Obama signs long-delayed hate crime legislation

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.  Bottled up in Congress for the last eight years and stalled under the threat of veto by President Bush, the new law extends protected status to three new bias categories:  gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability. In addition, the law grants federal officials greater authority to investigate and prosecute hate crimes on the local level and provides greater funding for state and local agencies to investigate hate crimes.

Since the inception of hate crime statutes in the sixties, there has been a tendency to increase the number of protected groups, with the addition of women, individuals with disabilities, and sexual preference as expansion options. However, as the battle in New York over the addition of sexual preference shows, these gains have not been uniform and have sparked opposition on the local level.  Indifference has also locked out people with disabilities. Despite more than 25 years of lawmaking in this area, for example, only about half the states include disabilities as a protected category, even though individuals with disabilities constitute one of nation's largest vulnerable populations.

New Jersey, however, was a pioneer in this area. As Human Rights First reported in a 2005 report, "a severely mentally retarded man was kidnapped, choked, beaten, burned with cigarettes, taped to a chair, and then abandoned in a forest in New Jersey. Eight people were subsequently tried and convicted in 2001 for the crime in one of the first prosecutions of a disability-based hate crime in the United States. Physical and mental disabilities had been added as protected classes to New Jersey's hate crime law just months before the attack."

Immigrants, it should be pointed out, are not protected as a class under most hate crime statutes, even though many benefit through their racial or ethnic minority status. The recent spike in the number of hate crimes in the United States has been fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media and the propaganda of local groups. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of extremist groups in the United States, "Virtually all the old line hate groups have turned their attention almost entirely to illegal immigration."  The lack of legal status becomes the pretext for attacking people of certain nationalities

Hate crime laws are no panacea, however, for the problem of intergroup hatred and violence. One of the most important unanswered questions is the extent to which such laws actually deter the commission of such acts.  Doubts have been raised on both the right and the left.  Writing several years ago in the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, James B. Jacobs questioned the efficacy of such legislation in addressing deep-seated social problems:

"The possibility that criminals can be threatened into not discriminating in their choice of crime victims seems slight. Whether the criminal law can be employed successfully in eradicating or reforming deep-rooted prejudices is doubtful."

Critics on the left think that the efficacy of hate crime legislation may be analogous to that of the death penalty.  If researchers can find no association between the imposition of the death penalty and reductions in violent crime in a particular jurisdiction, how can one assume that sentence enhancement for hate crimes will lead to a lower incidence of such acts and better human relations?

One of the best studies of hate crime law and practice in the United States was done by Michael Shively in a commissioned 2005 report to the National Institute of Justice. Shively noted the absence of research documenting the impact of such legislation and found evidence of significant underreporting of hate crimes, caused by conflicting definitions of what constitutes such a crime and lax enforcement on the local level.

While more than 30 countries now have some form of hate crime legislation, the passage of legislation doesn't ensure that perpetrators will be reported and prosecuted. According to Human Rights First, which tracks hate crime prevention around the world and publishes an annual report on the subject:

Even when hate crimes legislation is on the books, most countries fall short on its implementation for any but the most serious and publicly notorious crimes. In the majority of cases, criminal justice systems neither track nor effectively prosecute bias crimes, while timely, accurate, and public information on these crimes is the exception, not the rule. Public policy responses to racist, antisemitic, and other bias crimes too often reflect indifference, political expedience, or the same prejudices that generate these crimes.

A good summary of the arguments for and against hate crime legislation was given by Fred Persily, Executive Director of the California Association of Human Relations Organizations, who came down on the side of such laws, while according some legitimacy to the arguments of opponents.

Perhaps, the best case for hate crime laws was made by former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, writing in 1993 ruling on the constitutionality of hate crime legislation,  "this conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm.... bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest."

Report calls for creation of Federal Health Equity Commission


The Advisory Committee on Minority Health, an eleven-member body created in 1999 to advise the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on ways to improve the health of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, has issued a report and set of principles and recommendations to ensure that health disparities are addressed in health care reform. One of the major recommendations in the report is the creation of a "Federal Health Equity Commission," having the same "status and scope of responsibilities and authorities," in the health care field as the Federal Civil Rights Commission, established during the sixties, which focused national attention on historical and persistent inequities in American society and served as a catalyst for positive change in American life. Despite many high level reports and studies calling attention to problem of health disparities in the United States, the report notes that "the gaps in health status remain the same or are worsening with shocking consequences." Simply, expanding health coverage to the uninsured will not solve the problem. Equally important is an effective community health care planning process, involving members of local communities in the problem-solving process, and focused attention on the "social determinants" of health, including the elimination of "unhealthy behaviors and unsafe living environments." The report also recommends that state level minority health commissions, such as the Office of Minority and Multicultural Health in New Jersey, would be "answerable and accountable" to the Health Equity Commission. Finally, the report is noteworthy for the attention it pays to the special needs and circumstances of immigrants, in particular the importance of "language concordance" in the delivery of health care.