LogFAQs > #945611860

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

What matters is whether their actions were lawful.

That said, where hate crimes are often different charges from their non-hate-motivated counterparts, racist motivations may be relevant for making hate crime charges stick. In theory, I'd be fine with doing away with separate hate crime charges and just treating hate as an exacerbating factor during sentencing. In general, hate-motivated crimes are worse because of how many more potential targets they have and how commonly they're motivated by an ideology and therefore at increased risk of reoffending, which means they should be treated differently, but that treatment can easily be handled in sentencing. Try to handle it in the initial conviction, and you risk failing to convict them because you couldn't prove a hateful motive, which just wastes everyone's time and introduces the risk that they'll walk free.

In practice, however, I believe it is a different charge, so it needs to be considered now.

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