victor809 wrote:Tail...if you support sentence reduction for circumstances, why wouldn't you support higher penalties for circumstances?
Additionally, your mock scenarios are a little.... Fanciful.
How often does someone randomly attack a person with a bat unprovoked? They simply don't usually (when there are random attacks they become big news... Because of their randomness)... Usually if you've got someone hitting someone with a bat (I believe that is not assault, but battery.... No pun intended) it's because they had an argument with them previously...or some pre-existing beef.... OR it's because that person is of a group they want to target.
That's part of the difference with hate crimes. You and I are very unlikely to be randomly attacked by a group of strangers we never interacted with. (Yes there's mugging but we're leaving out "for profit" attacks because those are reasonably equal opportunity). There was a point in our history when that could not be said for gay men, blacks, Asians, Hispanics....
Think of how much people get their panties wadded up when there are random attacks in a city. The DC sniper... There was the overblown paranoia of the "knockout game" BS... When people can randomly be attacked they get scared beyond the rational reality of how likely it is to happen. One could call it a form of terrorism.
I'm not saying that penalties shouldn't be adjusted based on circumstance.
I'm saying that the "circumstance" shouldn't be why someone hates someone.
Maybe my example of a random stranger beating is too infrequent.
How about beating someone up with a bat because they don't like the fence their neighbor put up?
That's a hate crime. But it's not a hate crime.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter if they hate them because they're black, or if they smell, or if they play loud music, or if they look at you the wrong way.
And worse: if I were to get into fisticuffs with a person of color on my way home tonight, I could be accused of a hate crime when all it may have been is a scuffle over the last parking spot at Kraft's massage parlor.
If a person has a list of who is Jewish in their town and they go about hurting them, then YES that person should be charged with the most severe penalty. But it's not because it's a hate crime. It's because it's literally domestic terrorism.
I like your last paragraph. It's food for thought. But it's flawed.
If we were to use public pandemonium as the barometer think what would happen when someone of the Muslim faith were convicted of a crime.