The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Eugene Volokh posted a link to an article describing a hit and run in North Carolina. According to the article, a man deliberately ran down people, allegedly in protest of treatment of Muslims around the world.

First, read the article, because my one sentence summary will not suffice for purposes of the discussion.

Volokh asserted, "[t]hose who think hate crimes are a separate and important category should agree that this does indeed fall into that category." (Emphasis mine.)

While I do tend to think there can be a category of crime called hate crimes, I didn't think this was necessarily one of them. I commented:

I disagree that it necessarily falls into that category.

Where's the line between hate crime and a crime committed because of mental illness? Crimes of the latter type can often appear to be of the former - even to the perpetrator him or herself - but are really caused by the mental imbalance of the culprit and not some rationally-formed intent to act against hated people.

The article said they would be looking into psychological reasons for the crime, and it strikes me that there's something there. Even as hate crimes go it doesn't seem to really bear the hallmarks of rationally-planned ones. The targets were random, the means were imprecise... It seems like a crime caused by someone who lacked the personal mental capacity to deal with his own anger except by warping it into this context. And not, by contrast, the deliberate crime of someone whose consciously-chosen political orientation incorporates the position that taking violent action against certain people is an appropriate articulation of that opinion.

Granted this might be a fine line, and I'm not a psychologist so I can't define where it would be any better, but from what I have gathered it does strike me that someone with this expertise might well be able to draw one.

So far no one has addressed this issue; the other commenters are focusing on whether a hate crime could exist at all. I'm not quite satisfied with my own articulation of what might constitute an actual hate crime, but I am thinking about things along the lines of Klan cross-burnings, beatings outside gay bars, etc. Not that every crime that has these physical dimensions fits the definition of "hate crime," but with the right mens rea (intent) they could be.

My larger concern is that a person with a mental illness cannot form sufficient mens rea for a hate crime, however we define them to be. Moreover, I think criminal jurisprudence often runs roughshod over issues of mental illness to everyone's detriment (society's and the accused's).

Therefore, before we simply rush to label an action as "bad," however bad we wish to label it, we should have a better understanding of what precipitated it. Only by doing that can we have any idea what a just consequence should be.