For openers, my comment about the Marine charging the Lawyer with a Hate Crime was intended as tounge in cheek humor.
It's not a hate crime because to be a hate crime, the victim has to be a member of a suspect class... I am not a lawyer. In laymans terms please.....
the guy deserves some jail time, though. they should preserve the marine's testimony on video tape or let him testify by telephone from whereever he's deployed.
But I don't believe for a second that the DA's office said it would be difficult to collect a judgment from the guy "because he's a lawyer". You grab his bank account after getting a judgment against him. But that would be after a civil suit or an order for restitution. Guy's actual damages are, arguably, $100 though, which is why the D.A. can't be bothered. Heh. You haven't had a scratch repaired by a body shop around here huh?
With respect, society needs to enforce the base law without adding to it. A murder victim is still dead no matter the emotion of hate being added or not.Society needs to send a message that hate is unacceptable.
Heh. Wish I'd met you when I was on active duty. Would have been fun. Recruiters are doing a difficult job. Lil Johnny is protected from them by you until his/her 18th birthday.That's recruiters... different issue. And if they went near my kid, I'd have something not very nice to say about it, too.
Good post. But it wasn't a Soldier, he is a Marine. The difference is slight to civilians but huge to those in uniform. Additionally the services are held to a higher standard than the folks they serve. Fortunately a court martial is/was unlikely since the standard of proof wasn't met.But this isn't such an aberration. From Vietnam forward, military personnel have been the victims of assaults (spitting and threats), violent acts, screaming protestors at colleges, pushing, shoving, etc. There are some pretty outrageous acts captured on film for the movie "PC U" by "anarchists" against the Army. And there are restrictions against discriminating against military personnel by employers.
But their absence from the protected class category reveals the ridiculousness of "hate crimes." They are for the most part set up to favor minorities and hurt whites. There's barely a fig leaf of pretension that they're there to protect everyone or even a broad spectrum of people.
Here, it looks like the lawyer tried to whip it back against the soldier by accusing HIM of a hate crime, i.e., that he was accosted because he was Jewish. This lawyer knows full well the power of that accusation and that the soldier could be subject to a court martial.
Excellent.I dislike hate crime legislation because I dislike criminalizing thought, which is essentially what happens with a hate crime. We're going to increase the penalty because you hated the race of the person you assaulted, or what have you. Being a racist is not a crime, nor should it be no matter how abhorrent I find the philosophy. If someone is assaulted, the fact that the criminal is a racist doesn't increase the culpability of that person. The assault is the crime and the punishment should be based on that.
Also, I think hate crimes perpetuate the idea of differences among groups rather than bringing people together. How do you tell people they're all equal, but then say by the way if you're black or gay and someone assaults you for that reason, it is somehow worse than if they just assaulted you randomly.
I don't care for it.