LAST MONTH the precious legal doctrine known as the "hate crime" officially got out of control. Two eighteen-year-old New York youths were charged with "second-degree assault as a hate crime" after they jumped out of a car, yelled "Hey Satan!" to a self-proclaimed Satanist wearing black clothes and an upside-down crucifix and proceeded to beat him with a club and an ice scraper. While the act was certainly abhorrent, the prosecutor's response in charging the two with a hate crime illustrates both the illogical nature of hate crimes as well as the uneven standards with which they are assessed.
The prosecutor in the case eventually decided to drop the hate crimes charge against the two youths but the initial decision to designate the incident as a hate crime speaks to a broader problem. By classifying an attack on a Satanist as a hate crime, a similar crime on a member of a non-protected class of individuals, say non-Satanists, is implicitly denigrated. Under hate crimes statues, an individual who, for example, murders a member of a protected class (read: non-majority) because of their race, religion, sex, etc., is given a harsher sentence than someone who murders a member of a non-protected class. But by doing so, society implies that the life of the person who wasn't a member of the protected class is worth less than the victim who was, because their killer received a more lenient sentence.
Another problem with hate crimes is their shockingly uneven distribution. While the FBI Uniform Crime Reports Program logs hundreds of crimes motivated by race, religion and other factors each year, there are several high-profile crimes that are notably absent from the hate crimes register. In 1989, a female who would later be known as the Central Park jogger was attacked by a group of teenagers, gang-raped and left for dead. During the 1992 L.A. riots, cameras captured a group of individuals drag truck-driver Reginald Denny out of his vehicle and smash his head with a brick. Testimony showed the attack was racially-motivated, that the group even passed on attacking the driver before Denny because the driver was black. Finally, in April of 2000, an 8-year old boy, Kevin Shifflet was brutally stabbed to death in his front yard by an attacker who uttered racial epithets as he slashed Shifflet's throat. The common denominator in all three of these cases: the victim was white, the assailant(s) were black or Hispanic and were not charged with a hate crime.
"Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics," a book by James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter offers revealing statistics in the arena of interracial crime and hate crimes. In 2000, the study found that 75 percent of interracial violent crime involved black offenders and white victims, 10 percent were white offenders and black victims and the other 15 percent were different combinations. Such a discrepancy isn't entirely shocking; after all, there are about six times as many non-Hispanic Caucasians in the United States as African-Americans. What is shocking is that in 1998, the FBI reported 2,084 "anti-black" hate crimes committed by whites and 567 "anti-white" hate crimes committed by blacks. In other words, despite the fact that crimes committed by blacks against whites occur seven times as much as the opposite, someone from the latter category -- a crime committed by whites against blacks -- is four times as likely to be charged with a hate crime. This demonstrates that hate crimes seem to be nothing more than crimes committed by one of a majority against a minority.
The relevance the national debate on hate crimes has to our own University cannot be forgotten. Student Council President Noah Sullivan is currently pursuing a referendum that would call for harsher punishments for students prosecuted in the University Judiciary Committee system if their offense is classified as a hate crime. But the text of the referendum limits a hate crime to an offense motivated by hatred based on "race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion or disability." If these factors are valid, then so should others be, like political orientation. There were several well-documented cases last semester of Bush and Kerry supporters having their respective signs torn down. Surely the students who committed such acts were motivated based on political hatred. Maybe we should legislate that crimes against people who wear glasses should be a hate crime.
The point here is not to belittle the victims of the abhorrent crimes that do occur, but to demonstrate that the University and society as a whole should not be in the business of legislating who is and who isn't a member of a protected class. Proponents of hate crimes legislation point out that, for example, a religiously-motivated crime against a Christian is in fact a crime against the entire Christian community.But a crime is a crime, regardless of the victim's race, religion or sex; it's why the lady justice statue outside the Supreme Court is wearing a blindfold and thus blind to both the perpetrator and the victim's demographics. All crimes are bad, especially violent ones, but that's why we have existing laws that cover these infractions, and that's why hate crime laws are redundant and unnecessary.
Joe Schilling's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jschilling@cavalierdaily.com.
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