Americanization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanization 

A McDonald's in China. McDonald's is widely seen as a symbol of Americanization in many countries.

Americanization is the influence American culture and business has on other countries outside the United States, including their media, cuisine, business practices, popular culture, technology or political techniques. The term has been used since at least 1907. While not necessarily a pejorative term, it is most often used by critics in the target country who are against the influences.

Americanization has become more prevalent since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and especially since the advent of widespread high speed Internet use starting in the mid-2000s. In Europe in recent years, there is growing concern about Americanization through Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple Inc. and Uber, among many other United States tech industry companies. European governments have increasingly expressed concern regarding privacy issues as well as antitrust and taxation issues regarding the new American giants. The Wall Street Journal in 2015 reported "deep concerns in Europe’s highest policy circles about the power of U.S. technology companies."

Within the United States, the term Americanization refers to the process of acculturation by immigrants or annexed populations (e.g. the Californios or Louisiana Creoles) to American customs and values.

Media and popular culture

McDonald's at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

Hollywood (the American film and television industry) since the 1920s has dominated most of the world's media markets. It is the chief medium by which people across the globe see American fashions, customs, scenery and way of life.

In general, the United States government plays only a facilitating role in the dissemination of films, television, books, journals and so on. However, during the occupation of former Axis enemies countries after World War II, the government played a major role in restructuring the media in those countries to eliminate totalitarianism and promote democracy, against communism. For example, In Germany, the American occupation headquarters, Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in 1945 began its own newspaper based in Munich. Die Neue Zeitung was edited by German and Jewish émigrés who fled to the United States before the war. Its mission was to destroy Nazi cultural remnants, and encourage democracy by exposing Germans to how American culture operated. There was great detail on sports, politics, business, Hollywood, and fashions, as well as international affairs. Americanization would continue to spread out over the Iron Curtain even before the fall of the Soviet Union and periodically after.

Foreign versions of American TV programs are re-broadcast around the world, many of them through American broadcasters and their subsidiaries (such as HBO Asia, CNBC Europe and CNN International). Many of these distributors broadcast mainly American programming on their TV channels. In 2006, a survey of 20 countries by Radio Times found seven American shows in the ten most-watched: CSI: Miami, Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.

American films are also extremely popular around the world, often dominating cinemas as a result of a high demand of US product exported to consumers to clear away the outlook of World War II. The top-50 highest-grossing films of all time were all made entirely or partially in the United States. Often part of the negotiating in free trade agreements between the U.S. and other nations involves screen quotas. One such case is Mexico, which abolished screen quotas following the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. South Korea has agreed to reduce its quota under pressure from the U.S. as part of a free trade deal.

Many American musicians, such as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, are internationally known and have sold over 500 million albums each. Michael Jackson's album Thriller, at 100 million sales, is the best-selling album of all time.

Through the study of vocabulary and spelling of English words in books and tweets, American English is more common in communities in the European Union compared to British English. This trend is more apparent in the events following World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Business and brands

A kosher McDonald's in Ashkelon, Israel.

Of the top ten global brands (2017) by revenue, seven are based in the United States: Apple Inc., Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Amazon (company), Facebook and IBM. Coca-Cola, which previously held the top spot, is often viewed as a symbol of Americanization, giving rise to the term "Coca-Cola diplomacy" for anything emblematic of U.S. soft power. Fast food is also often viewed as being a symbol of U.S. marketing dominance. Companies such as McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino's Pizza among others have numerous outlets around the world.

Starbucks Coffee in Xi'an, China.

 

Burger King in Ankara, Turkey.

Many of the world's biggest computer companies are also U.S.-based, such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel, HP Inc., Dell and IBM, and much of the software bought worldwide is created by U.S.-based companies. Carayannis and Campbell note that "The USA occupies, also in global terms, a very strong position in the software sector."

By 1900 observers saw "Americanization" as synonymous with progress and innovation. In Germany in the 1920s, the American efficiency movement was called "rationalization" and it was a powerful social and economic force. In part it looked explicitly at American models, especially Fordism. "Rationalization" meant higher productivity and greater efficiency, promising science would bring prosperity. More generally it promised a new level of modernity and was applied to economic production and consumption as well as public administration. Various versions of rationalization were promoted by industrialists and social democrats, by engineers and architects, by educators and academics, by middle class feminists and social workers, by government officials and politicians of many parties. As ideology and practice, rationalization challenged and transformed not only machines, factories, and vast business enterprises but also the lives of middle-class and working-class Germans. Department stores threatened the more local businesses, with low prices and chain-managed stores. The small businesses were determined and fought back to protect their source of income from the U.S. market.

During the Cold War, the Americanization was the method to counter the processes of Sovietization around the world. Education, schools, and universities in particularly, became the main target for Americanization. However, the resistance to Americanization of the university community restrained it.

Visibility

Koç University one of the top universities in Turkey is based on the American model. The university also has an American football team, the Koç Rams.

During the 15 years from 1950 to 1965, American investments in Europe soared by 800% to $13.9 billion, and in the European Economic Community rose 10 times to $6.25 billion. Europe's share of American investments increased from 15% to 28%. The investments were of very high visibility and generated much talk of Americanization. Even so, American investments in Europe represented only 50% of the total European investment and American-owned companies in the European Economic Community employ only 2 or 3% of the total labor force. The basic reason for the U.S. investments is no longer lower production costs, faster economic growth, or higher profits in Europe, but the desire to maintain a competitive position based largely on American technological superiority. Opposition to U.S. investments, originally confined to France, later spread to other European countries. Public opinion began to resent American advertising and business methods, personnel policies, and the use of the English language by American companies. Criticism was also directed toward the international currency system which was blamed for inflationary tendencies as a result of the dominant position of the U.S. dollars. However, by the 1970s European investments in the U.S. increased even more rapidly than vice versa, and Geir Lundestad finds there was less talk of the Americans buying Europe.

Recent trends

Americanization has become more prevalent since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Until the late 1980s, the Communist press could be counted on to be especially critical of the United States. To some extent Russia continued that role under Vladimir Putin and there are similar tendencies in China. Putin in 2013 published an opinion article in The New York Times attacking the American tendency to see itself as an exceptional, indispensable nation. "It is extremely dangerous", Putin warned, "to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation."

A new dimension of anti-Americanism is fear of the pervasiveness of American Internet technology. Americanization has arrived through widespread high speed Internet and smart phone technology since 2008, with a large fraction of the new apps and hardware being designed in Silicon Valley. In Europe, there is growing concern about excess Americanization through Google, Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone and Uber, among many other American Internet-based corporations. European governments have increasingly expressed concern about privacy issues, as well as antitrust and taxation issues regarding the new American giants. There is a fear that they are significantly evading taxes, and posting information that may violate European privacy laws. The Wall Street Journal in 2015 reported "deep concerns in Europe's highest policy circles about the power of U.S. technology companies."

Historiography

Berghahn (2010) analyzes the debate on the usefulness of the concepts of 'Americanization' and 'Westernization'. He reviews the recent research on the European–American relationship during the Cold War that has dealt with the cultural impact of the United States upon Europe. He then discusses the relevant work on this subject in the fields of economic and business history. Overall, the article tries to show that those who have applied the concept of 'Americanization' to their research on cultural or economic history have been well aware of the complexities of trans-Atlantic relations in this period, whether they were viewed as a two-way exchange or as a process of circulation.

Capital punishment debate in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_debate_in_the_United_States 

The debate over capital punishment in the United States existed as early as the colonial period. As of March 2020, it remains a legal penalty within 28 states, the federal government, and military criminal justice systems. The states of Colorado, New Hampshire, Illinois, Connecticut and Maryland (by the legislature and not the courts) abolished the death penalty within the last decade alone.

Gallup, Inc. has monitored support for the death penalty in the United States since 1937 by asking "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?" Opposition to the death penalty peaked in 1966, with 47% of Americans opposing it; by comparison, 42% supported the death penalty and 11% had "no opinion." The death penalty increased in popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when crime went up and politicians campaigned on fighting crime and drugs; in 1994, the opposition rate was less than 20%, less than in any other year. Since then, the crime rate has fallen and opposition to the death penalty has strengthened again. In the October 2016 poll, 60% of respondents said they were in favor and 37% were opposed.

History

Colonial period

Abolitionists gathered support for their claims from writings by European Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire (who became convinced the death penalty was cruel and unnecessary) and Bentham. In addition to various philosophers, many members of Quakers, Mennonites and other peace churches opposed the death penalty as well. Perhaps the most influential essay for the anti-death penalty movement was Cesare Beccaria's 1767 essay, On Crimes and Punishment. Beccaria's strongly opposed the state's right to take lives and criticized the death penalty as having very little deterrent effect. After the American Revolution, influential and well-known Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin made efforts to reform or abolish the death penalty in the United States. All three joined the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which opposed capital punishment. Following colonial times, the anti-death penalty movement has risen and fallen throughout history. In Against Capital Punishment: Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, Herbert H. Haines describes the presence of the anti-death penalty movement as existing in four different eras.

First abolitionist era, mid-to-late 19th century

The anti-death penalty movement began to pick up pace in the 1830s and many Americans called for abolition of the death penalty. Anti-death penalty sentiment rose as a result of the Jacksonian era, which condemned gallows and advocated for better treatment of orphans, criminals, poor people, and the mentally ill. In addition, this era also produced various enlightened individuals who were believed to possess the capacity to reform deviants.

Although some called for complete abolition of the death penalty, the elimination of public hangings was the main focus. Initially, abolitionists opposed public hangings because they threatened public order, caused sympathy for the condemned, and were bad for the community to watch. However, after multiple states restricted executions to prisons or prison yards, the anti-death penalty movement could no longer capitalize on the horrible details of execution.

The anti-death penalty gained some success by the end of the 1850s as Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin passed abolition bills. Abolitionists also had some success in prohibiting laws that placed mandatory death sentences of convicted murderers. However, some of these restrictions were overturned and the movement was declining. Conflict between the North and the South in the run-up to the American Civil War and the Mexican–American War took attention away from the movement. In addition, the anti-gallow groups who were responsible for lobbying for abolition legislation were weak. The groups lacked strong leadership, because most members were involved in advocating for other issues as well, such as slavery abolishment and prison reform. Members of anti-gallow groups did not have enough time, energy, or resources to make any substantial steps towards abolition. Thus, the movement declined and remained latent until after the post-Civil War period.

Second abolitionist era, late 19th and early 20th centuries

The anti-death penalty gained momentum again at the end of the 19th century. Populist and progressive reforms contributed to the reawakened anti-capital punishment sentiment. In addition, a "socially conscious" form of Christianity and the growing support of "scientific" corrections contributed to the movement's success. New York introduced the electric chair in 1890. This method was supposed to be more humane and appease death penalty opponents. However, abolitionists condemned this method and claimed it was inhumane and similar to burning someone on a stake.

In an 1898 op-ed in The New York Times, prominent physician Austin Flint called for the abolition of the death penalty and suggested more criminology-based methods should be used to reduce crime. Anti-death penalty activism of this period was largely state and locally based. An organization called the Anti-Death Penalty League was established Massachusetts in 1897. However, national leagues, such as the Anti-capital Punishment Society of America and the Committee on Capital Punishment of the National Committee on Prisons, developed shortly after.

Many judges, prosecutors, and police opposed the abolition of capital punishment. They believed capital punishment held a strong deterrent capacity and that abolishment would result in more violence, chaos, and lynching. Despite opposition from these authorities, ten states banned execution through legislation by the beginning of World War I and numerous others came close. However, many of these victories were reversed and the movement once again died out due to World War I and the economic problems which followed.

The American Civil Liberties Union, however, developed in 1925 and proved influential. The group focused on educating the public about the moral and pragmatic trouble of the death penalty. They also organized campaigns for legislative abolition and developed a research team which looked into empirical evidence surrounding issues such as death penalty deterrence and racial discrimination within the capital punishment process. Although the organization had little success when it came to abolition, they gathered a multitude of members and financial support for their cause. Many of their members and presidents were well-known prison wardens, attorneys, and academic scholars. These influential people wrote articles and pamphlets that were given out across the nation. They also gave speeches. Along with other social movements of the time, however, the group lost momentum and attention due to the Great Depression and World War II.

Third abolitionist era, mid-20th century

The movement in 1950s and 1960s shifted focus from legislation to the courts. Although public opinion remained in favor of execution (aside from during the mid-1960s when pro and anti opinions were roughly equal), judges and jurors executed fewer people than they did in the 1930s. The decline in executions gave strength to various new anti-capital punishment organizations. Among these groups were: a California-based Citizens Against Legalized Murder, the Ohio Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment, the New Jersey Council to Abolish Capital Punishment, California's People Against Capital Punishment, the New York Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment, the Oregon Council to Abolish the Death Penalty, and the national Committee to Abolish the Federal Death Penalty. In addition to growing organizations, the movement also profited from growing European abolishment of the death penalty and from the controversial executions of Barbara Graham and Caryl Chessman.

Success mounted in the late 1950s as Alaska, Hawaii, and Delaware abolished capital punishment. Oregon and Iowa followed their leads in the 1960s. Many other states added laws that restricted the use of the death penalty except in cases of extreme serious offenses. Abolitionists began to strongly challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty in the 1960s. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched a major campaign challenging the death penalty's constitutionality and insisted a moratorium for all executions while it was in process. The United States executed zero people from 1968 to 1976. The anti-death penalty movement's biggest victory of this time period was the Supreme Court Case, Furman v. Georgia, of 1972. The Supreme Court found the current state of the death penalty unconstitutional due to its "arbitrary and discriminatory manner" of application. The court, however, left states with the option to revamp their laws and make them more constitutional. Twenty eight states did just that and the court eventually allowed the death penalty again through a series of cases in 1976, collectively known as Gregg v. Georgia.

Contemporary anti-death penalty movement

The anti-death penalty movement rose again in response to the reinstatement of capital punishment in many states. In the courts, the movement's response has yielded certain limitations on the death penalty's application. For example, juveniles, the mentally ill, and the intellectually disabled can no longer be executed. However, the Supreme Court also made it more difficult to allege racial discrimination within the capital punishment process.

During this era, the movement diversified its efforts beyond those of litigation and lawyers, to include a wide range of organizations that attacked the death penalty legislatively. Some of the most influential organizations who continue to work against capital punishment today include Amnesty International USA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. The works of these organizations have brought about various restrictions on the use of capital punishment at the state level, including several statewide moratoriums and bans on capital punishment. As a result, some scholars consider the American death penalty to be relatively vulnerable in this contemporary period.

Through both litigation and activism, the anti-death penalty movement has specifically targeted lethal injection as an unacceptable method of execution. By pressuring pharmaceutical manufacturers and raising awareness about protracted, painful, or "botched" execution attempts, activists have achieved some success at limiting the number of executions carried out. Contemporary activism and advocacy has also highlighted the possibility of executing innocent people, an issue that has gained salience as DNA testing has established the innocence of several death-row convicts. The Innocence Project has gained widespread recognition for its efforts to clear convictions using DNA evidence. Finally, many contemporary arguments focus on the greater cost of the death penalty compared to alternate sentences, which has attracted strong support in some state legislatures.

Rather than possessing leaders and members who are possible beneficiaries of the movement's success, the anti-death penalty movement is composed of "moral entrepreneurs" who speak up for those who are under threat of being executed. Membership is not as strong as those of mass movements because it is often composed of "paper membership," which means members are with a group that represents other issues as well or members are involved in multiple other issue-oriented projects.

Public opinion

In a poll completed by Gallup in October 2009, 65% of Americans supported the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, while 31% were against and 5% did not have an opinion.

In the U.S., surveys have long shown a majority in favor of capital punishment. An ABC News survey in July 2006 found 65 percent in favour of capital punishment, consistent with other polling since 2000. About half the American public says the death penalty is not imposed frequently enough and 60 percent believe it is applied fairly, according to a Gallup poll from May 2006. Yet surveys also show the public is more divided when asked to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, or when dealing with juvenile offenders. Roughly six in 10 tell Gallup they do not believe capital punishment deters murder and majorities believe at least one innocent person has been executed in the past five years.

As a comparison, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and Western Europe, the death penalty is a controversial issue. However certain cases of mass murder, terrorism, and child murder occasionally cause waves of support for restoration, such as the Robert Pickton case, the Greyhound bus beheading, Port Arthur massacre and Bali bombings, though none of these events or similar events actually caused the death penalty to be re-instated. Between 2000 and 2010, support for the return of capital punishment in Canada dropped from 44% to 40%, and opposition to it returning rose from 43% to 46%. The Canadian government currently "has absolutely no plans to reinstate capital punishment." Nonetheless, in a 2011 interview given to Canadian media, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper affirmed his private support for capital punishment by saying, "I personally think there are times where capital punishment is appropriate." According to some polls, as of 2012, 63% of surveyed Canadians believe the death penalty is sometimes appropriate, while 61% said capital punishment is warranted for murder. In Australia, a 2009 poll found that 23% of the public support the death penalty for murder, while a 2014 poll found that 52.5% support the death penalty for fatal terrorist attacks.

A number of polls and studies have been done in recent years with various results.

In the punishment phase of the federal capital case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2015 for the Boston Marathon bombing, the convict was given the death penalty. Opinion polls in the state of Massachusetts, where the crime and the trial transpired, "showed that residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev. Many respondents said that life in prison for one so young would be a fate worse than death, and some worried that execution would make him a martyr. But the jurors in his case had to be 'death qualified' — that is, they all had to be willing to impose the death penalty to serve on the jury. So in that sense, the jury was not representative of the state."

Deterrence

In regard to capital punishment, deterrence is the notion that the death penalty (for crimes such as murder) may deter other individuals from engaging in crimes of a similar nature. Up till 1975, most studies agreed that executing convicted criminals and publicizing these executions did not significantly deter other individuals from committing similar crimes.

In 1975, however, Ehrlich famously contradicted existing social science literature by seemingly proving the validity of the deterrence argument. Although Ehrlich's study appeared to show that executing individuals and publicizing said execution resulted in lower crime rates from the 1930s through the 1960s, his findings drew criticism, due to other researchers' inability to replicate the study and its findings. Since the publication of Ehrlich's controversial findings, studies have been increasingly contradictory. As studies' findings become increasingly contradictory, the validity of the deterrence argument has become even more highly contested. In fact, a 2011 article about the validity of the deterrence effect problematizes previous studies, arguing that econometric estimates of execution deterrence are easily manipulated and, by extension, fallible.

One reason that there is no general consensus on whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent is that it is used so rarely – only about one out of every 300 murders actually results in an execution. In 2005 in the Stanford Law Review, John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that the death penalty "is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. ... The existing evidence for deterrence ... is surprisingly fragile." Wolfers stated, "If I was allowed 1,000 executions and 1,000 exonerations, and I was allowed to do it in a random, focused way, I could probably give you an answer."

Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, authored a study that looked at all 3,054 U.S. counties over death penalty on many different grounds. The study found that each execution prevented five homicides. Emory University law professor Joanna Shepherd, who has contributed to multiple studies on capital punishment and deterrence, has said, "I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds. But I do believe that people respond to incentives." Shepherd found that the death penalty had a deterrent effect only in those states that executed at least nine people between 1977 and 1996. In the Michigan Law Review in 2005, Shepherd wrote, "Deterrence cannot be achieved with a halfhearted execution program."

The question of whether or not the death penalty deters murder usually revolves around the statistical analysis. Studies have produced disputed results with disputed significance. Some studies have shown a positive correlation between the death penalty and murder rates – in other words, they show that where the death penalty applies, murder rates are also high. This correlation can be interpreted in either that the death penalty increases murder rates by brutalizing society, which is known as the brutalization hypothesis, or that higher murder rates cause the state to retain or reintroduce the death penalty. However, supporters and opponents of the various statistical studies, on both sides of the issue, argue that correlation does not imply causation. There is evidence that some of the major studies of capital punishment and deterrence are flawed due to model uncertainty, and that once this is accounted for, little evidence of deterrence remains.

The case for a large deterrent effect of capital punishment has been significantly strengthened since the 1990s, as a wave of sophisticated econometric studies have exploited a newly-available form of data, so-called panel data. Most of the recent studies demonstrate statistically a deterrent effect of the death penalty. However, critics claim severe methodological flaws in these studies and hold that the empirical data offer no basis for sound statistical conclusions about the deterrent effect. A similar conclusion was reached by the National Research Council in its 2012 report "Deterrence and the Death Penalty", which stated that "research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates." In 2009, a survey of leading criminologists found that 88% of them did not think capital punishment was an effective deterrent to crime.

Surveys and polls conducted in the last 15 years show that some police chiefs and others involved in law enforcement may not believe that the death penalty has any deterrent effect on individuals who commit violent crimes. In a 1995 poll of randomly selected police chiefs from across the U.S., the officers rank the death penalty last as a way of deterring or preventing violent crimes. They ranked it behind many other forms of crime control including reducing drug abuse and use, lowering technical barriers when prosecuting, putting more officers on the streets, and making prison sentences longer. They responded that a better economy with more jobs would lessen crime rates more than the death penalty. In fact, only one percent of the police chiefs surveyed thought that the death penalty was the primary focus for reducing crime.

However, the police chiefs surveyed were more likely to favor capital punishment than the general population.

In addition to statistical evidence, psychological studies examine whether murderers think about the consequences of their actions before they commit a crime. Most homicides are spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous, emotionally impulsive acts. Murderers do not weigh their options very carefully in this type of setting (Jackson 27). It is very doubtful that killers give much thought to punishment before they kill (Ross 41).

But some say the death penalty must be enforced even if the deterrent effect is unclear, like John McAdams, who teaches political science at Marquette University: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call."

Maimonides argued that executing a defendant on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice." Caprice of various sorts are more visible now with DNA testing, and digital computer searches and discovery requirements opening DA's files. Maimonides' concern was maintaining popular respect for law, and he saw errors of commission as much more threatening than errors of omission.

Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, both of Harvard law school, however, have argued that if there is a deterrent effect it will save innocent lives, which gives a life-life tradeoff. "The familiar problems with capital punishment—potential error, irreversibility, arbitrariness, and racial skew—do not argue in favor of abolition, because the world of homicide suffers from those same problems in even more acute form." They conclude that "a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment." Regarding any attempt to make a utilitarian moral argument for capital punishment, Albert Camus wrote:

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

— Reflections on the Guillotine

The extent to which the deterrence argument is well-founded, however, is far from the only interesting and important aspect of this common justification of capital punishment. In fact, current conceptualizations of the deterrence argument are also paramount, insofar as they implicitly operate under the assumption that the media and publicity are integral to shaping individuals' awareness and understandings of capital punishment. In other words, current conceptualizations of the deterrence argument presuppose that most people are made aware of executions through the media's coverage of said executions, which means that the media's selection of executions to cover, as well as the media's coverage of said executions are necessary for the deterrence effect to transpire. In this regard, in contemporary society, the deterrence argument relies upon the implicit understanding that people's understandings and actions – including actions that may deprive an individual of life – are influenced by the media. Although it is increasingly unclear as to whether or not the media's coverage has affected criminal behavior, it is necessary to examine how the media's coverage of executions and, more abstractly, its holistic construction of capital punishment has shaped people's actions and understandings related to this controversial practice.

Use of the death penalty on plea bargain

Supporters of the death penalty, especially those who do not believe in the deterrent effect of the death penalty, say the threat of the death penalty could be used to urge capital defendants to plead guilty, testify against accomplices, or disclose the location of the victim's body. Norman Frink, a senior deputy district attorney in the state of Oregon, considers capital punishment a valuable tool for prosecutors. The threat of death leads defendants to enter plea deals for life without parole or life with a minimum of 30 years – the two other penalties, besides death, that Oregon allows for aggravated murder. In a plea agreement reached with Washington state prosecutors, Gary Ridgway, a Seattle-area man who admitted to 48 murders since 1982, accepted a sentence of life in prison without parole in 2003. Prosecutors spared Ridgway from execution in exchange for his cooperation in leading police to the remains of still-missing victims.

The media and the capital punishment debate

The media plays a crucial role in the production and reproduction of various cultural discourses, and is imperative to reflexively shaping and being shaped by pervading cultural beliefs and attitudes. In this regard, media messages and, by extension, people's beliefs and attitudes towards practices such as capital punishment may have considerable ramifications for not only convicted criminals, but also for jurors, attorneys, politicians, victims' families, and the broader public debate of capital punishment. Thus, it is imperative to understand how the media's framing of executions has massaged people's understandings and their support of capital punishment, as well as how this framing affects individuals' engagement in criminal activity.

Media framing of capital punishment

Journalists and producers play integral roles in shaping the media's framing of the death penalty. But frames develop through a wide variety of social actors and stakeholders. In terms of capital punishment, the media's framing of Timothy McVeigh's execution was interactionally accomplished by a variety of people. Specifically, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which historically shied away from media attention, responded to increased scrutiny through enlisting a media advisory group to help shape the media's framing of McVeigh's execution.

Despite the fact that media frames are ubiquitous, the public is not always cognizant of the particular frames with which they are bombarded. This is largely because the media frames issues in a way that, more often than not, keeps people from fully realizing said frames. For instance, examining the media's coverage of three Nebraskan executions reveals that the death penalty was framed in a particularly positive way, to ensure media coverage would correspond with the public's growing support for capital punishment at the time. This meant that journalists did not focus on the problems or tensions within each case, nor did they ask public officials hard-hitting questions regarding the cases or the death penalty more broadly.

Media frames can dramatically over-simplify complex social issues. More specifically, the media simplifies complex cases by ensuring news stories adhere to generally taken-for-granted, preexisting cultural understandings of capital crimes. More specifically, the media frames capital punishment in a particularly negative and inaccurate way, by almost exclusively covering cases that involve minority offenders, 'worthy' victims, and especially heinous crimes; this is especially true for capital crimes that involve the sexual degradation of women. A 209 thematic content analysis of Associated Press articles finds that the media frames the death penalty in a way that portrays capital punishment as being overly fair, palatable, and simple. To accomplish such discursively positive illustrations of the death penalty and individual executions, journalists frame stories around inmates' choice. In order of popularity, the other common frames journalists use to frame execution and the death penalty pertain to competency, legal procedures, politics, religion, state-assisted suicide, and inmate suffering.

Although most literature shows that in general, the media frames executions and capital punishment favorably by minimizing the complexities of each case, conversely, some studies show that the media frames executions and capital punishment in an overly negative way. Both conditions are achieved through reducing and obscuring the complexities embedded in capital crime cases. Content analyses reveal that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press have framed the death penalty negatively by focusing on exceptions that challenge acceptance: innocence of some people convicted of capital crimes, the wrongfully accused and convicted, and convicted individuals' lack of competency.

A formal content analysis of articles in Time, Newsweek, The Progressive, and National Review found that frames used in the left-leaning Progressive and right-wing National Review contributed to each magazine's respective bias. Time and Newsweek, however, were very centrist in their approaches to social issues, including the death penalty. Although these biased frames may seem insignificant, the media's framing of capital punishment has significant implications.

Effect on public opinion

Vigil and protest held against the execution of Brandon Bernard.

The media plays a critical role in shaping people's understanding of capital punishment. This is especially true insofar as the media's increased focus on the wrongful convictions of innocent people has resulted in the public becoming less supportive of the death penalty. This finding is supported by more recent studies, including a study involving the analysis of The New York Times articles' contents and the public's opinions on the death penalty. The media's increased focus on innocent people's wrongful convictions, referred to as the 'innocence frame,' has highlighted larger fallibilities within the justice system; it has contributed to a decline in public support of the death penalty. Furthermore, examinations of whether individuals' exposure to press coverage has the ability to alter their understandings of capital punishment reveal that the way in which the media portrays the public's support of capital punishment has bearings on the public's support of capital punishment. More specifically, if the media suggests there is widespread support of the death penalty, something of which the media has been guilty, individuals are more apt to support the death penalty.

It is not only the abstracted 'general public' that is affected by the media's coverage of the death penalty. The media's framing of cases involving the sexual degradation of women affects district attorneys' conceptualizations of said cases, resulting in prosecutors being more apt to pursue the death penalty in cases that involve the sexual mistreatment of women. Cases involving the sexual degradation of women receive much more media attention than others do. Prosecutors are consequently more likely to pursue the death penalty for these crimes, despite the fact that they were, oftentimes, less heinous and gruesome than other capital crimes that did not involve the sexual degradation of women.

News coverage has been found to shape people's understandings of the death penalty and specific cases of legally sanctioned execution. Dramatic television has also been found to have significant bearings on people's understandings of and actions pertaining to capital punishment. Viewing police reality shows and television news programs, one's viewership of crime dramas affects their support of the death penalty. In fact, people's viewership of crime dramas has been associated with completely altering people's pre-existing convictions about the death penalty. More to the point, crime dramas are able to reframe cases in ways that correspond with people's broader ideological beliefs, while challenging and changing their specific beliefs about execution. For example, people who identify as liberals have historically been against the death penalty, but crime dramas like Law and Order reframe criminal cases in a way that associates the death penalty with another closely held liberal value, such as the safety and protection of women. In doing so, crime dramas are able to appeal to and sustain people's ideological beliefs, while simultaneously influencing and altering their stances on the death penalty.

The media's ability to reframe capital punishment and, by extension, affect people's support of capital punishment, while still appealing to their pre-existing ideological beliefs that may traditionally contradict death penalty support is a testament to the complexities embedded in the media's shaping of people's beliefs about capital punishment. How the media shapes people's understandings about capital punishment can be further complicated by the fact that certain mediums shape people's beliefs and subjectivities differently. People exposed to more complex forms of media, such as traditional, hard-hitting news shows, approach the death penalty in more complex, sophisticated ways than people who are exposed to less complex forms of media, including news magazine television shows. Although the medium is the message to some extent, it is also clear that every media form has some bearing – large or small – on the public's support of the death penalty. In this regard, questions must be raised about the ethics of capital punishment in an increasingly media-saturated society. Furthermore, the public and journalists alike must pay increasing attention to new investigative techniques that lend themselves to increased exonerations. These new techniques are illustrative of the fact that oftentimes, the media can play a meaningful role in matters of life and death.

Racial and gender factors

People who oppose capital punishment have argued that the arbitrariness present in its administration make the practice both immoral and unjust. In particular, they point to the systemic presence of racial, socio-economic, geographic, and gender bias in its implementation as evidence of how the practice is illegitimate and in need of suspension or abolition.

Anti-death penalty groups specifically argue that the death penalty is unfairly applied to African Americans. African Americans have constituted 34.5 percent of those persons executed since the death penalty's reinstatement in 1976 and 41 percent of death row inmates as of April 2018, despite representing only 13 percent of the general population in 2010.

The race of the victim has also been demonstrated to affect sentencing in capital cases, with those murders with white victims more likely to result in a death sentence than those with non-white victims. Advocates have been mostly unsuccessful at alleging systemic racial bias at the Supreme Court, due to the necessity of demonstrating individualized bias in a defendant's case.

Approximately 13.5% of death row inmates are of Hispanic or Latino descent, while they make up 17.4% of the general population.

Some attribute the racial disparities in capital punishment to individual factors. According to Craig Rice, a black member of the Maryland state legislature: "The question is, are more people of color on death row because the system puts them there or are they committing more crimes because of unequal access to education and opportunity? The way I was raised, it was always to be held accountable for your actions." Others point to academic studies that suggest African American defendants are more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants of other races, even when controlling for the circumstances of the murder, suggesting that individual factors do not explain the racial disparities.

As of 2017, women account for 1.88% (53 people) of inmates on death row, with men accounting for the other 98.12% (2764). Since 1976, 1.1% (16) of those executed were women. Sexual orientation may also bias sentencing. In 1993, a jury deliberating over the sentencing of convicted murderer Charles Rhines submitted a written question to the judge asking if Rhines might enjoy prison because he was sexually attracted to men. The judge would not answer that question, and the jury sentenced Rhines to death. In 2018, the Supreme Court said that it would not interfere with the execution of Rhines.

Diminished capacity

In the United States, there has been an evolving debate as to whether capital punishment should apply to persons with diminished mental capacity. In Ford v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the state from carrying out the death penalty on an individual who is insane, and that properly raised issues of execution-time sanity must be determined in a proceeding satisfying the minimum requirements of due process. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court addressed whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of mentally retarded persons. The Court noted that a "national consensus" had developed against it. While such executions are still permitted for people with marginal retardation, evidence of retardation is allowed as a mitigating circumstance. However, the recent case of Teresa Lewis, the first woman executed in Virginia since 1912, proved to be very controversial because Governor Bob McDonnell refused to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, even though she had an IQ of 70.

Limits to majority

In theory, opponents of capital punishment might argue that as a matter of principle, death penalties collide with the substance of Madison's understanding on democratic rule. According to the Madisonian principle, the majority's will shall prevail, but at the same time, the minority shall be respected. Hence, the majority cannot pass legislation which imposes the death penalty for the simple reason that such legislation eliminates in total the minority that chooses to disobey the law. Thus the question pertaining to capital punishment is whether the majority has the power to enact legislation imposing capital punishment on the minorities that disobey the laws and exercise the prohibited conduct. As a result, the punishment for disobeying the law – i.e., the prohibition to murder, cannot be the death penalty, because it threatens the existence of the minority.

Cost

Recent studies show that executing a criminal costs more than life imprisonment does. Many states have found it cheaper to sentence criminals to life in prison than to go through the time-consuming and bureaucratic process of executing a convicted criminal. Donald McCartin, an Orange County, California jurist famous for sending nine men to death row during his career, said that "it's 10 times more expensive to kill [criminals] than to keep them alive." McCartin's estimate is actually low, according to a June 2011 study by former death penalty prosecutor and federal judge Arthur L. Alarcón, and law professor Paula Mitchell. According to Alarcón and Mitchell, California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978, and death penalty trials are 20 times more expensive than trials seeking a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Studies in other states show similar patterns.

Wrongful execution

Capital punishment is often opposed on the grounds that innocent people will inevitably be executed. In a study carried out by National Academy of Sciences in the US it states that 1 in 25 people executed in the US are innocent. Supporters of capital punishment object that these lives have to be weighed against the far more numerous innocent people whose lives can be saved if the murderers are deterred by the prospect of being executed.

Between 1973 and 2005, 123 people in 25 states were released from death row when new evidence of their innocence emerged. Whether all of these exonerations are cases of actual innocence rather than technical exonerations of the defendants due to legal issues in their cases that allow their convictions to be legally quashed is disputed by death penalty supporters.

Statistics likely understate the actual problem of wrongful convictions because once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case open, and it becomes unlikely at that point that the miscarriage of justice will ever be exposed. In the case of Joseph Roger O'Dell III, executed in Virginia in 1997 for a rape and murder, a prosecuting attorney bluntly argued in court in 1998 that if posthumous DNA results exonerated O'Dell, "it would be shouted from the rooftops that ... Virginia executed an innocent man." The state prevailed, and the evidence was destroyed.

Despite this, some controversial cases have been re-investigated following the execution by state authorities, such as post-conviction DNA testing ordered by Mark Warner of evidence in the Roger Keith Coleman case in Virginia and reviewing the forensic evidence in the Cameron Todd Willingham case in Texas.

Another issue is the quality of the defense in a case where the accused has a public defender. The competence of the defense attorney "is a better predictor of whether or not someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime".

In 2015, the Justice Department and the FBI formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an FBI forensic squad overstated forensic hair matches for two decades before the year 2000. 26 out of 28 forensic examiners overstated evidence of forensic hair matches in 268 trials reviewed, and 95% of the overstatements favored the prosecution. Those cases involve 32 cases in which defendants were sentenced to death.

Hate speech

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech 

Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". A legal definition of hate speech varies from country to country.

There has been much debate over freedom of speech, hate speech and hate speech legislation. The laws of some countries describe hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing, or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group, or which disparage or intimidate a group or individuals on the basis of their membership in the group. The law may identify a group based on certain characteristics. In some countries, hate speech is not a legal term. Additionally, in some countries, including the United States, much of what falls under the category of "hate speech" is constitutionally protected. In other countries, a victim of hate speech may seek redress under civil law, criminal law, or both.

Hate speech laws

A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Laws against hate speech can be divided into two types: those intended to preserve public order and those intended to protect human dignity. The laws designed to protect public order require that a higher threshold be violated, so they are not often enforced. For example, in Northern Ireland, as of 1992, only one person has been prosecuted for violating the regulation in 21 years. The laws meant to protect human dignity have a much lower threshold for violation, so those in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands tend to be more frequently enforced.

The global nature of the internet makes it extremely difficult to set limits or boundaries to cyberspace. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence shall be prohibited by law". The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) prohibits all incitement to racism. Concerning the debate over how freedom of speech applies to the Internet, conferences concerning such sites have been sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is prohibited by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

State-sanctioned hate speech

A few states, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Rwanda Hutu factions, and actors in the Yugoslav Wars have been described as spreading official hate speech or incitement to genocide.

Internet

Virgin SIM card in Poland with the slogan of the campaign against hate speech "Words have power, use them wisely"

On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours.

Prior to this in 2013, Facebook, with pressure from over 100 advocacy groups including the Everyday Sexism Project, agreed to change their hate speech policies after data released regarding content that promoted domestic and sexual violence against women led to the withdrawal of advertising by 15 large companies.

Commentary

Several activists and scholars have criticized the practice of limiting hate speech. Civil liberties activist Nadine Strossen says that, while efforts to censor hate speech have the goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they are ineffective and may have the opposite effect: disadvantaged and ethnic minorities being charged with violating laws against hate speech. Kim Holmes, Vice President of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a critic of hate speech theory, has argued that it "assumes bad faith on the part of people regardless of their stated intentions" and that it "obliterates the ethical responsibility of the individual". Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor of Islamic and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham, argues that laws against hate speech constitute viewpoint discrimination (prohibited by First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States) as the legal system punishes some viewpoints but not others, however other scholars such as Gideon Elford argue that this may not necessarily be the case. John Bennett argues that restricting hate speech relies on questionable conceptual and empirical foundations and is reminiscent of efforts by totalitarian regimes to control the thoughts of their citizens.

Michael Conklin argues that there are positive benefits to hate speech that are often overlooked. He contends that allowing hate speech provides a more accurate view of the human condition, provides opportunities to change people's minds, and identifies certain people that may need to be avoided in certain circumstances. According to one psychological research study, a high degree of psychopathy is "a significant predictor" for involvement in online hate activity, while none of the other 7 criteria examined were found to have statistical significance.

Political philosopher Jeffrey W. Howard considers the popular framing of hate speech as "free speech vs. other political values" as a mischaracterization. He refers to this as the "balancing model", and says it seeks to weigh the benefit of free speech against other values such as dignity and equality for historically marginalized groups. Instead, he believes that the crux of debate should be whether or not freedom of expression is inclusive of hate speech. Research indicates that when people support censoring hate speech, they are motivated more by concerns about the effects the speech has on others than they are about its effects on themselves. Women are somewhat more likely than men to support censoring hate speech due to greater perceived harm of hate speech, which researchers believe may be due to gender differences in empathy towards targets of hate speech.

 

Hate crime

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime 

A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) of a certain social group or race.

Examples of such groups can include, and are almost exclusively limited to sex, ethnicity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation. Non-criminal actions that are motivated by these reasons are often called "bias incidents".

"Hate crime" generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by bias against one or more of the social groups listed above, or by bias against their derivatives. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, mate crime or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).

A hate crime law is a law intended to deter bias-motivated violence. Hate crime laws are distinct from laws against hate speech: hate crime laws enhance the penalties associated with conduct which is already criminal under other laws, while hate speech laws criminalize a category of speech.

History

The term "hate crime" came into common usage in the United States during the 1980s, but it is often used retrospectively in order to describe events which occurred prior to that era. From the Roman persecution of Christians to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, hate crimes were committed by individuals as well as governments long before the term was commonly used. A major part of defining crimes as hate crimes is determining that they have been committed against members of historically oppressed groups.

As Europeans began to colonize the world from the 16th century onwards, indigenous peoples in the colonized areas, such as Native Americans, increasingly became the targets of bias-motivated intimidation and violence. During the past two centuries, typical examples of hate crimes in the U.S. include lynchings of African Americans, largely in the South, and lynchings of Mexicans and Chinese in the West; cross burnings in order to intimidate black activists or drive black families out of predominantly white neighborhoods both during and after Reconstruction; assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people; the painting of swastikas on Jewish synagogues; and xenophobic responses to a variety of minority ethnic groups.

The verb "to lynch" is attributed to the actions of Charles Lynch, an 18th-century Virginia Quaker. Lynch, other militia officers, and justices of the peace rounded up Tory sympathizers who were given a summary trial at an informal court; sentences which were handed down included whipping, property seizure, coerced pledges of allegiance, and conscription into the military. Originally, the term referred to the extrajudicial organized but unauthorized punishment of criminals. It later evolved to describe executions which were committed outside "ordinary justice." It is highly associated with white suppression of African Americans in the South, and periods of weak or nonexistent police authority, as in certain frontier areas of the Old West.

Psychological effects

Hate crimes can have significant and wide-ranging psychological consequences, not only for their direct victims but for others as well. A 1999 U.S. study of lesbian and gay victims of violent hate crimes documented that they experienced higher levels of psychological distress, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, than lesbian and gay victims of comparable crimes which were not motivated by antigay bias. A manual issued by the Attorney-General of the Province of Ontario in Canada lists the following consequences:

Impact on the individual victim

psychological and affective disturbances; repercussions on the victim's identity and self-esteem; both reinforced by a specific hate crime's degree of violence, which is usually stronger than that of a common crime.

Effect on the targeted group

generalized terror in the group to which the victim belongs, inspiring feelings of vulnerability among its other members, who could be the next hate crime victims.

Effect on other vulnerable groups

ominous effects on minority groups or on groups that identify themselves with the targeted group, especially when the referred hate is based on an ideology or a doctrine that preaches simultaneously against several groups.

Effect on the community as a whole

divisions and factionalism arising in response to hate crimes are particularly damaging to multicultural societies.

Hate crime victims can also develop depression and psychological trauma.

A review of European and American research indicates that terrorist bombings cause Islamophobia and hate crimes to flare up but, in calmer times, they subside again, although to a relatively high level. Terrorist's most persuasive message is that of fear and fear, a primary and strong emotion, increases risk estimates and has distortive effects on the perception of ordinary Muslims. Widespread Islamophobic prejudice seems to contribute to anti-Muslim hate crimes, but indirectly: terrorist attacks and intensified Islamophobic prejudice serve as a window of opportunity for extremist groups and networks.

Motivation

Sociologists Jack McDevitt and Jack Levin's 2002 study into the motives for hate crimes found four motives, whereby "thrill-seeking" accounted for 66% of all hate crimes overall in the United States:

• Thrill-seeking - perpetrators engage in hate crimes for excitement and drama. There is often no greater purpose behind the crimes, with victims being vulnerable because they have an ethnic, religious, sexual or gender background that differs from their attackers. While the actual animosity present in such a crime can be quite low, thrill-seeking crimes were determined to often be dangerous, with 70% of thrill-seeking hate crimes studied involving physical attacks.
• Defensive - perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of a belief they are protecting their communities. These are often triggered by a certain background event. Perpetrators believe society supports their actions but is too afraid to act and thus they believe they have communal assent in their actions.
• Retaliatory - perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of a desire for revenge. This can be in response to personal slights, other hate crimes or terrorism. The "avengers" target members of a group whom they believe committed the original crime, even if the victims had nothing to do with it. These kinds of hate crimes are a common occurrence after terrorist attacks.
• Mission offenders - perpetrators engage in hate crimes out of ideological reasons. They consider themselves to be crusaders, often for a religious or racial cause. They will often write complex explanations for their views and target symbolically important sites while trying to maximize damage. They believe that there is no other way to accomplish their goals, which they consider to be justification for excessive violence against innocents. This kind of hate crime often overlaps with terrorism and was considered by the FBI to be both the rarest and deadliest form of hate crime.

Laws

Hate crime laws generally fall into one of several categories:

1. laws defining specific bias-motivated acts as distinct crimes;
2. criminal penalty-enhancement laws;
3. laws creating a distinct civil cause of action for hate crimes; and
4. laws requiring administrative agencies to collect hate crime statistics. Sometimes (as in Bosnia and Herzegovina), the laws focus on war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity with the prohibition against discriminatory action limited to public officials.

Europe and Asia

European Union

Since 2002, with an amendment to the Convention on Cybercrime, the European Union mandates individual states to punish as a crime hate speech done through the internet.

Andorra

Discriminatory acts constituting harassment or infringement of a person's dignity on the basis of origin, citizenship, race, religion, or gender (Penal Code Article 313). Courts have cited bias-based motivation in delivering sentences, but there is no explicit penalty enhancement provision in the Criminal Code. The government does not track hate crime statistics, although they are relatively rare.

Armenia

Armenia has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes with ethnic, racial, or religious motives (Criminal Code Article 63).

Austria

Austria has a penalty-enhancement statute for reasons like repeating a crime, being especially cruel, using others' helpless states, playing a leading role in a crime, or committing a crime with racist, xenophobic or especially reprehensible motivation (Penal Code section 33(5)).

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, or religious hatred (Criminal Code Article 61). Murder and infliction of serious bodily injury motivated by racial, religious, national, or ethnic intolerance are distinct crimes (Article 111).

Belarus

Belarus has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, and religious hatred and discord.

Belgium

Belgium's Act of 25 February 2003 ("aimed at combating discrimination and modifying the Act of 15 February 1993 which establishes the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight against Racism") establishes a penalty-enhancement for crimes involving discrimination on the basis of gender, supposed race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, civil status, birth, fortune, age, religious or philosophical beliefs, current or future state of health and handicap or physical features. The Act also "provides for a civil remedy to address discrimination." The Act, along with the Act of 20 January 2003 ("on strengthening legislation against racism"), requires the Centre to collect and publish statistical data on racism and discriminatory crimes.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina (enacted 2003) "contains provisions prohibiting discrimination by public officials on grounds, inter alia, of race, skin colour, national or ethnic background, religion and language and prohibiting the restriction by public officials of the language rights of the citizens in their relations with the authorities (Article 145/1 and 145/2)."

Bulgaria

Bulgarian criminal law prohibits certain crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia, but a 1999 report by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance found that it does not appear that those provisions "have ever resulted in convictions before the courts in Bulgaria."

Croatia

The Croatian Penal Code explicitly defines hate crime in article 89 as "any crime committed out of hatred for someone's race, skin color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other belief, national or social background, asset, birth, education, social condition, age, health condition or other attribute". On 1 January 2013, a new Penal Code was introduced with the recognition of a hate crime based on "race, skin color, religion, national or ethnic background, sexual orientation or gender identity".

Czech Republic

The Czech legislation finds its constitutional basis in the principles of equality and non-discrimination contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms. From there, we can trace two basic lines of protection against hate-motivated incidents: one passes through criminal law, the other through civil law. The current Czech criminal legislation has implications both for decisions about guilt (affecting the decision whether to find a defendant guilty or not guilty) and decisions concerning sentencing (affecting the extent of the punishment imposed). It has three levels, to wit:

• a circumstance determining whether an act is a crime – hate motivation is included in the basic constituent elements. If hate motivation is not proven, a conviction for a hate crime is not possible.
• a circumstance determining the imposition of a higher penalty – hate motivation is included in the qualified constituent elements for some types of crimes (murder, bodily harm). If hate motivation is not proven, the penalty is imposed according to the scale specified for the basic constituent elements of the crime.
• general aggravating circumstance – the court is obligated to take the hate motivation into account as a general aggravating circumstance and determines the amount of penalty to impose. Nevertheless, it is not possible to add together a general aggravating circumstance and a circumstance determining the imposition of a higher penalty.

Current criminal legislation does not provide for special penalties for acts that target another by reason of his sexual orientation, age or health status. Only the constituent elements of the criminal offence of Incitement to hatred towards a group of persons or to the curtailment of their rights and freedoms and general aggravating circumstances include attacking a so-called different group of people. Such a group of people can then, of course, be also defined by sexual orientation, age or health status. A certain disparity has thus been created between, on the one hand, those groups of people who are victimized by reason of their skin color, faith, nationality, ethnicity or political persuasion and enjoy increased protection, and, on the other hand, those groups that are victimized by reason of their sexual orientation, age or health status and are not granted increased protection. This gap in protection against attacks motivated by the victim's sexual orientation, age or health status cannot be successfully bridged by interpretation. Interpretation by analogy is inadmissible in criminal law, sanctionable motivations being exhaustively enumerated.

Denmark

Although Danish law does not include explicit hate crime provisions, "section 80(1) of the Criminal Code instructs courts to take into account the gravity of the offence and the offender's motive when meting out penalty, and therefore to attach importance to the racist motive of crimes in determining sentence." In recent years judges have used this provision to increase sentences on the basis of racist motives.

Since 1992, the Danish Civil Security Service (PET) has released statistics on crimes with apparent racist motivation.

Estonia

Under section 151 of the Criminal Code of Estonia of 6 June 2001, which entered into force on 1 September 2002, with amendments and supplements and as amended by the Law of 8 December 2011, "activities which publicly incite to hatred, violence or discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, colour, sex, language, origin, religion, sexual orientation, political opinion, or financial or social status, if this results in danger to the life, health or property of a person, are punishable by a fine of up to 300 fine units or by detention".

Finland

Finnish Criminal Code 515/2003 (enacted 31 January 2003) makes "committing a crime against a person, because of his national, racial, ethnical or equivalent group" an aggravating circumstance in sentencing. In addition, ethnic agitation (Finnish: kiihotus kansanryhmää vastaan) is criminalized and carries a fine or a prison sentence of not more than two years. The prosecution need not prove that an actual danger to an ethnic group is caused but only that malicious message is conveyed. A more aggravated hate crime, warmongering (Finnish: sotaan yllyttäminen), carries a prison sentence of one to ten years. However, in case of warmongering, the prosecution must prove an overt act that evidently increases the risk that Finland is involved in a war or becomes a target for a military operation. The act in question may consist of

1. illegal violence directed against a foreign country or its citizens,
2. systematic dissemination of false information on Finnish foreign policy or defense
3. public influence on the public opinion towards a pro-war viewpoint or
4. public suggestion that a foreign country or Finland should engage in an aggressive act.

France

In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation. The penalties for murder were raised from 30 years (for non-hate crimes) to life imprisonment (for hate crimes), and the penalties for violent attacks leading to permanent disability were raised from 10 years (for non-hate crimes) to 15 years (for hate crimes).

Georgia

"There is no general provision in Georgian law for racist motivation to be considered an aggravating circumstance in prosecutions of ordinary offenses. Certain crimes involving racist motivation are, however, defined as specific offenses in the Georgian Criminal Code of 1999, including murder motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 109); infliction of serious injuries motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 117); and torture motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 126). ECRI reported no knowledge of cases in which this law has been enforced. There is no systematic monitoring or data collection on discrimination in Georgia."

Germany

The German Criminal Code does not have hate crime legislation, instead, it criminalizes hate speech under a number of different laws, including Volksverhetzung. In the German legal framework motivation is not taken into account while identifying the element of the offence. However, within the sentencing procedure the judge can define certain principles for determining punishment. In section 46 of the German Criminal Code it is stated that "the motives and aims of the perpetrator; the state of mind reflected in the act and the willfulness involved in its commission." can be taken into consideration when determining the punishment; under this statute, hate and bias have been taken into consideration in sentencing in past cases.

Hate crimes are not specifically tracked by German police, but have been studied separately: a recently published EU "Report on Racism" finds that racially motivated attacks are frequent in Germany, identifying 18,142 incidences for 2006, of which 17,597 were motivated by right-wing ideologies, both about a 14% year-by-year increase. Relative to the size of the population, this represents an eightfold higher rate of hate crimes than reported in the US during the same period. Awareness of hate crimes and right-wing extremism in Germany remains low.

Greece

Article Law 927/1979 "Section 1,1 penalises incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence towards individuals or groups because of their racial, national or religious origin, through public written or oral expressions; Section 1,2 prohibits the establishment of, and membership in, organisations which organise propaganda and activities aimed at racial discrimination; Section 2 punishes public expression of offensive ideas; Section 3 penalises the act of refusing, in the exercise of one’s occupation, to sell a commodity or to supply a service on racial grounds." Public prosecutors may press charges even if the victim does not file a complaint. However, as of 2003, no convictions had been attained under the law.

Hungary

Violent action, cruelty, and coercion by threat made on the basis of the victim's actual or perceived national, ethnic, religious status or membership in a particular social group are punishable under article 174/B of the Hungarian Criminal Code. This article was added to the Code in 1996.

Iceland

Section 233a of the Icelandic Penal Code states "Anyone who in a ridiculing, slanderous, insulting, threatening or any other manner publicly abuses a person or a group of people on the basis of their nationality, skin colour, race, religion or sexual orientation, shall be fined or jailed for up to two years."

India

India does not have any specific laws governing hate crimes in general other than hate speech which is covered under the Indian Penal Code.

Ireland

"The Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989" makes it an offense to incite hatred against any group of persons on account of their race, color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origins, or membership of the Traveller community, an indigenous minority group."

Ireland does not systematically collect hate crime data.

Italy

Italian criminal law, at Section 3 of Law No. 205/1993, the so-called Legge Mancino (Mancino law), contains a penalty-enhancement provision for all crimes motivated by racial, sex/gender, ethnic, national, or religious bias.

Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan, there are constitutional provisions prohibiting propaganda promoting racial or ethnic superiority.

Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan, "the Constitution of the State party prohibits any kind of discrimination on grounds of origin, sex, race, nationality, language, faith, political or religious convictions or any other personal or social trait or circumstance, and that the prohibition against racial discrimination is also included in other legislation, such as the Civil, Penal and Labour Codes."

Article 299 of the Criminal Code defines incitement to national, racist, or religious hatred as a specific offense. This article has been used in political trials of suspected members of the banned organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Russia

Article 29 of Constitution of the Russian Federation bans incitement to riot for the sake of stirring societal, racial, ethnic, and religious hatred as well as the promotion of the superiority of the same. Article 282 of the Criminal code further includes protections against incitement of hatred (including gender) via various means of communication, instilling criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.

Spain

Article 22(4) of the Spanish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's ideology, beliefs, religion, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, illness or disability.

On 14 May 2019, the Spanish Attorney General distributed a circular instructing on the interpretation of hate crime law. This new interpretation includes Nazis as a collective that can be protected under this law.

Sweden

Article 29 of the Swedish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim's race, color, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or "other similar circumstance" of the victim.

Ukraine

I. "Constitution of Ukraine" :

The most important law of the Ukraine country : the "Constitution of Ukraine" guarantees protection against Hate crime :

"Constitution of Ukraine" :

Article 10: "In Ukraine, free development, use and protection of Russian and other languages of ethnic minorities of Ukraine are guaranteed".

Article 11: "The State shall promote the development of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of all indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities of Ukraine".

Article 24 :"There can be no privileges or restrictions on the grounds of race, color of the skin, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds".

II. "CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE" :

In Ukraine, all criminal punishments for crimes committed under the law are required to be registered in only one law, it is the only one: "CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE"

The crimes committed because of hatred, are Hate crimes and thus, they reinforce the punishment in many articles of the criminal law. There are also separate articles on punishment for a Hate crime.

"CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE" :

Article 161: "Violations of equality of citizens depending on their race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, disability and other grounds

1. Intentional acts aimed at incitement to ethnic, racial or religious hatred and violence, to demean the ethnic honor and dignity, or to repulse citizens' feelings due to their religious beliefs, as well as direct or indirect restriction of rights or the establishment of direct or indirect privileges of citizens on the grounds of race, color, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, disability, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds"(Maximum criminal sentence of up to 8 years in prison)

Article 300 : "Importation, manufacture or distribution of literature and other media promoting a cult of violence and cruelty, racial, ethnic or religious intolerance and discrimination" (Maximum criminal sentence of up to 5 years in prison)

United Kingdom

For England, Wales, and Scotland, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 makes hateful behaviour towards a victim based on the victim's membership (or presumed membership) in a racial group or a religious group an aggravation in sentencing for specified crimes. The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (c. 24) amended sections of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. For Northern Ireland, Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987 (S.I. 1987/463 (N.I. 7)) serves the same purpose. A "racial group" is a group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins. A "religious group" is a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief. The specified crimes are assault, criminal damage, offences under the Public Order Act 1986, and offences under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

Sections 145 and 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 require a court to consider whether a crime which is not specified by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is racially or religiously aggravated, and to consider whether the following circumstances were pertinent to the crime:

(a) that, at the time of committing the offence, or immediately before or after doing so, the offender demonstrated towards the victim of the offence hostility based on—

(i) the sexual orientation (or presumed sexual orientation) of the victim, or

(ii) a disability (or presumed disability) of the victim, or

(b) that the offence is motivated (wholly or partly)—

(i) by hostility towards persons who are of a particular sexual orientation, or

(ii) by hostility towards persons who have a disability or a particular disability.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) reported in 2013 that there were an average of 278,000 hate crimes a year with 40% being reported according to a victims survey, although police records only identified around 43,000 hate crimes a year. It was reported that police recorded a 57% increase in hate crime complaints in the four days following the UK's European Union membership referendum, however a press release from the National Police Chief's Council stated that "this should not be read as a national increase in hate crime of 57 percent".

In 2013, Greater Manchester Police began recording attacks on goths, punks and other alternative culture groups as hate crimes.

On 4 December 2013 Essex Police launched the ‘Stop the Hate’ initiative as part of a concerted effort to find new ways to tackle hate crime in Essex. The launch was marked by a conference in Chelmsford, hosted by Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh, which brought together 220 delegates from a range of partner organizations involved in the field. The theme of the conference was 'Report it to Sort it' and the emphasis was on encouraging people to tell police if they have been a victim of hate crime, whether it be based on race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability.

Crown Prosecution Service guidance issued on 21 August 2017 stated that online hate crimes should be treated as seriously as offences in person.

Perhaps the most high-profile hate crime in modern Britain occurred in Eltham, London, on 24 April 1993, when 18-year-old black student Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in an attack by a gang of white youths. Two white teenagers were later charged with the murder, and at least three other suspects were mentioned in the national media, but the charges against them were dropped within three months after the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. 

However, a change in the law a decade later allowed a suspect to be charged with a crime twice if new evidence emerged after the original charges were dropped or a "not guilty" verdict was delivered in court. Gary Dobson, who had been charged with the murder in the initial 1993 investigation, was found guilty of Stephen Lawrence's murder in January 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment, as was David Norris, who had not been charged in 1993. A third suspect, Luke Knight, had been charged in 1993 but was not charged when the case came to court nearly 20 years later.

In September 2020 the Law Commission proposed that sex or gender be added to the list of protected characteristics.

Scotland

Under Scottish Common law the courts can take any aggravating factor into account when sentencing someone found guilty of an offence. There is legislation dealing with the offences of incitement of racial hatred, racially aggravated harassment, prejudice relating to religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender identity. A Scottish Executive working group examined the issue of hate crime and ways of combating crime motivated by social prejudice, reporting in 2004. Its main recommendations were not implemented, but in their manifestos for the 2007 Scottish Parliament election several political parties included commitments to legislate in this area, including the Scottish National Party who now form the Scottish Government. The Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Bill was introduced on 19 May 2008 by Patrick Harvie MSP, having been prepared with support from the Scottish Government, and was passed unanimously by the parliament on 3 June 2009.

Eurasian countries with no hate crime laws

A photograph of the famous fresco Bathing of the Christ, after being vandalized by a Kosovo Albanian mob during the 2004 unrest in Kosovo

Albania, Cyprus, San Marino, Slovenia and Turkey have no hate crime laws.

North America

Canada

"In Canada the legal definition of a hate crime can be found in sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code". 

In 1996 the federal government amended a section of the Criminal Code that pertains to sentencing. Specifically, section 718.2. The section states (with regard to the hate crime):

A court that imposes a sentence shall also take into consideration the following principles:

(a) a sentence should be increased or reduced to account for any relevant aggravating or mitigating circumstances relating to the offence or the offender, and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing,

(i) evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor, . . . shall be deemed to be aggravating circumstances.'' 

A vast majority (84 per cent) of hate crime perpetrators were "male, with an average age of just under 30. Less than 10 of those accused had criminal records, and less than 5 per cent had previous hate crime involvement (ibid O’Grady 2010 page 163.)."  "Only 4 percent of hate crimes were linked to an organized or extremist group (Silver et al., 2004)." 

As of 2004, Jewish people were the largest ethnic group targeted by hate crimes, followed by Black people, Muslims, South Asians, and homosexuals (Silver et al., 2004).

During the Nazi regime, anti-Semitism was a cause of hate-related violence in Canada. For example, on 16 August 1933 there was a baseball game in Toronto and one team was made up of mostly Jewish players. At the end of the game, a group of Nazi sympathizers unfolded a Swastika flag and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. That event erupted into a brawl that had Jews and Italians against Anglo Canadians and the brawl went on for hours.

The first time someone was charged with hate speech over the internet occurred on 27 March 1996. "A Winnipeg teenager was arrested by the police for sending an email to a local political activist that contained the message ‘Death to homosexuals’ it's prescribed in the Bible! Better watch out next Gay Pride Week.’ (Nairne, 1996)."

Mexico

Alejandro Gertz Manero, Attorney General of Mexico, recommended in August 2020 that all murders involving women be investigated as femicides. An average of 11 women are killed every day.

Murders of LGBTQ individuals are not legally classified as hate crimes in Mexico, although Luis Guzman of the Cohesión de Diversidades para la Sustentabilidad (Codise) notes that there is a lot of homophobia in Mexico, particularly in the states of Veracruz, Chihuahua, and Michoacán. Between 2014 and May 2020, there have been 209 such murders registered.

United States

Shepard (center), Louvon Harris (left), Betty Bryd Boatner (right) with President Barack Obama in 2009 to promote the Hate Crimes Prevention Act

Hate crime laws have a long history in the United States. The first hate crime laws were passed after the American Civil War, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1871, in order to combat the growing number of racially motivated crimes which were being committed by the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan. The modern era of hate-crime legislation began in 1968 with the passage of federal statute, 18 U.S. 245, part of the Civil Rights Act which made it illegal to "by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone who is engaged in six specified protected activities, by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin." However, "The prosecution of such crimes must be certified by the U.S. attorney general.".

The first state hate-crime statute, California's Section 190.2, was passed in 1978 and it provided penalty enhancements in cases when murders were motivated by prejudice against four "protected status" categories: race, religion, color, and national origin. Washington included ancestry in a statute which was passed in 1981. Alaska included creed and sex in 1982 and later disability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. In the 1990s some state laws began to include age, marital status, membership in the armed forces, and membership in civil rights organizations.

Until California state legislation included all crimes as possible hate crimes in 1987, criminal acts which could be considered hate crimes in various states included aggravated assault, assault and battery, vandalism, rape, threats and intimidation, arson, trespassing, stalking, and various "lesser" acts.

Defined in the 1999 National Crime Victim Survey, "A hate crime is a criminal offence. In the United States, federal prosecution is possible for hate crimes committed on the basis of a person's race, religion, or nation origin when engaging in a federally protected activity." In 2009, capping a broad-based public campaign lasting more than a decade, President Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Act added actual or perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability to the federal definition of a hate crime, and dropped the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity. Led by Shepard's parents and a coalition of civil rights groups, with ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), in a lead role, the campaign to pass the Matthew Shepard Act lasted 13 years, in large part because of opposition to including the term "sexual orientation" as one of the bases for deeming a crime to be a hate crime.

ADL also drafted model hate crimes legislation in the 1980s that serves as the template for the legislation that a majority of states have adopted. As of the fall of 2020, forty-six states and the District of Columbia have statutes criminalizing various types of hate crimes. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have statutes creating a civil cause of action in addition to the criminal penalty for similar acts. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have statutes requiring the state to collect hate crime statistics. In May 2020 the killing of African-American jogger Ahmaud Arbery reinvigorated efforts, to adopt a hate crimes law in Georgia, which was one of a handful of states without a hate crimes law. Led in great part by the Hate Free Georgia Coalition, a group of 35 nonprofit groups organized by the Georgia state ADL, the legislation was adopted in June 2020, after 16 years of debate. Georgia thus became the 46th state to enact a hate crimes law.

According to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report for 2006, hate crimes increased nearly 8% nationwide, with a total of 7,722 incidents and 9,080 offences reported by participating law enforcement agencies. Of the 5,449 crimes against persons, 46% were classified as intimidation and 32% as simple assaults. 81% of the 3,593 crimes against property were acts of vandalism or destruction.

However, according to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2007, the number of hate crimes decreased to 7,624 incidents reported by participating law enforcement agencies. These incidents included 9 murders and 2 rapes(out of the almost 17,000 murders and 90,000 forcible rapes committed in the U.S. in 2007).

Attorney General Eric Holder said in June 2009 that recent killings show the need for a tougher U.S. hate crimes law to stop "violence masquerading as political activism".

In 2009, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund published a report revealing that 33% of hate crime offenders were under the age of 18, while 29% were between the ages of 18 and 24.

The 2011 hate crime statistics show 46.9% were motivated by race and 20.8% by sexual orientation.

In 2015, the Hate Crimes Statistics report identified 5,818 single-bias incidents involving 6,837 offenses, 7,121 victims, and 5,475 known offenders

In 2017, the FBI released new data showing a 17% increase in hate crimes between 2016 and 2017.

Prosecutions of hate crimes have been difficult in the United States. Recently, state governments have attempted to re-investigate and re-try past hate crimes. One notable example was Mississippi's decision to retry Byron De La Beckwith in 1990 for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, a prominent figure in the NAACP and a leader of the Civil rights movement. This was the first time in U.S. history that an unresolved civil rights case was re-opened. De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was tried for the murder on two previous occasions, resulting in hung juries. A mixed race jury found Beckwith guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1994.

According to a November 2016 report issued by the FBI hate crime statistics are on the rise in the United States. The number of hate crimes increased from 5,850 in 2015, to 6,121 hate crime incidents in 2016, an increase of 4.6 percent.

Khalid Jabara-Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality Act (NO HATE), which was first introduced in 2017, was reintroduced in June 2019 as a response to anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic attacks to improve hate crime reporting and expand support for victims. The bill will fund state hate crime hotlines, support expansion of reporting and training programs in law enforcement agencies.

Victims in the United States

One of the largest waves of hate crimes in the history of the United States took place during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Both violence and threats of violence were common against African Americans, and hundreds of lives were lost due to such acts. Members of this ethnic group faced violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan as well as violence from individuals who were committed to maintaining segregation. At the time, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and their supporters fought hard for the right of African Americans to vote as well as for equality in their everyday lives. African Americans have been the target of hate crimes since the Civil War, and the humiliation of this ethnic group was also desired by many Anti-black individuals. Other frequently reported bias motivations were bias against a religion, bias against a particular sexual orientation, and bias against a particular ethnicity/national origin. At times, these bias motivations overlapped, because violence can be both anti-gay and anti-black, for example.

Analysts have compared groups in terms of the per capita rate of hate crimes committed against them to allow for differing populations. Overall, the total number of hate crimes committed since the first hate crime bill was passed in 1997 is 86,582.

Hate Crimes in the US (2008–2012) by Population Group
Population Group	Estimated Population	Total Hate Crimes Against (2008-2012)	Rate (per 100,000 people)	Violent Hate Crimes Against	Rate (per 100,000 people)
Jewish	5,248,674	4,457	84.9	411	7.8
LGBT	11,343,000	7,231	66.9	3,849	35.6
Muslim	1,852,473	761	41.1	258	13.9
Black	38,929,319	13,411	34.4	4,356	11.2
Aboriginal	2,932,248	364	12.4	161	5.5
Hispanic	50,477,594	3,064	6.1	1,482	2.9
Asian & Pacific Islander	15,214,265	798	5.2	276	1.8
White	223,553,265	3,459	1.5	1,614	0.7
Catholic	67,924,018	338	0.5	32	0.0
Atheist & Agnostic	17,598,496	47	0.3	5	0.0
Protestant	148,197,858	229	0.2	17	0.0

Among the groups which are currently mentioned in the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the largest number of hate crimes are committed against African Americans. During the Civil Rights Movement, some of the most notorious hate crimes included the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1964 murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, as well as the burning of crosses, churches, Jewish synagogues and other places of worship of minority religions. Such acts began to take place more frequently after the racial integration of many schools and public facilities.

High-profile murders targeting victims based on their sexual orientation have prompted the passage of hate crimes legislation, notably the cases of Sean W. Kennedy and Matthew Shepard. Kennedy's murder was mentioned by Senator Gordon Smith in a speech on the floor of the US Senate while he advocated such legislation. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law in 2009. It included sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, the disabled, and military personnel and their family members. This is the first all-inclusive bill ever passed in the United States, taking 45 years to complete.

Gender-based crimes may also be considered hate crimes. This view would designate rape and domestic violence, as well as non-interpersonal violence against women such as the École Polytechnique massacre in Quebec, as hate crimes.

In May 2018, ProPublica reviewed police reports for 58 cases of purported anti-heterosexual hate crimes. ProPublica found that about half of the cases were anti-LGBT hate crimes that had been miscategorized, and that the rest were motivated by hate towards Jews, blacks or women or that there was no element of a hate crime at all. ProPublica found not a single case of a hate crime spurred by anti-heterosexual bias.

South America

Brazil

In Brazil, hate crime laws focus on racism, racial injury, and other special bias-motivated crimes such as, for example, murder by death squads and genocide on the grounds of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. Murder by death squads and genocide are legally classified as "hideous crimes" (crimes hediondos in Portuguese).

The crimes of racism and racial injury, although similar, are enforced slightly differently. Article 140, 3rd paragraph, of the Penal Code establishes a harsher penalty, from a minimum of 1 year to a maximum of 3 years, for injuries motivated by "elements referring to race, color, ethnicity, religion, origin, or the condition of being an aged or disabled person". On the other side, Law 7716/1989 covers "crimes resulting from discrimination or prejudice on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, religion, or national origin".

In addition, the Brazilian Constitution defines as a "fundamental goal of the Republic" (Article 3rd, clause IV) "to promote the well-being of all, with no prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age, and any other forms of discrimination".

Chile

In 2012, the Anti-discrimination law amended the Criminal Code adding a new aggravating circumstance of criminal responsibility, as follows: "Committing or participating in a crime motivated by ideology, political opinion, religion or beliefs of the victim; nation, race, ethnic or social group; sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, affiliation, personal appearance or suffering from illness or disability."

Middle East

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has hate crime laws. Hate crime, as passed by the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), is defined as crime for reason of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.

Support for and opposition to hate crime laws

Support

Justifications for harsher punishments for hate crimes focus on the notion that hate crimes cause greater individual and societal harm. It is said that, when the core of a person's identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people. Furthermore, it is asserted that the chances for retaliatory crimes are greater when a hate crime has been committed. The riots in Los Angeles, California that followed the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist, by a group of White police officers are cited as support for this argument. The beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny by black rioters during the same riot is also an example that supports this argument.

In Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that penalty-enhancement hate crime statutes do not conflict with free speech rights, because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression; rather, they allow courts to consider motive when sentencing a criminal for conduct which is not protected by the First Amendment. Whilst in the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire the court defined "fighting words" as "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."

Opposition

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination in conflict with rights of free speech, because it selectively criminalized bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech for disfavored topics while permitting such speech for other topics. Many critics further assert that it conflicts with an even more fundamental right: free thought. The claim is that hate-crime legislation effectively makes certain ideas or beliefs, including religious ones, illegal, in other words, thought crimes. Heidi Hurd argues that hate crimes criminalize certain dispositions yet do not show why hate is a morally worse disposition for a crime than one motivated by jealousy, greed, sadism or vengeance or why hatred and bias are uniquely responsive to criminal sanction compared to other motivations. Hurd argues that whether or not a disposition is worse than another is case sensitive and thus it is difficult to argue that some motivations are categorically worse than others.

In their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter criticize hate crime legislation for exacerbating conflicts between groups. They assert that by defining crimes as being committed by one group against another, rather than as being committed by individuals against their society, the labeling of crimes as "hate crimes" causes groups to feel persecuted by one another, and that this impression of persecution can incite a backlash and thus lead to an actual increase in crime. Jacobs and Potter also argued that hate crime legislation can end up only covering the victimization of some groups rather than all, which is a form of discrimination itself and that attempts to remedy this by making all identifiable groups covered by hate crime protection thus make hate crimes co-terminus with generic criminal law. The authors also suggest that arguments which attempt to portray hate crimes as worse than normal crimes because they spread fear in a community are unsatisfactory, as normal criminal acts can also spread fear yet only hate crimes are singled out. Indeed, it has been argued that victims have varied reactions to hate crimes, so it is not necessarily true that hate crimes are regarded as more harmful than other crimes.

Heidi Hurd argues that hate crime represents an effort by the state to encourage a certain moral character in its citizen and thus represents the view that the instillation of virtue and the elimination of vice are legitimate state goals, which she argues is a contradiction of the principles of liberalism. Hurd also argues that increasing punishment for an offence because the perpetrator was motivated by hate compared to some other motivation means that the justice systems is treating the same crime differently, even though treating like cases alike is a cornerstone of criminal justice.

Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced. American forensic psychologist Karen Franklin said that the term hate crime is somewhat misleading since it assumes there is a hateful motivation which is not present in many occasions; in her view, laws to punish people who commit hate crimes may not be the best remedy for preventing them because the threat of future punishment does not usually deter such criminal acts. Some on the political left have been critical of hate crime laws for expanding the criminal justice system and dealing with violence against minority groups through punitive measures. Briana Alongi argues that hate crime legislation is inconsistent, redundant and arbitrarily applied, while also being partially motivated by political opportunism and media bias rather than purely by legal principle.