Why Federal Hate Crimes Law Essential

by Judith Gorman

At 1AM, on the morning of Sunday May 30, police were called to the Gill campus of the Northfield-Mount Hermon School. Within these immaculate greenswards, this scrubbed brick perfection, this Disneyland dream of a prep school, a vile atrocity was committed.

On Thursday May 27, two students are alleged to have used a knife to carve the word "Homo," in letters 4 to 5 inches high, across the back of the victim, a 17 year-old fellow student.

That Sunday afternoon, 20 year-old Matthew Rogers was arrested, and 18 year-old Jonathan Shapiro was arrested later that week. Each was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon, assault with intent to maim, and assault with intent to intimidate resulting in bodily harm. The third charge makes the incident a hate crime, which in the state of Massachusetts carries an enhanced penalty, upgrading a misdemeanor to a felony. The defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, each face a maximum of 25 years in prison. Pre-trial begins in Greenfield, Massachusetts, on July 22.

Back at Northfield-Mount Hermon, the PR director is away on "medical leave," and all questions are being referred to the office of the assistant marketing director, who is not returning calls. It is therefore impossible to confirm reports that students at the school were sworn to secrecy by NMH authorities.

Crimes such as these beggar description. The language cannot contain them. They confound the brain, and spill over into the indescribable, the unthinkable. They are offenses committed by human beings against one another solely on the basis of difference, a penalty exacted on the defenseless by the remorseless.

The fact that the nature of this crime is so clear, spelled out in the victim's own blood, should not obscure the fact that hate crimes often go unreported to police, seldom make the front pages, and are extremely difficult to prosecute. It seems to require the most unspeakable of acts to get the public's attention, like the dragging to death of James Byrd in Texas, and the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

What distinguishes this incident, and other like it, from the usual garden variety criminal behavior, is what the Supreme Court, in a 1993 decision, called "depraved motive," morally corrupt intent.

The law defines a hate crime as a crime committed because of someone's actual or perceived membership in a particular group. Americans commit these crimes every day of the year, in every state of the union, on every inconceivable level. On the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, and sexual orientation. From verbal assaults to rock throwing, from cross burnings to church and synagogue arsons, cemetery desecrations, swastika graffiti, and murder. Hate is not reserved to the Balkans, it is everywhere. It is right here.

Statutes on hate crimes are not uniform nationwide. More than 40 states now have laws punishing bigoted or discriminatory crimes, but as of 1998, only about 20 states included protection for crimes based on gender, disability, or sexual orientation.

State laws also differ on the issue of penalty enhancement, the upgrading of criminal penalties if a defendant is found to have "intentionally select(ed) his victim based upon his perception of the victim's race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender".

The third variable is the reporting and prosecution of hate crimes. Crimes of this type are notoriously underreported, most particularly those occurring on high school and college campuses. According to FBI statistics, "New Jersey's 839 reported hate crimes in 1996 exceeded the total for Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas combined."

Current federal hate crime laws relate solely to crimes against race, religion, color, and national origin.The Hate Crime Prevention Act (S.622/H.R.1082), now before the Congress, would make any crime based on gender, sexual orientation, disability, race, religion, or national origin, a prosecutable offense under federal law. It should come as no surprise that both GOP presidential frontrunner George W. Bush, and perennial also-ran Pat Buchanan, consider such legislation unnecessary.

While it may be of some comfort to view incidents such as this as aberrations, discrete, isolated and statistically insignificant, they are part of a disturbing trend, symptomatic of a growing national mood of intolerance. The rise in hate crimes parallels the explosive increase in violence of all kinds, a lowering of the national threshhold for rage.

Hate crimes are our dirty little secret, the worm in the American apple pie, the flip side to the American promise of equality for all. Hidden from public scrutiny, left in the dark, they thrive, like a fungus on the national consciousness. However abhorrent you find this act, don't look away.