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Why not just criminalize "hate" entirely and throw people in jail for being bigots? Why wait until another criminal act is committed?
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Becuase "hate" is not a crime, just like "premeditation" isn't a crime.
But it does dramatically effect my feeling of the situation if someone is killed accidently by a person hitting them with a car than if they spent three weeks plotting the murder of the person.
You can't reasonably say that the laws now would treat these two murders the same, and I don't think they should be. It's legal precedent at the least, but "moral imperative" at best. In an idealistic sense, laws are based on how we as a society feel about the crimes and how they should be punished. So feeling does have a place in the FORMATION of the laws, but not the enforcement.
We (as a society) feel that premeditation makes a murder worse, so I don't see how it's a logical leap to say that seething hatred for someone doesn't make it worse. It should require demonstration beyond a reasonable doubt, just like the addition of pre-meditation does. Hateful speech, writing, dismemberment or manipulation of the corpses, etc. It should be hard to prove, just like proving intent is in the case of premeditation.