I was under the impression that hate crimes were only charged when one had committed a crime. Are there any cases where one's action was not a crime of itself, but only under Hate Crime Legislation?
It would be impossible to try and arrest people for just hating a group of people. I would hope that this would never happen. But acting on that hate in an illegal way, I feel, is a different story. Like I said, I feel that there is far more possibility of that person committing future crimes for the same reason.
I would like to make a comparison to drunk drivers, in that someone who drives while intoxicated and causes a traffic accident is more likely to cause a future accident than someone who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus the punishment for them is different, even though the crime might be the same.
So, I feel that the potential future danger should be taken into account, in some cases (only where the hatred can be proven). But, maybe there are some factors that I am not thinking of?
There are a lot of different reasons for it. That very well may be one. Others are that, as a society, we decided that killing somebody solely because the represent a group of people you hate is a more...for lack of a legally accurate term, "evil," then killing somebody out of, say, revenge, which, in turn, is worse than killing in a fit of passion, which is worse than killing in self defense.
Also, I think the hate crime designation is tagged on to a crime to acknowledge that, while the physical action may have only been against a piece of property or one person, the attack was really on an entire community. The goal of the crime is not solely to hurt the one victim, but to spread fear through a community of people with the message "You could be next." This is why, when lynchings were at their peak, the victims were often chosen at random, or for obviously contrived and silly reasons like mocking a pig or enraging an infant. If the victims are random, than every member of the community becomes a potential victim. It is a deliberate act of psychological terrorism that interferes with the proper functioning of society more than other crimes of comparable violence.
"Hate Crime" is not a crime in and of itself, only a modifier that can be added to existing crimes. There
has to be a committed crime to tag the modifier onto. The ox must be gored.
For some reason, people's objections to punishing crimes based on motivation, thought and speech,
only seem to crop up where anti-gay hate crimes are concerned.
Thought and speech may be the only acts committed in the crimes of:
Treason
Conspiracy to commit [crime]
Various forms of child abuse
Soliciting (even if the acts solicited are never actually performed, soliciting for prostitution, or for sex acts with a person under the age of consent, is still a crime)
I have yet to hear or see somebody go into the "freedom of speech/thought" over these.
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