Palin Church Arson a Hate Crime?
The church of Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, former Republican vice-presidential nominee, was torched Friday night and over $1M worth of damage was done to the structure and its contents. Happily, none of those inside the church were injured. This is obviously a hateful act. Should the arson be treated as a hate crime?
That depends on whether hate crimes are a valid legal construct. Perhaps those with legal credentials could weigh in on that question. Justice demands that crimes be punishable based on the act committed, not the emotions behind it. From this perspective, and even though it’s likely that the arsonist’s actions were politically or religiously motivated, I have to say that I don’t think that he or she, if caught, should be charged under hate crime laws.
Incidents such as those at Palin’s church do provide an interesting scenario to test the validity of hate crime laws from a fairness perspective. If Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church were to be burned, for instance, there would be a fair amount of pressure applied to have the act treated as a hate crime.
On one hand, if the same standard is applied to Sarah Palin’s church, the determination of hatred, which can never be proven, is thrust upon the jury to make. Considering a large number of such cases, such necessarily arbitrary decisions will not be made consistently.
On the other hand, if the Palin incident is not treated as a hate crime, then where is the fairness? Applying hate crime laws to crimes committed against minority groups, whether primarily or exclusively, inherently prejudices the legal process and effectively condones acts of violence against the majority.
In my opinion, hate crimes represent a slippery slope of legal preference – laws that provide special rights to certain categories of victims and whose application requires prosecutors and jurists to attempt to divine motive in order to justify increased punishments. This is not a good idea given that justice is supposed to be fair and impartial.
That’s why the idea of hate crime laws, while they sound and feel good at a superficial level, are bad legal remedies.
If there were any such thing as fairness in so-called “hate crimes” laws, the fire at Gov. Palin’s church would naturally be called a hate crime, if it is determined that it was committed out of personal, or religious hatred. However, “hate crimes” laws are essentially designed to protect favored minorities, be they racial, religious, or sexual. Rarely, are such laws used to prosecute those who committ crimes against groups that are essentially out of favor. How often to you see blacks how commit crimes against whites charged with a hate crime? Almost never, even when the motive for the crime is clearly racial, in fact the authorities will go out of their way to avoid raising the issue. On the other hand, whites who commit crimes against blacks are routinely subjected to thorough investigation to see if a racial aspect can be uncovered.
Hate crimes laws and federal civil rights violations were the result of white jury nullification in the south and some other regions. When the majority is victimized by the likes of Bloody Sunday, the unsolved murder of Viola Liuzzo or the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Rudi, interesting point. But the legal process as well as the standard of guilt is the same, regardless of whether a defendant is charged with an “ordinary” crime or a hate crime. If a jury is delinquent in its duty to discharge justice the charge hardly matters.
BTW, the fire has been confirmed as arson.
Without getting into whether hate crimes is a valid or useful denomination, I’m not entirely sure this incident would qualify, given precisely that it was Palin’s church. The denomination of “hate crime” tends to be reserved for actions whose consequences are felt by a larger group of people, and the implication that this is actually the underlying intent.
One of the greatest problems with hate crime legislation is precisely that it requires full knowledge of the intentions of the perpetrator. Did the criminal who perpetrated this act do so out of a hate for Evangelicals or a hate for Palin as an individual? In the first case, I think it would qualify as a hate crime under the normal definition. In the second, while entirely unjustifiable, I don’t think it would qualify. Hopefully when the criminal(s) are caught, we’ll have a clearer idea of their motivations.
If an arsonist admits that he prefers to torch churches, regardless of denomination or characteristics of congregants, is that a “hate crime”?