The Kwaku Network is afire, and now Howard Witt is driving volume.
There's a best-selling author who goes by the name of John Sandford. I'm on my fourth book of his in as many weeks. In the one I just finished, a gay US Senator is drugged unconscious, burned alive, chained to a tree with barbwire and beheaded.
Shocked?
Everybody knows, who watches television news these days, exactly how our media would behave and how much public opinion would be swayed by such an event. That's why it makes for a great murder mystery book. But very few people know how police would investigate such matters, how the FBI would get involved and how this differs or does not differ from other murders, about 17 thousand of which occur in our country every year. In one way, the American public is prepared to deal with this quite easily as media consumers. We are not no prepared to deal with the police investigations, and legal proceedings behind it.
How does one become accustomed to the fact that there are that many people murdered in America every year? Only if you are the sort whose business it is to do something about it. You might be a judge, a defense attorney, a prosecutor, a detective, a jailer or some part of the system. You have to look at it straight. And yet I'm convinced that there are people who do this everyday who find themselves shocked at the brutality of some fraction of these crimes. I think they'd know a hate crime when they see one.
A while back, I negotiated with some thoughtful people The Boohabian Hate Crime Standard. I thought it was appropriate at the time to recognize the terrorist intent of criminals who wanted to send a message through their intimidations and crimes. For what it's worth I think this remains a good principle.
To win a hate crime prosecution, the prosecution has to show a clear expression of group hatred through the felony. It is not a "hate crime" merely because the perpetrator hates people of that group. The crime has to be intended to communicate that hatred of the group to the victim. The idea that police search for hidden hate motivations is antithetical to the notion of hate crime. Hate crime statutes don't enhance your punishment merely for thinking bad thoughts. They enhance your punishment for committing your crime in a manner that creates added psychological injury to the victim and society.
There's something of a problem with that standard which is that depending upon who you are, you may or may not be psychologically injured. This is the difficulty when such ideas are promoted by multicultural activists of all stripes. Some of them are simply too touchy feely. How can you trust the kind of person who is deeply offended by Don Imus to be anywhere near objective enough to determine whether one murder is more offensive than another? You can't. But you also cannot expect the most relatively jaded people who deal with criminality on a daily basis, to be the sole arbiters of what society should deem especially cruel.
It was with something like that in mind that I heartily welcomed the Depravity Scale study. I think that we can studiously and empirically approach an understanding of what is truly evil without the prompting of political advocates and we can build the appropriate punishments into our laws.
As we grow as a nation in population, the odds are that we are going to see in greater number and greater detail with the advance of communication technology, more heinous crimes than ever before. Some of it will rise to the level of terrorism, and we should acknowledge that and work accordingly. 'Hate crime' is nothing new, it is just something newly noticed. Let us recognize that and evolve our justice system rationally and carefully.
Beyond that, I'm not on the Boohabian mission any longer. I don't believe that there is any progress to be made in race relations that originates from the prosecution of crime. Think about that for a second, then agree with me. Moreover, I'm not particularly interested in 'race relations'. That is nothing more or less than the negotiation of stereotypes.
There is a global war on terrorism going on as well as an ongoing battle against a domestic threat. I think I've made my position amply clear about that. For those who forget, remember Posner. Also remember that I have friends and acquaintances in the FBI, and I know that despite what complainers may complain about Waco and Ruby Ridge, they're very effective in shutting down domestic militants. Everything else is crime, and you know that I live outside of Sherwood Forest.
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