finethen wrote:

I believe in hate crimes now as I always have because they move beyond crimes into the realm of symbols. A burning cross on a lawn is not just property destruction. It is a symbol to that family, and the rest of the community. Comparing that with, say, smashing a mailbox, shows the distinction.

When a man is killed for his money, or a woman is raped while she jogs in the morning, it is no doubt awful and deserves to be punished to the full extent to the law. However, when a black man is killed and hung from a tree, or a jewish woman is raped by nazi thugs, the message is not just to those individuals. It is a symbolic threat to the whole community- especially communities that have been plagued by discrimination and hatred. For this reason, it needs to be treated as more than just the facially obvious crime.

In this scenario, where an individual was allegedly denied life-saving assistance because of his sexual orientation, this action sends a message to other gays in the community: the police may not help you like they would help straight people. They may choose to conceal their sexual identity to officers, or simply not call the police and rely on their own resources when accidents occur. Either way, the fact that the whole community has to fear for equal treatment because of this one cop's actions, I believe it should be considered a hate crime.

I would mention that the act of one does not necessarily represent the consensus of many, but your supposition seems to be that hatred of homosexuals is endemic in one or more police precicnts in West Virginia, so I will follow that line of thought for the sake of the discussion. It's the worst case scenario and needs to be explored.

To the best of my knowledge (I remember "hate crime" first popping up in the 90's) it did not take the existence of "hate crime" sentences for women's suffrage to become a reality, nor for the civil rights movement to be successful. Those social groups exerted pressure themselves and fought to gain rights for themselves, along with other sympathetic supporters outside those groups. To use more severe punishment for crimes proven to be motivated by hate seems like a cop out, a false sense of security inducing protection scheme, rather than actually achieving anything progress in the eyes of society. A hollow victory if you will.

Knowing that a harsher penalty exists for crime motivated by "hate" is not going to prevent hate crime. It will simply train the perpetrators to keep a tighter lid on their motives and operate below the radar. Just because you can't hear them say it though, don't think they aren't still thinking it. If hate crime law is only meant to muzzle threatening messages to a community, but the net result at the end of the day is still a bullet in the forehead, or in this case, laying dying on the sidewalk, what has really been achieved?

Basing sentencing on motive alone seems like a slippery slope to thought crime. This police chief's purported crime could be punished as pre-meditated. If "hate" can be proven to have motivated letting a person die, then so can the pre-meditated intent. Why does the motive even need to be brought into play? And I'll be pedantic here and ask: What is the "proper" relative sentence for a hate crime, versus murder 1 or 2, manslaughter, etc...

If the decision was to either put a person to death or let them live their days out in prison, with the deciding question being, "Did you hate them because they were part of a social group?" and a yes answer means death (nevermind how you actually quantify or prove hate, I'm just setting up a loony in a straight jacket igorning his counsel and yelling out, "Yeah, I hated him!" type situation) how is that equal protection under the law? It's ironic that the very amendment used to prevent stronger punishment for blacks than whites is being ignored in the case of "hate crime" sentencing.

Insert cliche comment about double edged swords here.

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