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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (24631)	8/24/2001 5:04:51 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

I can perhaps INFER from the character of some of the racists who were arrested, and who had their ability to organize and to incite...uh... restricted I personally don't know of any cases where the hate crime legislation has been used to enhance a crime to levels that weren't available under preexisting law. (For example, our state, and I think most others, allow sentence enhancements for extreme viciousness of a crime. That is crime specific, not thought specific, and I heartily support it. This would certainly have been usable in the Shephard case and in the case of the dragging in Texas, I regret that I forget the man's name. No hate crime legislation would have been necessary in those cases, if it was even used in them, to enhance the sentences.) However, by far the most effective tool in combatting organized hate has been not hate crime legislation but the simple tort case, most notably by Dees This has been enormously successful in breaking up hate organizations and seriously damaging their ability to organize and act. No hate crime legislation required, no enhancements for thought, just plain old assignment of blame and responsibility and making people pay for their actions, not their thoghts. (An aside: too bad Israel doesn't have an equivalent tool to use against Hamas, etc.)

To: Solon who wrote (24631)	8/24/2001 5:12:11 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Nobody in a community should need to live in fear for their families. That's a nice ideal. But if you take it seriously, you have to arrest and jail for life everybody who has ever thought about robbing, or assaulting, or otherwise inflicting violence on anybody in their community. I suppose it could be done. I wouldn't want to live in such a society. We have a trade off between living in security and restrictions on individual liberty. The US may not have reached the perfect balance, but IMO it's closer than any other country with such a heterogenous population has ever achieved.