Jason Vassell was a victim of a hate crime.

If only it were that simple.

Conservative intellectual Don Feder’s speech this Wednesday about hate crimes raises the issue of the limits of free speech. In regard to those on campus who support hate crimes legislation, perhaps they should take a closer look at what hate crimes laws actually are.

Essentially, a hate crime is a crime in which the motivation behind the hostile’s attack is based on hatred of the victim’s sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or religion. If a black perpetrator assaults a white victim person on the victim’s skin color, the perpetrator should not only be prosecuted for the assault, but he should also receive additional penalties for the racist motive behind the attack.

Of course, one of the obvious problems with hate crimes laws is judging whether the crime was indeed an act of racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism.

Did the black perpetrator carry out the attack because the victim was white? Or was it because the victim had harassed the perpetrator’s sister previously? Or was it because the victim was getting more playing time on the basketball team? Or was it because the victim showed the perpetrator up in front of his friends?

Psycho-analyzing someone’s mindset lends itself to all sorts of difficulties in trying to find out what the perpetrator was thinking at the specific moment in time in which he committed the crime; what he was thinking leading up to the crime; and what he was thinking immediately after the crime was committed.

Did a racist thought flash through his head when he was assaulting the victim? Did not one racist thought even enter his head when committing the crime? Did he think racist thoughts only after the crime was committed?

Even more so, states cannot even agree on what constitutes a hate crime. Eve Gerber of the liberal Slate magazine writes, ‘The definition of a hate crime varies. Twenty-one states include mental and physical disability in their lists. Twenty-two states include sexual orientation. Three states and the District of Columbia impose tougher penalties for crimes based on political affiliation.’

But what if the perpetrator ‘- ‘ as Justice For Jason supporters assert ‘- has a history of racism and yelled racist epithets at the time of the crime? What if it is crystal clear that the perpetrator committed a crime because of the victim’s race?

The tough answer that few politically correct people want to acknowledge is this: regardless of what one thinks and no matter how racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic it is, the state should not criminalize thought.

The state, through common-law statutes, judicial court decisions and other law enforcement mechanisms, should not punish people merely for thinking something.

Freedom of thought ‘- enshrined in the Bill of Rights ‘- is something that citizens enjoy in the United States far more than anywhere else in the world.

Take a look at European countries that criminalize the denial of the Holocaust. While the Holocaust is an undeniable historical fact, the United States does not prosecute academics or bishops merely for saying it did not happen or was exaggerated, even though there are American academics who have said so repeatedly, including at least one who has spoken here at UMass.

Instead of punishing private thoughts, what American criminal law does is criminalize actions. What if a white perpetrator committed assault against a white victim, and a black perpetrator committed assault of a lesser degree against a white man? And what if a court determined that the second act was not only assault, but also a hate crime, so that the black perpetrator, in the end, would get more jail time than the white perpetrator?

The result would be that the state would be punishing someone more for committing a less severe crime than someone else. Such unequal standards undermine the very purpose of the American legal system: equality before the law.

In relation to hate crimes, equality before the law means that a crime is a crime is a crime.

Assault and battery is as equally damaging to a victim of a non-hate crime as it is to a victim of a hate crime. However. hate crime laws demean the level of criminal brutality by explicitly suggesting that a victim suffers less than another victim because the perpetrator of one crime does not hate the victim as much as the perpetrator of another crime.

This is nonsense.

It is safe to say that all crimes resulting in assault, battery, murder and other vicious crimes
are ‘hate crimes’ in one sense or another.

The famous death of Matthew Shepard, who was gay, by two homophobes was horrific not because of the murderers’ opinions about sexuality, but because of the utterly brutal nature in which they attacked him.

Because more than anything else ‘- more than even being gay ‘- he was something that our unique American legal system of equality recognizes as being paramount in determining the severity of the crime: a human being.

Greg Collins is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].