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There are many thinkers and writers that question the legitimacy of hate or bias crime laws on the basis that they violate a fundamental democratic principle by punishing individuals for their prejudiced thoughts and beliefs (Altman, 2001). The assumption is that the defendant had a bias motive for committing the offense and the motive consists solely of the defendant's thought. (Gellman, 1992). Therefore, it has been argued that bias crime laws are illegitimate because they punish motive. In addition, the fact that complicates things further is that the motive is inextricably tied to a certain set on political values and attitudes. Other writers have recognized that hate crime is a social construct, focusing on prejudice as a criminal act. It attempts to extend the civil rights paradigm into the field of criminal law. (Jacobs & Potter, 1998).
However, there are several justifications put forth for such laws. These justifications also serve in the context of this paper as further arguments that help differentiate hate crimes from ordinary crimes. James Weinstein (cited in Altman, 2001) gave five possible justifications for such laws: prejudice is morally reprehensible than other motives and so deserves greater punishment (retributive justice); society's morality holds prejudice to be morally more reprehensible and so requires more punishment; bias crime do extra harm to their victims because the offense is understood as an attack on their identity; bias crimes do extra harm to the victim's community because the attack is understood by the community as an attack against it and a threat to its members; bias crimes do extra harm to society in general because they increase tensions and conflict among social groups.
The incidences of hate crime are important because are the...
After the hate crime occurs, before the crime is counted as part of the national data, the victim must report the crime to the police. The police records the crime by completing an incident report. Therefore, as stated above, it is vital that the police identify correctly the nature of the crime. Moreover, a proper recording of hate crime incidents provides information on the type of victim (for instance in 2004, most of the reported hate crimes were motivated by race) and the type of underlying crime that has been reported (in 2004 the most common manifestation of hate crime was vandalism) (according to McDevitt et al.).
References
Report of Attorney General's Civil Rights Commission on Hate Crimes, Retrieved at http://caag.state.ca.us/publications/civilrights/reportingHC.pdf
Gerstenfeld, P.B. (2004). Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls, and Controversies, Sage Publications Inc.
Nolan, J.J., Y. Akiyama. (1999). Analysis of Factors That Affect Law Enforcement Participation in Hate Crime Reporting. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 15:1, February 1999, 111-127.
Gellman, S. (1992). Hate Crime Laws are Thought Crime Laws, Annual Survey of American Law, No.3, pp. 514-515
McDevitt, J., Farrell, a., Rousseau, D., Wolff, R. Hate Crimes. Characteristics of Incidents, Victims, and Offenders, Retrieved at http://www.sagepub.co.uk/upm-data/14238Chapter6.pdf
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