The Prosecution of Hate Crimes

Abstract

Since the development of bias crime legislation over the past few decades, scholars have debated the merits of the legislation and questioned its enforcement.(1) In light of such concerns, this study presents characteristics of all cases prosecuted as bias crimes in a New Jersey county between 2001 and 2004 and applies the hate crime typology originally developed in 1993. Results show that, in this jurisdiction, the typology is an inadequate tool for classifying cases prosecuted as hate crimes. Approximately one third of the cases are unclassifiable according to the typology. Findings indicate that the typology is useful for understanding cases in which bias is the sole motivation but inadequate for application to the many cases in which bias is a peripheral motivation.

A higher bar: Institutional impediments to hate crime prosecution

“…The Miami‐Dade State Attorney's Office provided access to case files for criminal cases processed as hate crimes in Miami for the period 2005–2019. There were 23 hate crime cases during this time, which included those motivated by victims' race, religion, sexual orientation, mental disability, or homelessness (a comparable number of cases was reviewed by Phillips, 2009 when studying hate crimes in New Jersey). Cases involving juveniles are sealed and not available for review.…”

Unique Characteristics of Bias Crimes Committed by Males or Females in the United States

“…Although frequently seen as the most prototypical bias crime offender, those who were motivated to do harm because of deeply held racist, misogynist, heterosexist, or other privileged beliefs were the least common type of bias crime offender. Others have attempted to characterize other specific types of bias crime, such as online hate crimes (Jacks & Adler, 2015), or hate against Muslims on social media (Awan, 2014), though none have been expansive as Levin and McDevitt's typology. While widely cited, a later critique of Levin's and McDevitt's typology that attempted to replicate the findings highlight that roughly a third of cases that do not fit neatly into these four categories (Phillips, 2009), and that additional categories may be necessary (Pezzella, 2017), suggesting that there is still more to learn about bias crime offenders. Rather than separating bias crime types into a typology, some scholars have proposed underlying mechanisms for what may be driving bias crimes overall.…”

The Prosecution of Bias Crime in the Netherlands and the Problem of Net-Widening: Fundamental Limits to Criminal Liability

“…The crimes they committed seemed to be the result of group pressure coupled with the use alcohol [34:202-203, 59]. Other studies suggest a prevalence of mental illness among seemingly ideologically inspired offenders [52]. However, in our survey it emerged that ideological offenders of bias speech are significantly less often under the influence of alcohol: only 17% of malignant bias offenders was under influence while committing the bias speech, compared to 45% of the offenders in the other categories (N0198; p<0.05).…”

“…The European Union (EU) 2008 Framework Decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia and the Council of Europe (CoE) 2002 Recommendation on national legislation to combat racism and racial discrimination both recommend more severe punishment for offences that are committed with a 'racist or xenophobic motivation' [14,18]. 1 However, it has been observed that such penalty enhancement is frequently applied to offences that are not motivated by bias [20,30,52]. Then, the penalty enhancement loses its justification.…”

“…Levin and Amster[40:342], appendix B, providing an overview of the nature of hate crime committed in New York in the period 1996-2006. Moreover, the English MacPherson report of 1999 suggests that, in serious cases, the focus on the motive is not usually a prominent issue; see also:[22,52] 12. Burney and Rose[8] concluded that, for the UK, the minor crimes made up the majority of hate crime.…”