Re: Wow
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This is why "Hate" Crime statutes have no place in a free society. They punish the thought behind the act rather than the act itself.
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So there should be no difference considered legally between manslaughter and premeditated, first degree murder?
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Apples and oranges.
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I think it's more like Macintosh and Granny Smith.
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Your example differentes between killing someone in a spur-of-the-moment bar fight and coldly planning to kill someone.
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"Coldly planning to kill someone" -- that's a thought, right? Why should he be punished more harshly for that?
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My objection is to taking two situations where someone decides to harm someone and making *why* they decided to harm someone relevant to the severity of the crime.
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At a bar fight, someone decides to pull out his knife and cut the other guy's throat. After a marital affair, a husband decides to poison his wife and kill her. Both decisions. We punish the 2nd one more harshly because of the thoughts that went into making the decision.
Hate crimes should be punished more harshly because of the thoughts that motivated the crime: specifically, a hatred toward an entire class of people, regardless of any actions that specific victim did or didn't do. Hate crimes, therefore, affect the entire class of people that was subject to the hate. If I kill a black man because he took my seat at a bar, then that is not (necessarily) a hate crime. If I kill him while shouting racial slurs at him, and have voiced my bigotry at other times, it probably is. In other words, had it been a white person that took my seat, I would have let it go, or asked him to get up. Because it was a black guy, I killed him. I was motivated by my hatred of a class -- black people. The entire black community will feel victimized, as they should, since now they have to fear similar acts of violence toward them just for being black.
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