Hate-Crime Legislation

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Hate crime is generally known as an aggressive, intolerant stimulated crime that transpires when a man/women targets a victim because of his or her apparent partisanship in a social/race/sex category. Scholars often argue for the legislation of harsher penalties for hate crime, they argue that hate crimes are often premeditated and done solely to inflict harm to a specific group of people within society. However Heidi Hurd argues that increased penalties for hate crimes are unjustifiable in liberal societies. Hurd argues that hates crime laws, unjustifiably label character traits as deserving for greater punishments (p. 222, Hurd). In “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation’, Heidi Hurd draws the comparison that ‘hate’ and ‘bias’ are similar to such individual characteristics such as ‘jealousy’ , ‘greed’ and ‘cruelty’. Heidi Hurd’s theory clearly dismisses the notion of increased penalties on hate crimes, she supports this conception with the ‘fact theory’ (p. 217, Hurd), which criticizes the standard of measuring culpability and guilt. Hurd also dismiss the idea of motivation towards hate crime, she argues that Motivation is situational; therefore it is difficult to argue that some motivations for crime are emphatically inferior to others (p. 221, Hurd). I believe that hate crimes should be punished to the same degree as regular crimes, our society’s legal structure is mounted on equality and a ‘crime’ is a ‘crime’; Hate crime laws provide prosecutors with various options for incriminating defendants thus leading to harsher sentencing procedures. By instilling hate crime laws, more awareness of race/gender will be verified and taken to effect by society. It is impractical to categorize motivating characteristics to ca...

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...the guilty should face the consequences.
In conclusion accepting legislation for hate crimes would move us from an act- centered theory of punishment to a character- centered theory, by accepting such a theory society is moving distinctly to a non- liberal structure. Hurd believes that “to criminalize certain aspects of character must honor what Joseph Raz calls "the morality of freedom." While a political perfectionist, Raz has power-fully insisted that in many instances what is good (virtuous) for persons is a product of what they autonomously chose to do and to believe”(p. 216, Hurd). Mills notion of liberty provides citizens with freedom and sovereignty to believe and act in such a way citizens deem fit. Motives towards hate crimes are uneasy to recognize; by infusing crime identical in terms of intention, parity and correspondence would subdue in society.

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