“Prison rules will allow the 10 men convicted in beard- and hair-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in eastern Ohio to keep their religiously important beards,”
Beard-and-hair cutting attacks?
“Prosecutors say the 16 defendants targeted hair because it carries spiritual significance, hence the hate crime prosecution.”
Interesting to see that crimes motivated by hate are a different category from crimes motivated by non-hate.
This is an interesting case. It’s not a far leap from this verdict to say that when someone is ex-communicated from the Catholic Church that they are the victim of a hate crime.
^I recommend you check out the Amish Mafia reality show that runs on discovery. These are some real-life amish thugs, no joke. You dont need to roll up in a benz to be a playa in rural ohio, a hand-crafted horse cart will do.
A few months ago, an African American guy was targeting and beating/mugging only Asian people somewhere on the UpperEastSide.
Before they caught the guy, the police already ‘ruled out’ a ‘hate crime’. Their premise was that ‘Asians are less likely to put up a fight during a physical confrontation’ so that is why the African American targeted them, so it’s not a hate crime. Definitely some strange spin on this.
I was up late having a filibuster party so I don’t have the energy to start up this debate again. I’ll just say this: Shaving someone’s beard off is assualt. They shouldn’t face extra punishment just because those particular people feel really, really sad about losing their facial hair. If I was to chase down bchad and shave off his luscious beard because I thought it would transfer some sort of Samson-esque power to me, I should face the same sentencing.
I can agree with STL on this particular one. I support the concept of prosecuting and punishing hate crimes. But I don’t think this is a hate crime, I think this is a lawyer grasping straws. The concept of hate crime punishments is to put a stop to racially or demographically driven violence (ie people killing, raping, beating people because of their race, or because they’re gay, etc) because of the related social costs if these things snowball. That was not what drove this case. I don’t think this should be a hate crime
This is demographically driven violence. First of all, it is assault, and they’re targeting people because of their religious beliefs. Now you can say, that it’s not “offensive enough”, but then you’ve agreed with the premise, and we can start a slippery slope argument that only supports my thesis.
I don’t know, I’m neutral on this one, I guess. Hate crime seems a little over the top though. I mean, its an intra-church feud that resutled in free (albiet forced) haircuts.
I’d side with this as a hate crime. The beards/hair are a purely religious/ethnic practice - targeting that is targeting the victims religions, and therefore a hate crime. It seems ridiculous but that’s basically the definition of a hate crime right there. They could have just beaten the guys, burned down their outhouse, whatever… but they chose to cut off one of they’re sacred…things.
What is interesting to me is that the sum of the crimes is greater than the parts. For instance, if I forcibly trim an Amish man’s beard, I will presumably be charged with two crimes: 1) Assault and 2) Hate crime. Or at least, hate induced assault seems to be a worse crime than normal assault. So either “hate” is a crime by itself, or it augments another crime.
However, if I hate Amish people but do not commit assault, I am not charged with anything. So, hate by itself is ok, but hate plus some punishable crime makes the crime worse. 2+2 != 4.
I don’t really see this as suprising. If I decide I’d like to kill someone and meditate on the concept for awhile before abandoning it, I have no committed a crime. If I accidentally run someone over in my car, or kill them in a responsive fit of rage I get manslaughter or murder. If I premeditate and kill someone, I get premeditated murder. Same idea.
But one last thing, lets not get caught up in the label and be clear here though. Hate in hate crime refers to demographic hate such as racism or hate for an ethnic or other group, not anger towards an individual.
^ if f(*) is a function that assigns punishment to some crime x, then mathematically you are surprised to find out that f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y) doesn’t hold, i.e. the punishment-assigning function f(*) is not additive.
Cauchy has shown that all ‘simple’ solutions to the additive functional relationship above take the form f(x)=a*x for some constant a. Other solutions may exist, but would be hard to construct and would be discontinuous - i.e. small changes in crime could result in large jumps or drops in punishment, which is undesirable from legal perspective.
But the crime-assigning function should also be bounded from above as x->infinity, because there is an upper limit on the punishment (capital punishment? life in prison?) even though crime can grow without limit:
(limit of f(x) less than some constant L as x goes to infinity).
It follows that the punishment-assigning function f cannot take this simple linear form f(x)=a*x which is unbounded. It therefore cannot satisfy the additive relationship f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y) in general.