All crimes are hate crimes.
So, that 20 year old woman who was tortured in West Virgina? The one who was stabbed, forced to eat feces, and called a Nigger? The woman who, "an assailant cut the woman’s ankle with a knife and used the N-word in telling her she was victimized because she is black, according to the criminal complaints."
Yeah, apparently her captors will not have hate crime charges brought against them.
Why?
She was not a random target.
So they did hate her, and they were racist, but they didn't hate her and act like racists in the right way.
Or, arguably, they were racist and hateful in the right way, because legally they weren't racist or hateful.
Go team.
5 comments:
“She obviously had some sort of social relationship,” Abraham said. “That is based on the fact that she was present at his residence on a prior date.”
If true, that evidence would undercut the hate crime law, which applies to crimes motivated by racial hatred and not by non-race-related conflicts.
It's like stealing money from a bank at gunpoint, but not getting an armed robbery charge because you fucking bank there normally. That's awesome....ly bad.
I don't think that the motivation for a crime should affect the sentencing. But in a system in which motivation does affect sentencing shit like this makes me even more confused.
Motivation should totally affect the sentencing for a crime.
If a person attacks you with a knife, and somehow you defend yourself and kill the man with his own knife, you shouldn't be punished as severely as that guy should were he to have killed you for the cash in your wallet.
I agree with Kyle, but I'm not sure how racial motivation can be determined with much accuracy (this is a case that seems like a false negative). Then again, I'm sure there are times when self-defense isn't quite so obviously defined.
What gets me about all this is here in this theoretical conversation:
"These people tortured a woman!"
"My god, that's horrible."
"And they were white people torturing a black woman!"
"That's somehow even worse!"
"That's what I thought, but then it turns out that they knew her from before!"
"Oh, well that's not so bad, then."
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