Still swamped here, with no time for a long post. At the top of the list of topics on my mind, though, is that insane Dharun Ravi thoughtcrime trial and verdict — in which an (admittedly unlikable) young man is facing 10 years in jail, a permanent felony record, and possible deportation for committing … a nasty little prank in which he spied on his roommate, in his own dorm, for a few moments. The central charge here is that he had impermissible thoughts — and it should be plain to everyone that this is nothing more than a show trial, meant to make a public example of Mr. Ravi, and to make very clear to all just what thoughts you can and cannot harbor in this age of “tolerance”. It is creeping totalitarianism, and all of you with any understanding of history, and with any awareness of just how rare and precious our fragile freedoms really are, should be getting very edgy right about now.
There are lots of rants I could link to here, but instead I’ll direct you to two (mostly) sensible posts by Jacob Sullum at Reason. They are here and here.
4 Comments
I tend to agree with you here, but it is a mischaracterization to say that Ravi was convicted of “thoughtcrime.” The actual charges included tampering with evidence and invasion of privacy, which are actions and not “impermissible thoughts.”
Since you appear to oppose a legal definition of hate crimes, would you consider the murder of Trayvon Martin to be a hate crime? If so, should it be treated differently than if the shooter and the victim were the same race?
Yes, the invasion-of-privacy and evidence-tampering charges are objective things, but the real stinger here is “bias intimidation”, which is explicitly thoughtcrime. The sole purpose of its existence, as with all hate-crime laws, is to punish certain kinds of thoughts. (You can see the New Jersey statute here.) The law goes even further: it convicts the accused even if he wasn’t harboring hateful thoughts, but his victim might reasonably have thought he was. So the law can convict a person based upon thoughts about thoughts! (Think about that.) If that isn’t thoughtcrime, nothing is — which is even more Orwellian, if you think about it.
I don’t know anything about the Trayvon Martin case; I’ve had no time to read the news the past couple of days. I will say this, though: murder is always a foul crime, and should always be treated as such. So I will reverse your question: should a murderer be treated more leniently just because the victim was of the same race?
Incarceration has two primary goals: punish the offender and deter similar acts from occuring in the future. Hence Martha Stewart received a harsh sentence for tax evasion, because everybody knows who Martha Stewart is and the publicity given to her sentence is likely to prevent others from doing the same thing. While this may be unfair to Martha Stewart, I think that it is a proper use of prosecutorial discretion because it has value as a deterrent.
In my view, the presence of hate is an aggravating factor which can justify harsher penalties in some instances. The provenance of many hate crimes statutes is the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard by homophobes. Should his death be treated differently than others? I think so. He was killed because he was gay, making it different from garden-variety murders. It is reasonable to expect that singling out hate crimes for additional punishment should serve as an added deterrent to similar events in the future.
Martin was killed because he is black. Not only is it nearly inconceivable that he would have been shot if he were white, but if the situation was reversed – a black man shooting an unarmed white teenager – it is also inconceivable that there would be no charges brought against the shooter. Hence the involvement of the Feds in the face of insouciance by Florida authorities.
I really don’t care if Zimmerman (assuming he is guilty) gets harsher punishment than he would if Martin were white. I would be perfectly satisfied if he gets the same level of justice if it was a black shooter and a white victim.
Well, I think we should deter the foul crime of murder, no matter what thoughts are in the head of the person doing it — and whatever level of deterrence is appropriate for murder is what the level of deterrence should be. The idea that a mere state of mind can be an “aggravating factor”, when you have already done pretty much the worst possible thing you can do to a victim, seems to me to trivialize the crime itself. By your logic it seems that we should just go ahead and criminalize hate itself, which we are well on the way to doing.
So I disagree that we should be more tolerant of, and therefore less inclined to deter, intra-group murders.
And there, readers, you have both sides of the hate-crime debate.