Hangin's too good for 'em!

"Broken Windows" in practice has never, ever been targeted at windows, only against poor people.

The problem with capital punishment is that from a public safety standpoint, as well as a simple justice standpoint, it makes no sense whatsoever, but from a getting-elected standpoint it is the greatest thing ever. Americans are a bloodthirsty people who demand punishment and don't particularly care whether the right people get it or not.

@3, quite so.

I'm in the middle of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a death-row attorney and advocate in Alabama. I realize that WA isn't AL, but the descriptions of how capital justice is dispensed in that state are shocking. Another state that elects its judges.

City council am death penalty: right on!

3 drive-by shootings in good'old Seattle: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2…

What is the difference between assault and harassment and a hate crime?

For the former they are prosecuting someone for their actions. For the latter they are prosecuting someone for what they think. Bring on the thought police! In the interim, arrest this bozo and prosecute him for assault!

Shorter @7: I put zero thought into my comment, but here's something I heard on Fox News 10 years ago.

(actually you can apply this to all his comments)

@8, Proving intent or proving why the intended are too different issues. Intent is linked with action. They did it (action) and it was deliberate and willful (intent).

When we punish somebody for homicide, assault, or harassment, it is because the action caused physical harm and loss to someone. That harm and loss does not change because of what the perpetrator was thinking. A black man is just as dead at the end of a Jim Crow rope as an white labor organizer run over and killed by an anti-labor thug.

We punish for bad deeds, not bad thoughts.

@8

What you describe has nothing to do with hate crimes, accurately described as thought crimes by @7. That is, unless every time someone insults another person we're willing to prosecute for "malicious harassment. " As it is, it's only a crime to insult them if they're a protected class.

If this guy threatened other citizens with a knife and a jury finds he was doing so he was violating the law and should pay the consequences. To add to those consequences because you don't like the way he thinks is very bad for the first amendment, worse for equal protection under the law.

It's not "what he thinks", it's why he did the crime. Crimes motivated by bias are different than crimes motivated by other factors like robbery. And there is no "hate crime" in thought alone; all hate crime statutes enhance penalties for crimes -- they do not create new crimes.

This isn't controversial except to mouthbreathers who think it's still 1950. The Supreme Court, led by that notorious pinko liberal William Rehnquist was not confused. This is the law of the land. The First Amendment is not at risk.

Do you idiots have any ideas at all that were not thoroughly refuted more than twenty years ago?

@10: What's the difference between Manslaughter, Murder 1, Murder 2, etc? What they intended, what their thought process was, why they did it.

@11: LISTEN UP, NITWIT:
PEOPLE do not belong to protected classes; TRAITS belong to protected classes. Classes protected under the law include race/ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability status, gender, sexual orientation, and sometimes age. Your heterosexuality, your Christianity, your whiteness, and your maleness are protected! That means that if anyone commits a crime against you BECAUSE you are straight, Christian, white, or male, they're guilty of a hate crime. And yes, every year there ARE hate crimes against those protected classes that are reported and prosecuted accordingly; you just don't face discrimination to the degree that queers, Jews, Muslims, blacks, and women do. (Check your privilege, eh?)

When someone commits a crime against someone else based on their protected trait, they send a threat to everyone bearing that trait: "if you are this race/religion/gender/sexual orientation, we will fuck your shit up". That is why by lynching just mere tens of blacks a year, racists in the South were able to keep millions and millions of their black neighbors in terror. This threat to the entire population inherent to such acts is the very basis for hate crime laws, and it has been upheld MANY TIMES in court. (But then again, any court decision with which you disagree, even if it comes from the Supreme Court, you insist you can just ignore because your opinions mean more than the law of the land.)

I alone have explained this SEVERAL TIMES to you here on SLOG. If you are too INCOMPREHENSIBLY STUPID to understand the reasoning involved, it is a wonder that you even know which side of the hammer is the face and which is the claw.

P.S.: Did you see? In the thread about how the municipality, rather than the guilty cop, would pay damages awarded by a civil court, your posts calling the bereaved family of Eric Garner a bunch of money-grubbing chiselers were removed. I'll ask you again: does it ever bother you that you're an awful person?

@13. The difference between Manslaughter and Murder is not why they did it, but whether they did negligently vs. willfully, recklessly vs. deliberately, or with willful disregard of another v. a determination to kill another. Why is not a factor other than to fit it into those categories. Was the guy impaired when he ran over someone in a crosswalk (negligence in getting behind the wheel and manslaughterl) or did the guy get behind the wheel looking for somebody to run over (murder).

The difference between 1st Degree Murder and 2nd Degree Murder is one of timing. For example, the guy sat in his house at 9 a.m. planning to be at the school crossing at 3 p.m. because that is when school lets out and he could run up a big score of dead kids, or was he in his car, the kids appeared before him, and he decided in that split second to hit the gas and crush the little btards?

Why, as an element of either manslaughter vs. murder, or 1st degree or 2nd degree is not a consideration as a legal matter.

If a person with "malice and aforethought, and having considered the consequences" kills another person,they are guilty of a first degree murder in Washington State, and may be given a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole

A person under the same set of circumstances, who kills a Law Enforcement Officer (among others) in Washington State, is guilty of a first degree murder with special circumstances, and will receive a sentence of either life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death.

Society has deemed that the motivation of some murders (not manslaughter, but first degree murder) requires an enhanced punishment based on the motivation of the criminal.

Just like society has deemed that when the motivation for committing certain crimes is bias against some trait of the individual such crimes are worthy of an enhanced penalty.

Educated people understand this.

I'm not sure if it's more funny, pathetic or both that posters like numbers; seven and eleven are to stupid to comprehend this.

@15: the difference between first and second degree murder in Washington State is not timing, but intent, what is second degree murder in Washington State is the same crime as Voluntary Manslaughter in many states.

Please stop embarrassing yourself.

Or in the alternative, if you and the poster at number seven have some deep need to embarrass yourselves, find a karaoke bar, that way you can look cool making fools of yourselves instead of just pathetic.

@16

Far left loonies like you and the boy @14 always assume seeing specious reasoning as specious is a sign of stupidity.

Arrogance is never an attractive quality. Maybe because it blinds you to the glaring flaws in your oen 'thinking'. Or maybe because being both wrong and proud of it is an irritating trait.

@18:

I've never really decided if you're performance art, or if you're really as uninformed as you appear, either way intended or not thanks for the laughs.

@18: Given that you believe that hate crime laws give gays special rights that straights don't get, I'm gonna say that "specious" is a figment of your delusional mind.

"Malice aforethought is the "premeditation" or "predetermination" (with malice) that was required as an element of some crimes in some jurisdictions,[1] and a unique element for first-degree or aggravated murder in a few ." Wikipedia

"Mens rea (/ˈmɛnz ˈriːə/; Latin for "the intending mind"[1]), in criminal law, is viewed as one of the necessary elements of some crimes. " - Wikipedia

"n. 1) the conscious intent to cause death or great bodily harm to another person before a person commits the crime" -Free on-line legal dictionary.

Quoted because of ease of access, but not at all inconsistent with more authoritative legal texts like Black's Legal Dictionary.

I don't see a "why" in those definitions. Malice Aforethought has to do pre-meditation ("afor") and intent to harm (malice). It has nothing to do with why they decided on that pre-meditated, willful harm.

@21: "hate crmes [sic] laws do create special citizen status for those who have chosen the perversion of homosexual behavior. If a man attacks another man he's charged with assault. If he attacks a man who chose the gay lifestyle while commenting on that choice it's assault and malicious harassment."
But that's wrong, you fucking retard. That is, you are fucking FACTUALLY CHALLENGED, Seattleblues. And you know it, too! You deliberately tailored your example narrative to ignore the counterexample that I've pointed out to you before, including in THIS VERY THREAD.
Now, let me be perfectly clear; this is what the law provides for. THIS IS WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY MEANS:
-Perpetrator arbitrarily assaults A. NOT A HATE CRIME, REGARDLESS OF A's ORIENTATION.
-Perpetrator assaults B because B is gay. A HATE CRIME.
-Perpetrator assaults C because C is straight. A HATE CRIME.
-Perpetrator assaults D because D is bisexual. A HATE CRIME.
-Perpetrator assaults E because he thinks E is gay, even though E is straight. A HATE CRIME.
-Perpetrator assaults F because he thinks F is straight, even though F is gay. A HATE CRIME.

Wrap your puny mind around this, you imbecile: the IDENTITY of the victim makes no difference. It is the ANIMUS of the attacker that determines whether or not a crime is a hate crime. And as I have explained to you many times, and now TWICE in this thread alone, STRAIGHT PEOPLE GET EXACTLY THE SAME PROTECTIONS THAT GAY PEOPLE GET.

Your response to that has been to say that anti-heterosexual hate crimes are much rarer than anti-homosexual hate crimes and therefore you don't get the full protections. To that sorry excuse for an argument I say: by that logic, we shouldn't have ANY laws criminalizing assault, because there will ALWAYS be some demographic that gets assaulted more often than some other demographic.

IN SUMMARY:
This has been explained to you many, many times. Your carefully chosen examples in the arguments you advance suggest that you understand the operative principle but choose to pretend that you don't. Either you fail to understand some fairly simple facts despite them being presented to you multiple times, in which case you are stupid, or you understand the facts but choose to pretend they don't matter, in which case you are delusional.
So tell us, Seattleblues, which are you? I personally see no reason you can't be both.

@21: Also, Seattleblues, you seem pretty keen on talking about me like I'm some kind of little kid. I'm 23 years of age, and I'm a real giant of a man, standing 6'5" tall and tipping the scales at about 220 lbs. I'm so damned big that I have to go to specialty stores for shoes that fit me, and I'd be a card-carrying member of the Big Galoot Association of America if it existed. And oh yes, I have a bachelor's degree from not only one of the finest (like, TOP TEN UNIVERSITIES IN THE WORLD kind of 'finest') colleges, but also one of the most infamously grueling. AND I GRADUATED WITH A DOUBLE MAJOR.

So before you go ahead and call me "boy" or similar, please consider that I'm big enough to tuck you under one arm and carry you around, well-educated to the point where I can make intelligent conversation on just about any subject, sharp-witted enough that I got a PERFECT SCORE on the GRE despite only taking 2/3 of the allotted time, and currently hungry enough to eat an entire deep-dish stuffed spinach pizza on my own.
Did I mention the time I singlehandedly cut down a tree, hefted it, and hurled it onto a brush pile? AND THAT WAS WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER AND HADN'T HIT MY FULL GROWTH YET. Or the time I was eating lentils and found a pebble in mine, and I chewed and swallowed it anyway? Don't hate me 'cause you ain't me.

@21: Calling venomlash "boy" and tyke" over and over just makes you look even dumber and more irrelevent as he destroys your uneducated ass time and again.

But I am sure if you just call him that one more time the your outdated opinions will be relevant again.

@24
All those words to admit I was right?
See, treating 'animus' as a criminal matter means criminalizing thought. By definition. Like I'd written. Maybe you were too busy leaping tall buildings to notice. Read it again. You'll get it. Maybe. Eventually. If you take that ESL course first.

@27: Look m8, don't flatter yourself. If you actually do think I was conceding an argument, you must not have read a single word.
By your definition, we criminalized thought when we made laws against attempted murder. What's the difference between assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder (where a deadly weapon is involved) itself? In the latter, the perpetrator had the intent of killing the victim. Therefore, to hear you tell it, we've criminalized thought (despite that thinking "I'm gonna kill that sonuvabitch" is only actually a crime if you actually try to do so).
Second-order effects (in the statistical sense), Seattleblues. Second-order effects. Or in words you may understand, more than the sum of its parts. Or in symbols you certainly won't understand, A+B ≠ A ∪ B.