Premeditated murder is premeditated no matter who the victim is. Isn't it a little scary to have harsher penalties based on victim status? I'm not convinced that's a valid judgment for the state to make.

First commenter Chris: How can it possibly be made plainer? Either judges and juries shall be asked to assess subjective mental and emotional states in determining the enormity of a crime--as between say, first-degree murder and negligent homicide--or they are not. Determining, on the basis of contextual evidence, testimony, and the like, whether racial hatred plausibly contributed to the formation of an intent to do violence to a victim is no more "totalitarian" or "subjective" than this hallowed exercise of Anglo-Saxon jurispridence. The arguments against hate-crime laws on this basis are thus invalid, intellectually bankrupt, or undertaken in bad faith.

For some reason, my emails to Andrew Sullivan on this very obvious and basic question never seem to reach through the ether to elicit a forthright response....

I might be wrong about this but when I studied this about 15 years ago in relation to the MN hate crimes statute, the impact is not on the highest level felonies. I'm a bit foggy but, for example, a petit misdemeanor can be made one grade more severe if bias is the motivation. Or a misdemeanor made into a gross misdemeanor or something. Once the crime rises to the level of a felony there's nowhere for it to go, and the legislation merely provides for reporting.

In other words, your garden variety 2nd degree murder charge is not increased to 1st degree because of bias motivation.

This was the way the state statute read. Dunno about the federal one.

I must disagree on your Emmit Till analogy. He was murdered & the murderers should have received the death penalty (and if there had been a fair trial, they would have).

Hate crimes laws are for when the victim survives the assault. When the victim dies, then it's murder in some degree & beating someone because of your hatred of their ethnicity/sexual orientation, etc. should be murder 1.

I support hate crimes laws, if for no other reason than Ms. Paglia is agin them.

And conservatives are generally all for "Law and Order" stuff. Unless it messes with guns. Look esp. to what some want in relation to anti-immigration enforcement.... Oh, I see. "Law and Order" is supposed to help keep down minorities and maintain the status quo. Hate-crime laws are liberal perversity: They attempt to use the justice system to protect minorities and *possibly* improve society.

(Assuming you consider diversity and racial harmony a social good, of course.)

One wonders if Ms. Paglia is also against the use of "special circumstances" designations in murder cases, i.e.:

The willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing of a law enforcement officer or any law enforcement officer of another state or the US having the power to arrest for a felony under the laws when such killing is for the purpose of interfering with the performances of his official duties
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/aggravating-factors-capital-punishment-state

Why oh why did Salon give her a column again? This is just trite.

The point of hate crimes is to intimidate a population. Burning a cross on someone's lawn is not the same as leaving a burning bag of poop on your teacher's doorstep.

Sorry elle loco (second comment), I still don't get it. The difference between the actions one takes in committing a crime (planning, heat of the moment, etc.) have an obvious bearing on the nature of the crime, while the way one feels about the victim's status doesn't strike me as an important consideration from the point of view of the state. Obviously, cops should consider it to help in an investigation, but I don't see how its relevance in prosecution. Actions are illegal. Thoughts aren't.

Make that "relevant" not "relevance", and "chris" not "Anonymous.

Why does anybody care about motivation? That's a claim to understand how the mind works (which, incidentally, presumes a single-entity "thinking" device).

It doesn't matter if someone was killed due to a "premeditated" plan, through reckless horse-play, or by accident. The death, and who physically cause it, can be determined. That's as far as you can go. Punish accordingly for the loss, but don't presume to be able to describe how the mind worked at the time.

Scott, try and be a thorough reductionist for a while. That means that until the basic elements of a system are understood, no claims should be made as to how it operates. You will be then honoring the empirical/scientific process first heralded by the Enlightenment.

Quiddity, and chris: The very nature of a crime lies in its intentionality. Otherwise, it's an accident. Think about it. (Oh! I picked up your laptop in the library and walked off with it! My bad! Intentional or unintentional? What if I thought it was mine? Therein lies the rub.)

And racially violent intent is simply a subset thereof that I think the government of a pluralistic society with a proliferation of vulnerable, stigmatized minority members of riotously various kinds very much has an interest in discerning, and punishing overt acts of violence pursuant to such intent. Call me crazy--and wake me when it's over.

DBT had it right. The reason you prosecute hate crimes as such is because the criminal is not committing a crime against just the direct victim. The intended victim of a hate crime is a population.

Wouldnt all crimes be considered hate crimes? i mean, when was the last time you punched someone in the face that you liked?

elle loco: Why do you care about intentionality?

That sounds as if your notion of human behavior includes a free will component. I consider free will to be an illusion created by the conscious mind taking note of whatever language-based-dialogue that flashes by and presuming that it represents some sort of independent, "higher" level of thinking. But it's an illusion.

Back to intentionality: What's that? Is there intentionality if, during a crime, the perpetrator did not have an in-the-mind sentence (like "I'm going to steal that laptop"). Is that your test? If so, good luck ever proving that such an instance took place.

Whether Paglia's arguments against "hate crime" statutes are the most compelling is a matter upon which reasonable people can disagree.

One practical argument against "hate crime" statutes: They tend to create special classes of protected and non-protected individuals. For example, apparently because white Gentiles are a majority population in many parts of the country, there is strong leftist opposition to the very idea that a white Gentile could ever be the victim of a "hate crime."

Such views are of course contrary to the equal protection clause of the Constitution, are contrary to the best of the American tradition, and are patently absurd in the face of common sense and human experience.

For a recent example, check out the case of the white family attacked by black youths yelling racial remarks in Ohio (http://www.ohio.com/news/50172282.html). The police and the Leftist Establishment balk at labelling this incident a "hate crime." Why so?

Until whites can have some reasonable expectation that "hate crime" laws will be enforced even when they are the victims, whites have absolutely no reason to support them.

@ Salomo: That's a matter of prosecutorial discretion and jury bias, not legal analysis. Given that hate crimes laws are enforced with regard to anti-white bias as they are with any other bias (which is why there's a proper category for anti-white hate crimes in the FBI Hate Crimes Statistics at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/table_01.htm), you (or, I suppose, 'whites') should look to your local officials for answers- I doubt they're all 'Leftists'.

Absent from this discussion is any recognition that for most of American history killing somebody because they were black or gay was treated in practice and sometimes in theory as a mitigating circumstance in judging the degree of guilt.

Justice is supposed to be blind about individual circumstances, but it shouldn't be blind about the general meaning of acts in the concrete circumstances the country finds itself in a particular historical era. The law is a legitimate way in which a society can gradually reform itself, and our society has a huge legitimate interest in combating sexism and especially racism. The hate crime statutes are similar to the laws that implemented denazification in Germany after WWII. They exist not to combat a notional but a specific evil.

One could argue that the remedy is ineffective or even that e pluribus unam is perverse national goal, but the Paglia argument is a nonstarter.

You can practically hear Paglia's little mind whirring, trying to figure out what liberals think about something so she can be her calculated contrarian self by taking the opposite view. As one commenter suggested, a more legitimate form of contrarianism is to be for whatever Paglia is against.

By the way, since when are jurors "government functionaries"?

dbt: "The point of hate crimes is to intimidate a population."

And the point of hate crime laws can also be to intimidate a population, as should be apparent from observing how they've played out elsewhere. (But of course we're America the Exceptional. Among us, well-intentioned, vaguely written laws are not subject to the abuse and corruption they always fall into among lesser nations.)

Ursula - your breezy dismissal of "prosecutorial discretion and jury bias", particularly in this context, is a marvel to behold.

elle loco: "I think the government of a pluralistic society with a proliferation of vulnerable, stigmatized minority members of riotously various kinds very much has an interest in discerning, and punishing overt acts of violence pursuant to such intent."

With such a riotously proliferating number of "stigmatized minority members", it's going to be hard to keep track of whose hatin' on whom, isn't it? You're suggesting that such a situation is inherently unstable and is going to need lots of new laws and agents of "discernment" to keep the lid on, eh? Nice future you've got envisioned for us.

And nowhere has anyone offered any evidence that "hate crime" laws actually accomplish the purported goals of reducing bigotry and promoting social harmony, while ignoring the reasonable concern that they may aggravate, rather than ameliorate, the opposing tendencies.

Jim Harrison: Justice...shouldn't be blind about the general meaning of acts in the concrete circumstances the country finds itself in a particular historical era.

No kidding - and a good argument against hate crime laws.

Most people, including Scott Lemieux and most commentators here, have utterly no idea of the distinction in law between INTENT AND MOTIVE.
CRIMINAL INTENT, I.E. the intent to break the law, is necessary to commit a crime. Absence of intent, e.g. an accident or mental incapacity to form intent (insanity) are defenses to an accusation.
MOTIVE is irrelevant to the commission of a crime. If I rob a bank, is it a defense that my motive was to feed starving children, instead of being greedy?
"Motive" statues are rarely definitional of the commission of a crime, for this reason. They pose a formal issue of the presence or absence of an "extenuating circumstance" not related to guilt or innocence, but advisory to the judge about the severity of the sentence IF THE ACCUSED IS FOUND GUILTY. Of course, judges have always had the discretion to take into account motive as a factor in sentencing (Robin Hood gets it easy, John Dillenger not).
Bottom line: motive statutes may require a more severe sentence - but do not define a crime. Therefore thez do not create a privileged class of victims - the prosecutor must prove the same level of guilt no matter who is the victim. Nor do motive statutes impinge on the rights of a defendant, as long as the class of victims is one constutionally allowable to legal protection. Therefore motive statute classes parallel civil rights classes, i.e.; groups recognizable as entitled to protection consistent with "equal protection of the law" standards in the federal constitution.

Of course we all know the slippery slope argument is nonsense and this will never happen here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/8144366.stm