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Hate Crime Laws: Abolish Them

In the 1980’s the governments of the United States created a new sort of crime; hate crime.

The FBI defines hate crime as: “a criminal offense committed against a person, property or society which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientatio, or ethnicity/national origin.” The 1994 Crime Act included the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act which stated that a person who committed a crime based on hate would be punished more severe than someone who committed a similar crime not based on hate (NCJRS, Hate Crime Resources – Legislation). Analysing this statement, someone who has committed a hate crime is partly punished by his or her motives. This makes that hate crime laws in the United States of America are superfluous, unjust, discriminating against victims of other crimes, and in violation of the First Amendment.

At first, in the US hate crime laws are superfluous. Every crime that can be committed can already be punished under state laws and local laws. If someone commits a crime he has broken the law and is punished for that. An example: if a man murders a black woman because she is black, he should be charg

what penalty is given to a perpetrator, but as Huxtable says, they do not “excuse, mitigate or make it worse”. Also, how do the judge and the jury know for sure what the motives of a perpetrator are? If the perpetrator knows that when he tells the jury he has beaten a person up out of hate he gets a more severe penalty, why would he tell them? Why would he not pretend he had beaten that person up out of indifference? Then he gets a lower penalty. It is just impossible for a judge and a jury to get inside the head of the defendant and decide what his or her motives were, so these hate crime laws are unjust.