WALSH: Jussie Smollett Should Be Charged With A Hate Crime

I don’t think the legal designation of “hate crime” should exist in the first place. Many different sorts of crimes are motivated by hatred. You could argue that hatred of some form or another probably plays a role in most crime. The courts have put themselves in the position of reading a criminal’s mind, peeking into his soul, and then arbitrarily distinguishing certain types of hate from certain others, and even more arbitrarily deciding that the one type is “worse” than the other. So a crime motivated by a hatred for humanity as a whole will not qualify as a hate crime. A crime motivated by hatred for a particular person will not qualify, either. It must be hatred toward the demographic features of a particular person or group. But why should that earn more legal condemnation than personal hatred or universal hatred?

Besides, the very worst crimes are often motivated not by hatred at all, but by total indifference to human life. A serial killer may not have anything against any particular racial group. He just kills for the sake of it. A guy who murders another guy for his shoes probably has little hatred in his heart. He is callous, not bigoted. But callous indifference is surely just as bad as, if not worse than, hatred. Surely, it’s just as dangerous to a community. If not more so.