Do Hate Crime Laws Do Any Good?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted August 4, 2009.

There's no indication that getting hate crimes on the books actually prevents them.

"We have seen a man dragged to death in Texas simply because he was black. A young man murdered in Wyoming simply because he was gay. In the last year alone, we've seen the shootings of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish children simply because of who they were. This is not the American way. We must draw the line." -- President Bill Clinton, final State of the Union Address, January 27, 2000.

It was a year-and-a-half after the horrific torture-murder of James Byrd Jr., the African American man who was assaulted, chained to a pickup truck and dragged for 3 miles by three white men in Jasper, Texas, a crime that the New York Times called "one of the grisliest racial killings in recent American history."

A few months later came the similarly brutal killing of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who was savagely beaten and left to die in Laramie, Wyoming.

The perpetrators in both cases were slapped with severe punishments -- life sentences for Shepard's killers, and two death sentences and one life sentence for Byrd's. Nonetheless, in the emotional public upheaval that followed, both cases became rallying cries for the passage of state laws to toughen the sentences for hate-motivated crimes.

Read on...

1 comment:

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Joan Stepsen
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