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'Hate-crime' laws don't protect minorities, complicate justice
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share thisSupporters of "hate-crime" laws seem to believe that such legislation protects minority groups. But those laws needlessly complicate criminal prosecutions.
The latest such law was attached to the $680 billion defense appropriations bill signed this week by President Obama. It expands federal hate crimes definitions to include crimes based on sexual orientation.
It's not clear why a crime rooted in discrimination is any worse than a crime rooted in any other motive. It works against the notion that all crime victims deserve equal consideration.
In criminal cases prosecutors need only to prove that a crime occurred and the defendant committed it; they do not have to prove why the defendant did it. While it might be helpful to know motivation as a means of gathering evidence and to convince a jury, it is not required and, in some cases, is impossible to know.
Proving a hate crime, however, requires a prosecutor to convince a jury of a defendant's state of mind at the time of the crime - a much more difficult standard than merely showing that the defendant committed the crime.
Hate crimes designations are, in practice, political designations - proof that a particular minority group had enough clout to be included by lawmakers.
The federal government's focus should be to ensure that crimes against all victims are pursued with equal vigor, not to impose additional burdens on prosecutors and create separate classes of crime victims.
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