A rationale for hate crime laws

I left a fairly lengthy comment on a thread that I didn't realize till afterwards was probably dead. Oh well; here's the post, and here's my comment:

How about this:

When an attack on someone is motivated by racial hatred, the crime is compounded, not because the attack itself is somehow made worse due to the attacker’s hatefulness, but because the attack signals–as a matter of fact–a credible death threat against a group of people (gays, in this case). In other words, killing someone because they are gay–besides being an obvious act of murder–is also equivalent to sending a threatening note to every gay person in the community that reads: “I’m going to kill you.” And issuing death threats is, of course, against the law.

The important thing here is that the death threat component to the crime is purely an empirical finding: it is only due to the specific history of violent crime in this country that some classes are credibly “threatened” by hate crimes while other classes are not. So, for example, because there is no history of philosophers being singled out for attack, an attack motivated by hatred for philosophers does not constitute a credible death threat against the community of philosophers. But for a different class, say black people, the threat would be all too credible.

Interestingly, I think using this rationale you could also justify similar “hate crime laws” for situations not involving a broad class such as gays or blacks. For example, say the Hatfield and McCoy families have a long history of attacking each other. If John Hatfield attacks Bill McCoy out of a general hatred for McCoys, then I think you could make an empirical case that all members of the McCoy family were credibly threatened, and that therefore this death threat component should be added to John Hatfield’s crime.

So in the end, the rationale for laws against hate crimes reduces to the rationale for laws against issuing death threats. The final equation is “hate crime = violent crime + death threat”.

What do you think?

(PS: Another interesting twist to this is that I think the requirement that the death threat component be “credible” could have a mitigating effect in some cases. For example, in a town in which KKK attacks are common, a hate crime against a black person would constitute a very credible threat against the wider black population–after all, this is a group of likeminded people whose stated aim is to terrorize blacks and other minorities. However, if the attacker was just sort of this lone actor in a place where racially motivated crimes were extremely rare, the crime wouldn’t pose much of a substantive threat to others–it would mostly be discounted by the targeted minority as a freak occurrence. In this case, I don’t think a hate crime charge would be warranted–because the assailent in this case lacked the capacity to threaten anyone by his crime.)