| rocketpig said: Ignoring that harsher punishment has not shown itself to be a deterrent to violent crime in almost every instance, it's not being used to determine how dangerous the individual is, the crime showed that with facts. It's used as punishment for committing an unpopular crime and allows equal crimes to be punished more harshly in certain instances. These are CRIMES. The motive for almost every one of them is a bad one. The person could hate short people, gingers, Republicans, Democrats, metrosexuals, rich people, poor people, blah blah blah. Why are we allowing courts to include the victim and use subjective reasoning to establish punishment when the crime itself speaks volumes about the type of person being prosecuted? It's a "feel good" law. I HATE "feel good" laws. A crime was committed. That should be enough for anyone. |
Not all motives are equal. Some are much worse than others, thus showing that some criminals are wose than others. They can also indicate whether a person can be reeducated or not. The harder it is to rehabilitate a criminal, the more jail time he should do, and be kept out of society. Hate crime laws also send the message that certain attitudes (like racism and homophobia) are terrible and not considered acceptable.
FTR, what do you think if crimes of passion? In those cases the motives help individuals do less time in prison.
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