---
and hate speech laws are next
we know who is promoting these laws ... and why they are bullshit
On Apr 2, 9:40 am, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Tyler and Trayvon
>
> By BILL KELLER NYTimes Published: April 1, 2012
> IN 2009 President Obama signed a federal bias crimes law named for the
> victims of two gruesome 1998 atrocities: the young gay man who was
> tortured, lashed to a fence and left to die; and the black man chained
> to the back of a pickup by white supremacists and dragged until he was
> dismembered. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes
> Prevention Act joined a 40-year accumulation of statutes declaring
> that crimes committed with a mind full of racial spite or
> anti-Semitism or homophobic hatred should be punished more severely
> than identical crimes committed for greed or vengeance.
>
> Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
> Bill Keller
>
> Related in Opinion
> Charles M. Blow: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin (March 17, 2012)
> Enlarge This Image
>
> Nicholas Blechman
> Today the notion is embedded in our culture. Almost every state has
> some variety of hate crime law. The most recent F.B.I. count, for
> 2010, reports 6,628 "criminal incidents" involving bias — instances
> where local authorities judged that the offender was motivated by
> hatred of a particular group. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld
> disparate penalties for bias crimes in 1993. The A.C.L.U., after years
> of resisting, endorsed a hate crime bill in 2005.
>
> But the fact that it is constitutional and commonplace does not quiet
> the nagging sense that hate crime legislation resembles something from
> an Orwell dystopia. Horrific crimes deserve stern justice, but don't
> we want to be careful about criminalizing a defect of character?
> Because our founders believed that democracy requires great latitude
> for dissent, America, virtually alone in the developed world, protects
> the right to speak or publish the most odious points of view. And yet
> the government is authorized to punish you for thinking those vile
> things, if you think them in the course of committing a crime.
>
> The issue is back with us thanks to the heartbreaking deaths of two
> teenagers. One is Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who jumped to
> his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate
> surreptitiously, briefly, video-streamed him kissing another man. The
> other is Trayvon Martin, the black Florida youngster shot dead by a
> neighborhood watch volunteer. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, was
> convicted not only of invading Clementi's privacy and intimidating
> him, but of acting with an anti-gay bias that could add up to 10 years
> of prison to his sentence. The shooter in the Trayvon Martin case,
> George Zimmerman, has not been charged with anything, but politicians
> are already slinging the h-word.
>
> If the idea of criminalizing hatred makes you queasy, as I think it
> should, these two cases will not settle your stomach.
>
> Anyone who followed the Rutgers trial closely — or read Ian Parker's
> absorbing investigation of the two roommates in The New Yorker — is
> likely to conclude that Ravi is arrogant, mouthy and insensitive, but
> not a malicious homophobe. Clementi was an openly gay, socially
> awkward, complicated 18-year-old, who killed himself for reasons we
> don't know. My reading of the case is that the jury seized on those
> handy bias statutes in a clumsy attempt to punish somebody for a death
> that remains unexplained. It's not a great reach to say that Ravi
> faces up to 10 years in prison for being a jerk.
>
> The shooting of Trayvon Martin has become a cause before it is even a
> case. It's natural to admire the resolute grace of his grieving
> parents and to endorse their demand for answers Florida authorities
> have been slow to provide. It's commendable to shine the lamp of shame
> on Florida's absurdly permissive gun laws. (This, remember, is the
> state that tried last year to make it a crime for doctors to talk to
> patients about the dangers of guns in the home.) But fashioning a
> narrative from the hate-crimes textbook — bellowing analogies to the
> racist nightmares of Birmingham and Selma, as the reliably
> rabble-rousing Reverend Sharpton has done — is just political
> opportunism. This is the kind of demagoguery that could prejudice a
> prosecution, or mobilize a mob. Is it not creepy, by the way, that
> Spike Lee was tweeting the suspected home address of George Zimmerman?
> As if to say, "Go get him!" (Lee sent apologies and a check to the
> elderly couple who were scared from their home because, oops, the
> tweet gave the wrong address. But apparently it's O.K. to terrorize
> Zimmerman.)
>
> If the trial of Dharun Ravi illustrates how readily hate crime laws
> can be abused by juries, the death of Trayvon Martin shows how easily
> they become pitchforks for showboating politicians.
>
> The anguishing cases of Tyler and Trayvon sent me back to the earlier
> debates over hate crimes. It is an abundant literature packed with
> historical analogies, philosophical hair-splitting, political
> posturing and interesting digressions.
>
> Many of the justifications for anti-hate laws seem to me to fall
> short: bias crimes terrorize more than the immediate victim; yes, but
> so does a mugger who frequents a particular neighborhood. We must
> protect the most vulnerable; fine, then why not assign extra penalties
> for criminals who prey on the poor, children, or — as a few
> prosecutors have done — the elderly? Racism and other prejudices are
> especially offensive motives; worse than sadism, or pedophilia?
>
> Back in 2001, Heidi M. Hurd, a professor who comingles law and
> philosophy, wrote an article entitled "Why Liberals Should Hate 'Hate
> Crime Legislation.' " The thesis sounded contrarian; hate crime laws
> evolved out of a great liberal cause — civil rights — and have been
> propelled by activists and politicians most of us would call liberal.
> Hurd, though she is a Democrat, was referring not to the contemporary
> political left but to traditional, John-Locke-and-John-Stuart-Mill
> liberalism, which holds that the state is licensed to temper bad
> behavior, not to perfect human nature. Hate crime laws, she wrote,
> crossed that line: "The law now regulates not only what we do, but who
> we are."
>
> There is nothing novel about the law taking into account a criminal's
> state of mind; one of the prerequisites for a conviction under common
> law is "mens rea" — a guilty mind, malice aforethought, criminal
> intent. The law also recognizes gradations of guilty purpose. A
> premeditated killing is more punishable than one committed in the heat
> of the moment, which is worse than a killing that results from
> negligence. New York law compounds the punishment if you kill someone
> to prevent him from being a witness.
>
> The distinction Hurd makes — convincingly, I think — is that when you
> penalize intent you are punishing matters of choice. One can choose
> not to pull the trigger, not to throw the rock, not to steal the
> purse.
>
> "You can't choose not to be prejudiced or biased — at least not
> willy-nilly, on the spot," she told me, when I called her the other
> day at the University of Illinois. "We pass moral judgments all the
> time against bigots and chauvinists and homophobes and so forth. But
> this is a question not of what we should morally blame people for, but
> of what we should deprive them of liberty for."
>
> In her criminal law class, Hurd teaches the cases of Matthew Shepard
> and James Byrd, and says that every time she confronts those monstrous
> crimes a part of her wonders, "Why don't we use the power of the state
> to make people less evil?" But, as she points out, those were both
> crimes eligible for the death penalty. "What are you going to do, kill
> somebody twice?"
>
> In most cases, hate crime laws take offenses that would carry more
> modest sentences — assault, vandalism — and ratchet up the penalty two
> or three times because we know, or think we know, what evil
> disposition lurked in the offender's mind. Then we pat ourselves on
> the back. As if none of us, pure and righteous citizens, ever
> entertained a racist thought or laughed at a homophobic slur.
>
> Bias laws are widely accepted. They are understandable. They are
> probably here to stay. But they seem to me a costly form of
> sanctimony.
>
> More:
> nytimes.com
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment