Determining intent therefore involves mind reading. To deny this smacks of some pretty silly lawyering: your honor, how can you really know that my client meant to kill anyone? Can you see inside of his mind? Homework assignment: think of all of the crimes that involve judgments of intent.
Another argument often advanced against the hate crimes legislation is the relative rarity of hate crime:
>In 2005, among about 7,000 hate crimes — mostly characterized by intimidation (48.9 percent) and simple assault (30.2 percent) — just six murders and three forcible rapes were reported as fitting the hate crime definition, according to the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics report. Though we may hate “hate crimes,” those numbers hardly seem sufficient to justify extra laws designating a special category for certain crime victims.
The frequency with which an act occurs has nothing to do–I think–with whether it ought to be a crime or not. High treason is a crime, but almost no one does it (I think). Besides, while designating something a crime necessarily implies designating someone a victim, the crime is defined by the act, not the victim. A crime remains a crime, in fact, whether the victim feels himself a victim or not.
You left off the closing howler:
She claims, “It is human nature to resent groups and individuals deemed more special than others.” And then she suggests that laws that privilege groups are bad laws as they “engender the very animosities such laws are meant to deter.”
That’s right DV. The other day I learned a bloggish term: concern troll. Well, first, a troll (on a blog) is someone who comments on a blog merely to annoy or bait into arguments about other subjects merely for the sake of doing so. A concern troll is someone who fakes agreement with some principle but asserts some reservations or “concerns” about it. The latter is the kind of thing we see from Parker. She doesn’t like hate crime, but is “worried” that laws against it might engender more hate crime because people will unjustifiably feel left out.
I left out a bunch from the Parker column. Among other things (basing her argument on the feelings of the uniformed or just plain racist white supremacists) she invokes the Duke rape case and a murder case in Knoxville, Tenn (which has been trumpeted by the KKK, Michele Malkin, and the ever more clueless Glenn Reynolds) as support for the claim that hate crime is unfair to whites. No one claimed the Duke rape case was a hate crime (if they did, they weren’t the police); the Police have determined that the other crime, no matter how heinous, was not a hate crime. So, in other words, Kathleen Parker, mere racial difference doesn’t make something a hate crime.
There’s more to this abysmal piece. But someone else can comment on that.
To her –
“the prosecution of which requires a degree of mind-reading not yet available to most Earthlings”
You reply –
“Many crimes involve judgments of intent. Intent is a state of mind. Determining intent therefore involves mind reading. To deny this smacks of some pretty silly lawyering”
But I’m not sure whether we need to read her statement as referring to mind-reading in the same sense that you are. Of course, as you say, judgment often deals with intent. But it doesn’t follow that a judgment of intent in the case of a supposed hate crime is on par with or as discernible as (if at all) one of the judgments of intent which you take her to not be considering.
It’s certainly different to say –
A) your actions adequately reflect that you intended to kill that man
Than it is to say –
B) your actions adequately reflect that you intended to kill that man **because** you possess hatred of a class of people he belongs to
(A) seems like a relatively safe judgment, even granted that it involves a judgment of intent, of course.
Obviously there are potential indicators which would serve to justify (B), but they need to be carefully determined, case by case it seems, and thus maybe it is wise to be “concerned” over classifications which ignore such minutia.
I took your analysis to imply that the “judgment of intent” in (A) and (B) are relatively similar and/or accomplished with relatively similar success.