Samizdata asks "What is a hate crime?"

This post at Samizdata discusses what is commonly referred to as a "hate crime", making some very good points:

It is a criminal act which attracts extra sanction because of what the perpetrator was thinking at the time. In short, a 'hate crime' is a 'thought crime', albeit one usually only applied to thoughts held by certain politically disfavoured classifications of people.

Do you really trust something as corrupt and fallible as a political process to create laws not on demonstrable facts (who hit who with the two by four) but on what people think?

Laws regarding "Hate crimes", like "hate speech", can be very unsubtle instruments in enforcing certain kinds of conformity — not by the way the law is enforced, but by the way the threat of enforcement is used. A typical criminal act, in Canada, might end up costing the perpetrator (if correctly identified and apprehended) a year or two in prison. The same crime, if adjudged to be a hate crime, suddenly becomes a five-to-ten year sentence, with much reduced chance of parole or early release.

A true cynic might think that this is a very useful way of creating a two-tier system of punishments. This has cascading benefits to the lawmakers and the operatives in the legal system: the government can claim to be "tough on crime", while the functionaries in the system now have a much more powerful tool to coerce guilty pleas from innocent suspects (to avoid the much heavier penalties of the second tier).

The only losers are, after all, criminals, right? Everyone knows that no innocent person could ever be charged or convicted of a serious crime, right? (Then don't bother googling for Susan Nelles, David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, or Donald Marshall.)