The recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have sparked another controversy over Indiana’s lack of laws criminalizing bias-motivated violence known as hate crimes. Although 45 states and the District of Columbia have enacted such laws, Indiana has yet to buckle under the pressure of the public by passing this legislation.
What many seem to not realize is that this sort of legislation would not simply deter hate crimes, but it would actually further inequality.
Bills attempting to define hate crimes have been presented by the Indiana Congress and have failed in the past, but were recently brought to the forefront of Indiana legislators agendas.
Hate crime legislation essentially defines certain groups of people and allows judges to issue greater punishments to crimes that seem to have been motivated by a malice toward those groups. These often include, but are not limited to, the following: race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation and disability.
This legislation does not create new laws banning any actions that were previously legal, but rather it defines crimes to be worthy of greater punishment if a perpetrator’s intentions are based in bias.
The thought and hope of the authors is that their laws would deter people from committing crimes for these reasons, but will ultimately be doing more harm than good.
Although I, just as anyone else, would like to feel protected from being attacked or persecuted due to my identification with any of these groups, all this would do is create a greater separation of classes.
Hate crime legislation would denote a specially protected group of people, which could cause other victims of similar crimes to be treated differently. It may create a sense that the people who belong to that specific group are unequal to the rest of the community because they need an extra layer of protection via the legislative process.
Additionally, it simply gives judges too much power by allowing them to unilaterally decide for what reasons one committed a crime.
If a victim's identity falls within one of the proposed protected classes, it's almost impossible for a jury to exclude that information in its decision-making. It then becomes difficult to determine whether or not that part of the victim's identity contributed to the motivation of the perpetrator. A group of nine people must decide whether or not a person felt hate toward a group of people at the time they committed a crime against someone who is part of that group.
It's difficult. As Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post notes in his article on the Chapel Hill shootings, "prosecutors have to get into someone’s mind at the time a crime was committed and prove to a jury not that someone perhaps hated but that “hate” was the motive."
For it to be a hate crime, it has to be a crime because of a specific hate, rather than a crime that coincides with a hate.
The existence of hate crime legislation complicates the legislative process and politicizes crime unnecessarily.
A government’s primary duty is to protect the rights of its individuals, therefore the social and political opinions of a criminal is completely irrelevant and should have no influence on the length or severity of his or her sentence.
Indiana, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and Wyoming need to stand their ground and prevent hate crime legislation from being passed within their systems of government.
States need to recruit a larger police force in order to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place, rather than attempting to scare off perpetrators by attaching an additional punishment to their crime.
