Neighbor: Arson victims suffered anti-gay harassmentThe difference between a crime not committed because of hate and those that are, is the motive. The motive for this crime might have been to intimidate not only the couple that lived there, but also all the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. To send them a message that they are not welcome in the neighborhood.
WRAL
Posted: February 5
Clayton, N.C. — Johnston County authorities were investigating a fire Saturday that gutted a home near Clayton and displaced a gay couple who had been victims of harassment for more than a year.
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A neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of backlash against her, said there have been at least three separate incidents of anti-gay harassment at the home. A note with derogatory language was left in the mailbox, an anti-gay slur was written on the house with marker, and the tires of a car parked in the garage were slashed, the neighbor said.
We separate levels of punishment by motive in many crimes. Look at murder, if your actions unintentionally causes a death it is the lowest level of murder (in a bar you push someone and they fall over backward, hitting their head and they die). If you should have known that your actions may cause a death, you are punished more than an unintentional death (in a bar fight you pick up a bottle and strike a person in the head and they die). We reserve the worst punishment for what we usually call premeditative murder (in a bar fight, you go out to your car and get a gun, come back in a shoot the person to death). The same is true for a hate crime, if the motive is also to intimidate a person or class of people.
It seems that almost any time I read about the assault or killing of a transgender person, the investigators or those in charge of the investigators say that they've never seen anything so brutal.
ReplyDeleteThey're beaten over the head after they're shot or stabbed. Or the bodies are chopped up and parts are left in dumpsters all over a city.
Or they meet fates as bad, or worse, than the ones I've described. And you rarely, if ever, hear about such things when the victim is not transgendered, or a member of some other group that experiences prejudice.
All crimes are indeed matters of hate,or at least indifference or disrespect, toward the victim. But when the identity of the victim comes into play--particularly if the victim is LGBT--the perpetrator commits his act in particularly brutal and grisly ways. That should be taken into account in the investigation (Indeed, the gruesomeness of the crime is sometimes what leads the cops to the perp.) as well as the arrest and sentencing of the perpetrator.