Canada kicks racist butt!

[rocketpig]

sapphi_snake said:

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.

So even though stricter punishments don't work as a deterrent, we should keep using them because it lets people know that hurting another person is bad and that hurting someone because of race is even worse. You see the flaw in logic here, don't you?

If the person is truly remorseful for their crime and has shown an attempt to rehabilitate or work with the court, I have no problem with a little leniency. That is often the case with crimes of passion. However, if a person shows no remorse for stabbing a victim for the keys to his Mercedes because he thinks he also deserves a Mercedes, what difference is there between him and the neo-Nazi who stabbed a black man in the street and left him to die?

In both cases, victims were targeted for a specific reason but the courts view one as worse than the other. It doesn't make sense. Then again, I'm not a fan of letting the government draw arbitrary lines in the sand.