Penalty-enhancement hate crime statutes are laws that give extra punishment to crimes in which a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership in a certain social group. Hate crimes laws are ineffective, impractical, themselves discriminatory, and unconstitutional.

First, it is important to understand that hate crime laws have been essentially ineffective. Although hate crime laws have been in effect for over twenty years, an FBI report shows that hate crimes as currently defined have gone up by 7.8 percent since 2006, and the Department of Justice reports roughly the enormous number of 190,000 hate crimes a year (Kopel 1).

Second, hate crime laws are overly impractical for the criminal justice system, which in turn burdens the citizenry by clogging up needed legal resources. James B. Jacobs, Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law among other titles, and Kimberly Potter, a Senior Research Fellow at NYU’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, have together written a book called Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics that provides a strong case against hate crime laws. One of the authors’ arguments is that “the concept of hate crime is loaded with ambiguity because of the difficulty of determining (1) what is meant by prejudice; (2) which crimes qualify for inclusion under the hate crime umbrella; (3) which crimes, when attributable to prejudice, become hate crimes; and (4) how strong the causal link must be between the perpetrator’s prejudice and the perpetrator’s criminal conduct” (Jacobs and Potter 11). Jacobs and Potter further argue that practically everyone is prejudiced to some extent, so any crime by one member of a group against another might be a hate crime, and thus it would be fair to investigate it as such (Jacobs and Potter 16).

Third, even if hate crime laws succeeded in their goals, they are themselves discriminatory. Again, hate crime laws give extra punishment to crimes wherein a person is targeted because of their membership in a certain social group. However, the only social groups protected by most hate crime laws are based on race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality (“Hate crime laws in the United States” 1). 2005 statistics from the Williams Institute Court Law show that homosexuals are experiencing just as much hate as African Americans and Jews, but yet they are just one of the groups not protected by some hate crime laws (Kopel 2). According to Jacobs and Potter, “in 1994, women reported approximately 500,000 rapes and sexual assaults, almost 500,000 robberies and 3.8 million assaults. The perpetrator was male in the vast majority of these cases”, making crimes against women “the most obvious candidate for recognition as hate crime” (Jacobs and Potter 19-20). Crimes against women, however, are not recognized as hate crime by some laws. This is the case with other social groups that apparently aren’t considered important enough to be considered victims of hate (Kopel 2). David Kopel, Director of Research for the Independence Institute, a public policy research organization in Golden, Colorado, concludes that hate crimes are in themselves a form of discrimination. There is long-standing precedent, originating in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, wherein this kind of discrimination is clearly illegal. The equal protection clause reads: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (“The United States Constitution”).

Fourth, while hate crime laws probably violate the Fourteenth Amendment, they are most definitely unconstitutional in that they violate the First Amendment. All hate crime laws do is give higher punishment to crimes that would be punished already, just because they’re considered hateful. Thus, hate crime laws go beyond punishing the act to punishing the attitude or belief of the perpetrator, which is protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (“The United…”). The First Amendment has been interpreted to give people the freedom of thought or expression. The US Supreme Court unanimously found that hate crime laws which punish prejudice-motivated speech conflict with freedom of thought because they isolated certain words based on their content or viewpoint (“Hate crime”). Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis sums it up well: “If there is any principle in the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought--not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” Go out and lobby you representatives to abolish hate crime laws today.