More backwater justice

http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18025306&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568860&rfi=6
A Hate Crime Without Hate

At a February 7 bail hearing for Anthony Fortunato, one of four defendants charged in the killing of Michael J. Sandy, Gerald J. DiChiara, Fortunato’s lawyer, challenged the use of the state hate crime statute in the case. “There was no hate,” DiChiara said.

Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, would agree.

“This section of the hate crimes law says that if you pick
someone because they are a member of that class you can establish the hate crime,” Hynes said last October. “You don’t have to hate blacks or hate gays to be guilty under this statute. All you have to do is identify them as a class and victimize them because they come from that class.”

While little of the evidence in the case is public, published reports have said that the defendants chose Sandy because he was gay and, they believed, less likely to fight back when they tried to rob him. Typically, hate crime prosecutions rely on evidence of prejudice as the motivation for the crime.

The law’s use in this case is new, Hynes said.

“I think it’s novel in the sense that there is no case law,” he said. “We’ll probably make new law… I’m comfortable with it.”

Experts disagreed on whether this use of the state law was new.

“This is the first time I’ve run into this distinction being made,” said Dr. Michael Shively, an associate at Abt Associates, a consulting firm, and the author of a 2005 study for the U.S. Department of Justice that looked at hate crime laws across the country.

Jeannine Bell, a law professor at the Indiana University School of Law and the author of “Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime,” a 2002 book, said it was common.

“That is actually quite typical,” she said. “It’s based on a stereotype about a particular group so it’s still based on bias about a particular group. It’s still a hate crime or a bias crime.”

The New York hate crime law may support Hynes though attorneys disagreed. The statute’s “legislative findings” refer to crimes “based upon bias and prejudice” and “invidious hatred,” but the law itself says a person commits a hate crime when he “intentionally selects” a victim based on a “belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation” of that person.

In an e-mail, DiChiara said he might oppose the hate crime designation as part of his client’s defense.

“I do think that this is a serious issue and have been contemplating challenging its use in court,” he wrote. “It seems to be against the legislative intent of the statute and frankly expanding its use to situations that are not generated by hate or prejudice may weaken, not help, its purpose.”

Lawyers for Shurov and Fox did not respond to requests for comment.

Alafair S. Burke, a law professor at Hofstra University, said that the law backed Hynes.

“The language of the statute is pretty clear,” she said. “I suppose they could point to the language in the legislative findings that talks about hate, but ultimately the statute is pretty clear.”

With hate crime laws on the books in 49 states, the broader question is whether Americans and elected officials intended or want them to be used in this way.

In interviews, lawyers and activists cited crimes that could be prosecuted in this way, such as a mugger selecting Asian victims believing them to be passive and less likely to call police or a gay thief preying on other gay men because he knows that population well.

Are these hate crimes?

“I’m not so sure that the line dividing them is very wide,” said Clarence Patton, executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. “I don’t know that it’s very far or distant from someone who says I hate gay people to someone who says let’s do this to a gay person because it will be fun or easier. I don’t think there is that much daylight between one and the other.”

Richard E. Sincere, president of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty, a libertarian group, and an opponent of hate crime laws, said Hynes was wrong.

“This seems to be rather an odd use,” he said. “Using the stereotype of a gay man as less likely to fight back seems to be a means to the crime and not so much a motivation… I don’t think it falls within any scope of a hate crimes statute.”

Abt Associates’ Shively, a supporter of hate crime laws, wondered if using a statute in this way would harm such laws.

“This would worry me about weakening the core intent,” he said. “The majority of crime is intra-race. All the racial groups tend to be victimized by people of their own racial groups… Is the fact that there is a tendency to pick these victims according to these characteristics - does that make them a hate crime? I think the answer is no.”

Hynes is either an idiot, a sociopath, or intentionally opening the racial liberal’s legal version of Pandora’s Box.  As Tim “white like me” Wise asserted in one of his debates with race-realists, black criminals’ disproportionate and deliberate selection of white victims don’t constitute “hate crimes” because it isn’t ostensibly motivated by racial animus; if Hynes & co. have their way, it will, and a huge portion of black crime will suddenly have precedent to be considered “hate crimes.”

I predict that higher up the food chain someone will squash this before it goes too far.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Friday, March 2, 2007 at 02:08 PM in
Comments (2) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Next entry: All in a day’s work

Previous entry: Astronaut Farmer