TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT1516> <title> Apr. 26, 1993: When Hate Makes a Fist </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Apr. 26, 1993 The Truth about Dinosaurs </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> LAW, Page 30 When Hate Makes a Fist </hdr> <body> When does a crime become a hate crime? The Supreme Court deals with criminals who add insult to injury. By JESSE BIRNBAUM--With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami, Lynn Emmerman/Chicago and Julie Johnson/Washington In October 1989 a group of young black men in the Wisconsin town of Kenosha saw Mississippi Burning, the film about Ku Klux Klan terror in the early 1960s. As they left the theater, one of the blacks, Todd Mitchell, spotted a 14-year-old white youth named Gregory Riddick. "Do you all feel hyped up to move on some white people?" Mitchell allegedly asked. "There goes a white boy. Go get him!" They did. Mitchell's friends jumped Riddick and beat him so badly that he suffers permanent brain damage. Mitchell was tried and convicted of aggravated battery--and of something more ambiguous. After sentencing him to two years in prison for the beating, the court also punished him for his motives. Using a Wisconsin law that permits increased penalties for hate crimes, the judge gave Mitchell two more years of jail time. A just society will go to great lengths to discourage violent crimes of hatred. Should a free society go so far as to punish the hatred as well as the violence? More than a dozen states have enacted laws that permit courts to increase the jail time for offenders whose crimes have been motivated by prejudice on the basis of such things as race, religion, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Like the speech codes aimed at legislating civility among students on college campuses, hate-crime laws have spawned a controversy among legal scholars and interest groups. At its center is a collision between the 14th Amendment's guarantees against discrimination and the First Amendment's protection of free speech. If the debate were a lawsuit, it would be called Civil Rights v. Civil Liberties. The Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law last year that made nonviolent acts of intimidation, like cross burning, a crime. This week the Justices hear arguments over the Wisconsin statute used against Mitchell, which allows bias-related assaults to be punished more severely than the same crimes are treated when bigotry is not a motive. State Senator Lynn Adelman, who is representing Mitchell, complains that such legislation criminalizes thoughts. "What if there was a law aimed at abortion-clinic protesters that said anyone who commits trespass and is also against abortion rights commits a more serious crime and faces enhanced penalties?" Supporters of hate-crime legislation point out that the principle of enhanced punishment for certain categories of crime is well-established in law: the murderer of a police officer, for example, suffers a greater penalty than someone who kills a civilian. Moreover, the Supreme Court has set limits on the freedom to express certain antisocial ideas, like so-called "fighting words" that incite an immediate breach of the peace. Advocates of enhanced punishment want to take these restrictions a step further. The Mitchell case notwithstanding, most of the targets of hate crimes are blacks, Asians, homosexuals, Jews and members of other ethnic groups; crimes against them are especially reprehensible because these people are victimized on the basis of nothing more than their status. In their view, society should announce its values by placing a heavier weight of disapproval on crimes of hatred. Even without such laws, judges will sometimes take matters into their own hands. In December, Broward County Circuit Judge Richard Eade sentenced Bradley Mills to 50 years in prison--going far beyond the 22 years that sentencing guidelines suggest--for Mills' part in the murder of Lu Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American student at the University of Miami who was beaten to death by a mob of white partygoers while they taunted him for being Asian. Despite the threat of tougher sentencing, hate crime is increasing. The Anti-Defamation League counted 1,730 anti-Seincidents in the U.S. last year, the second highest total in the 14-year history of the ADL's audit. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says attacks on homosexuals increased by 172% over the past five years. Klanwatch, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that 1992 was "the deadliest and most violent year" for bias-related events in more than 10 years. Thirty-one of these were murders. Despite the growing numbers, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe believes Wisconsin-style statutes are reasonable and necessary. "The absolute right to think and believe what you want," says Tribe "and to express any viewpoint, however hateful, has nothing to do with some kind of license to target victims of violence based on their race, sex, religion or sexual orientation." If the court struck down these laws, he adds, "the decision would cast a long shadow of doubt over all antidiscrimination measures and much of criminal law because the state of mind of the offenders is typically a critical element of how crimes are defined and how punishment is meted out." The growth of hate crimes suggests that prejudice with its fists clenched is not all that susceptible to the persuasive power of the law. The legislation designed to deal with hate also becomes harder to justify when applied to threats--but not to acts--of violence. One of those laws became an issue in a major Ohio case that grew out of a 1989 incident at a public campground near Columbus. A black camper, Jerry White, complained to a park ranger about loud music coming from the neighboring campsite of David Wyant, a white man. After the park ranger left, Wyant shouted threats to shoot the "niggers." He was eventually charged with and convicted of aggravated menacing, a misdemeanor. But because his threat fell under Ohio's "ethnic intimidation" law, Wyant's crime was reclassified as a felony, which brought him an 18-month jail sentence. Wyant's behavior was repellent, but it never degenerated into violence. If the law places extra penalties on his threats because they were racist, isn't it edging closer toward punishing offensive speech by itself? "The drafters of ((the law)) may have had in mind marauding Klan members or skinheads," says Susan Gellman, an Ohio public defender who filed a brief in Wyant's appeal opposing her state's hate-crime law. "But what they're getting is Archie Bunker." Then again, Archie Bunker didn't usually threaten to shoot anyone. </body> </article> </text>