The Thought Police Are Coming! The Thought Police Are Coming!

Hate crimes, thought crimes, and double jeopardy:

But the two classic arguments against hate-crime legislation still apply to the Shepard bill, which expands the number of protected classes to include particular genders, sexual orientations and "gender identities," without precisely defining all of the terms involved. The arguments are (1) hate crimes laws effectively place society's valuation of some victims' lives and well-being above that of others and (2) they create opportunities for prosecutions based on a defendant's attitudes or opinions rather than his acts, effectively violating freedom of speech and thought.

Another problem with this particular bill is that it explicitly encourages federal prosecutors to try defendants twice for the same crime, even if the first trial results in acquittal.

People usually think of hate-crimes bills as sentence-enhancers – and indeed, many state hate-crime laws take that format. The Shepard bill does not. In addition to providing financial help for local prosecutors for hate crimes, it creates a new federal charge, with a ten-year prison sentence, that can be used against those who commit "crimes of violence" with firearms or explosives, or which cause serious bodily harm, motivated by hatred toward certain groups.

Among other things, the bill permits the U.S. Attorney General to initiate federal hate-crime prosecution in cases where

"the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence."

If someone is acquitted of an alleged hate crime at the state level, this bill allows federal prosecutors to haul him into federal court for the same alleged act, based only on evidence that "hate" motivated the crime that the jury says the defendant didn't commit. This makes use of a loophole in the constitutional protection from double jeopardy.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R, Wis.) discussed this provision on the House floor when he urged that the bill be re-written simply to enhance penalties for hate crimes. As he put it:

At the first trial, the person is acquitted of the violent crime, and at the second trial the person is convicted of the hate crime, meaning what the defendant says during the commission of that crime. And that ends up criminalizing free speech, because the actual act of violence the jury determined that the defendant was not guilty, but because of what the defendant said during the commission of the crime aimed at the victim, the person is convicted of saying that. That is where we have the First Amendment slippery slope. And I think if this ever happens, you will find this bill declared to be unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment in the blink of an eye.

Not only is this blatantly unconstitutional, but it slides us ever closer to establishing an actual thought police.  What's even worse is that the entire (stated) premise of the Left's argument about hate crimes is demonstrably false:

Do criminals motivated by hatred get off easy when there are no hate crime laws? It is a question worth considering, because that was the implicit argument behind the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Act of 2009, which passed the House last week and now heads to the Senate.

David Freddoso discusses several examples of 'hate crimes' that were mentioned on the floor of the House, and then finishes with this:

Their killers received or face sentences of life, death, and 50 years. Only in the California case could a hate-crimes law actually affect the penalty [could add 1 to 3 years if convicted] — in the Colorado case, it is effectively symbolic [3 years max].

It is entirely possible that there are cases out there where hate criminals get away with slaps on the wrist, but I could find no such case presented on the House floor last week as the bill's proponents made their case. Given the bill's other problems, this should prompt some reflection as to its rationale.

And how rampant is the problem of 'hate crimes'?  Matt Barber puts some numbers to the myth:

I challenge proponents of S. 909 to provide one verifiable example of a prosecutor refusing to charge a violent criminal because the victim was a homosexual or a cross-dresser.
 
They won't. They can't.

Here, the federal government's own statistics serve to derail the "hate crimes" gravy train. According to the FBI, in 2007 – out of 1.4 million violent crimes in the U.S. – there were a mere 247 cases of aggravated assault (including five deaths) allegedly motivated by the victim's "sexual orientation."
 
Yet S. 909 makes the fantastic claim that there is an epidemic of such "hate crimes." So many, in fact, that it "poses a serious national problem."

This is classic liberalism for so many reasons:
- fixing the wrong problem (determining the severity of a crime based on the intent rather than the crime itself)
- style over substance (more interested in political outcry than actually leveling real consequences)
- all the hubbub is based on a myth (there's no consideration of gay-on-gay crime or other evidence that 'hate criminals' are getting off easy)
- categorizing and elevating one group of people over another based on political sensitivities (gays get more protection than non-gays)

To put this into real life perspective, let's look at a recent example of conflict between gays and mainstream America: Miss California Carrie Prejean and Perez Hilton.  What if...

Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Virginia) is a former ranking member of the Judiciary Crime Subcommittee, and founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. He recently took to the House floor and provided a powerful example of how the "Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act" does not ensure equality under the law.

Congressman Forbes compared the protection Miss California Carrie Prejean would receive under the bill to the special protection homosexual blogger and Miss USA judge Perez Hilton would have been afforded.
 
"Had [Hilton] done what he said he would do and stormed that stage and pulled that tiara off [Prejean's] head and [inflicted] bodily harm when he did it, there would not have been one ounce of protection under this piece of legislation for that young girl," Forbes stated.
 
"But after he did it, if she had in response made a statement back about the very sexual orientation that had led him to his hatred and dislike for her, and if she had responded by slapping him or any physical injury, she would have had the potential of a ten-year federal piece of legislation coming against her."
 
The Virginia Republican also argued that if beauty contestant's father had rushed onto the stage at the Miss USA pageant and responded to Hilton's hatred in a physical way, he would have been open to prosecution under the hate crimes bill as well.

Isn't that great?  The Thought Police will put you away for thinking the wrong thing while protecting people who spew true bile and hatred.

Welcome to the Obama Democrat era.

There's my two cents.