Thought Crimes

I’ve never really thought about this before, but hate crime penalties really amount to punishments for thoughts. Shouldn’t the law be concerned with actions and deeds, not with thoughts?

I know a lot of people think judging someone’s motives in a hate crime is no different than classifying a murder as premeditated, but really, I’ve never been a big fan of that either, much like I’ve never liked “not guilty by reason of insanity” or of crimes of passion or similar qualifications of crimes. Sure, there are mitigating circumstances, and I agree flexibility in sentencing is desirable, but a crime is a crime. All the mitigation leads to a system that is easily “played” and one that consistently frustrates everyone.

A while back I wrote about a young man who ran a stop sign and killed someone in a traffic accident. People were calling for a charge of murder. I could not disagree more! The kid didn’t kill anyone, he ran a stop sign. Why should he be charged with murder when someone else may have run that same stop sign just minutes before and been charged only with a traffic violation, and what about the many who run the stop sign every day with no penalty at all. My house sits on the corner of a four way stop, so I can attest to the number of people who simply ignore stop signs. The number is **much** higher than I ever imagined.

I know why people want this kind of treatment. Running a stop sign is a very risky thing – not to be taken lightly. Someone could be killed. So, perhaps the law should punish it severely. Perhaps the penalty for running a stop sign should be almost as steep as the penalty for murder. That would be “fair,” but it doesn’t make sense since most people who run stop signs don’t kill anyone. Seems like that would be going overboard. As sad as this may be, the other driver in that case was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life is full of tragedy. I wish there was some legal recourse, but in my mind, there is not.

If we take the same idea and apply it to hate crimes …

A lot of people hate, but not everyone kills people over it. We can’t punish people for hating. We know that. We live in a free society where we don’t want to be punished for our thoughts and feelings. So, the only way to handle this kind of very sad tragedy is to more severely punish the killer when it can be proven that he acted out of hate, right?

Wrong! Where do we draw the line, and who decides what is a good reason to kill someone?

I detest bigotry. If someone like me, someone who hates bigotry, were to kill a bigot – out of hate – perhaps that would be a good service. What if that killer were willing to take the penalty for killing the bigot in the name of the greater good. If a case like this were left to the jury, many jurors might side with the killer. And that, in my mind, is the problem. Instead of deliberating on the demonstrable facts of the case, the jury is left to judge someone by his or her motives. We simply should not go down this road.

The law needs to be about what I did or did not do – not about why I did what I did or what I was thinking when I did it or why I wanted to do it or what I might have read or listened to that made me think it was necessary to do. Those things should not be a matter of law. Those things are my business.

Keep your laws out of my head.

Laws should be written to protect one individual from the individuality of others. Laws should be written specifically to keep me from taking away your freedoms. Murder is a great example of a necessary law. Killing you is against the law because it infringes on your freedom – in a big way. Why I kill you, on the other hand, isn’t a matter of law.