In yesterday’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen — whom I normally disagree with completely — has a fairly rational column about that strange phenomenon known as the “hate crime” and offers two examples of such crimes from New York.
One of the suspects is named Nicolas Morse. He is reportedly a one-man melting pot — half-Chinese, half-white with a sister who’s half-black. A neighbor tells the press, “He’s not racist.” Maybe not. But because Morse was allegedly one of a group of men who set upon a black man with baseball bats and iron pipes while uttering racial epithets, he and the others have been charged with a hate crime. That means he can spend even more time in jail than if he merely used sticks and stones to beat someone and failed to call him a name, as we used to say. In 45 states and Washington, D.C., the “name” is now a crime.
The article goes on to state that later evidence, specifically the fact that these two men had been involved in previous fights, has indicated that this may not have been a racial incident at all, but simply two violent men going after each other.
and in the second case:
Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney (and now a Republican senatorial candidate), last month charged a deranged and homeless black man with a hate crime — as well as all the usual stuff — for murdering a white woman only on account of her race. Since the man was both insane and already being prosecuted for murder, it’s hard to say what the additional penalties could be.
So why the enhanced penalties of a hate crime in these two cases ?
It turns out there is a common denominator:
There is a mayoral election coming up, and everyone in this town recognizes the political influence of the Rev. Al Sharpton. He has emerged as a power broker, so much so that in this week’s mayoral debate, all the Democratic candidates said they would seek his endorsement. It was Sharpton who, in 1986, led a protest march through the Howard Beach section of Queens after three black men were attacked there
And in the second case:
Pirro later announced that Sharpton had called her and urged that she prosecute the case “vigorously.” Sharpton, you will be relieved to know, is against bigotry “irrespective of the side from which it comes,” Pirro said. The man is, well, a prince.
In other words, the political pressure of one man, combined with the none-too-subtle threat of the same protests that rocked Howard Beach and other areas of New York City in the 1980s was sufficient to turn what otherwise would have been a standard murder into a hate crime, with the enhanced penalties that come with it.
Al Sharpton is a race hustler and a fraud. I grew up in the New York City area and watched as he spread his own special brand of racial bigotry while the media fawned all over him. The piece de resistance came when he participated in the Tawana Brawley fiasco, wherein a young black girl falsely accused an upstate New York police officer of perpetrating an attack that never occurred. Not only has he never paid the price for that incident, but he is now a power broker in New York politics and becoming one on the national level.
As Cohen said:
Making hate a crime reflects the political power of the injured groups — gays, Jews, women, blacks, etc. But that political power — and not the crime itself — is why defendants in New York and across the country stand in jeopardy of additional penalties. The punishment here does not fit the crime. It fits the thought.
And that is what is wrong with hate crime statues. I’ve never understood why its worse if someone attacks a person because of their race or religion rather than attacking them because they want their wallet. In both cases, someone has been attacked and injured, if not worse. Calling it a hate crime doesn’t accomplish anything that charging them with assault, or murder, would.
