On Jul 10, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Charles Bennett wrote: > > On Jul 9, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Jared Earle wrote: > >> On 9 Jul 2009, at 16:49, Chris Gehlker wrote: >>> I'm so naive that I think justice is when the punishment fits the >>> crime. I don't see how the racial, religious, gender or sexual >>> orientation of either the victim or the perpetrator com into it. >> > > I agree. What always bothers me is that we presume to be able to > read minds. > > I don't have a problem with worse penalties for people in a position > of trust or authority abusing it but I don't see how > you could then add something on top because you "think" that in > their hearts, they were *also* racist, homophobic or whatever. > > When you try to divine a criminals motivation just to award greater > penalties, you end up with all sorts on convoluted thinking, trying > to define what constitutes "thought" of sufficient virulence to > invoke these additional punishments. It's not like the threat of > additional punishment actually deters the crime. "I'm gonna kill > that rat bastard, but I better not utter a racial epithet lest I get > an additional 10 years.." That is just illogical.
So far we agree completely. > >> >> That's good. It means that if everyone were as enlightened as you, >> there would be no need for hate-crime legislation. Until then, >> though, >> we unfortunately still need it. >> > > > So was their attack a hate crime? > > The Akron police don't seem to be able to figure it out. Maybe. But has others have pointed out, they can't say it's a hate crime without implicitly inviting the Feds in and I can think of several reasons, some perfectly legitimate, why they might want to avoid that. I think the Akron police need to be judged on their performance. If there are arrests and prosecutions I don't care what they label it. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
