Free speach US vs EU

[DirtDawg]

If you say that immigrants rape more than Swedes, which they do, and that as good as all gang rapes are performed by foreigners from specific countries, which they are, you can get a harder punishment than the rapists. 

We have "hate crime" laws also. It is a somewhat vague stopgap measure to pile on additional sentencing to really heinous offenders. Especially if two of one race attack one of another race, they will often try to define the crime as a hate crime. Since sentencing for many crimes has softened these days and most of the public seem to agree that it should NOT have, these "extra laws"  are used to redefine certain crimes as "Hate related." 

We just can't have any hate, not in this country. We are all one big happy family, remember.


It has already happened when a defendant is found NOT Guilty of a charge of assault, due to some legal technicality, but sentenced to prison for committing a Hate Crime. How can that possibly be?

[TheoK]

"Hate crime" is a fucking tautology. Except when poor people steal food to survive, when was a crime with a victim not committed out of hatred? 

[DirtDawg]

This is from WIKI:

Arguments for hate crime laws

Justifications for harsher punishments for hate crimes focus on the notion that hate crimes cause greater individual and societal harm. In Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously found that "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest.... The State's desire to redress these perceived harms provides an adequate explanation for its penalty-enhancement provision over and above mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs or biases.


The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that penalty-enhancement hate crime statutes do not conflict with free speech rights because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression; rather, they allow courts to consider motive when sentencing a criminal for conduct which is not protected by the First Amendment.


Arguments in opposition to hate crime laws
   

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that hate crime statutes which criminalize bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech conflict with free speech rights because they isolated certain words based on their content or viewpoint .

Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced. Some have argued that if it is true that all violent crimes are the result of the perpetrator's contempt for the victim, then all crimes are hate crimes. Thus, if there is no alternate rationale for prosecuting some people more harshly for the same crime based on who the victim is, then different defendants are treated unequally under the law, which violates the United States Constitution.

[Parts]

Hate crime laws are bad also.  It should be let up to the judge for sentencing and if say someone beat a gay guy because he was gay the judge could just max his sentence.  Adding these things on is just stupid and they seem to be enforce on a selective abases

[DirtDawg]

Interestingly, the hate crime bills regarding crimes against gay/lesbian, etc. have not passed. The people trying to pass these bills have, stupidly, attached proposed legislation to some of the most ridiculous "major bills."  The last time it was attempted, the Matthew Shepard Act as it has been called, was attached as an amendment to a DOD bill for funding troops in Iraq, FFS.



An item from the "Agenda" section Obama's website:

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: President Obama and Vice President Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice's Criminal Section.