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If his name wasn't Adbul--would BillyBob have iced him?
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Who cares? Billybob kills Abdul. Joe kills Omar. Jose kills Fredrick. Rastus kills Luigi. What's the difference? Not a damn thing, in all cases one human killed another human, and should be punished.
Our legal system has a built in way of dealing with mitigating circumstances. Not everyone that takes another life should receive the same punishment. Remember the kid getting ten years for receiving blow job? So, they add hate crime to the books as a more serious, more heinous act, alerting the judge and jury that this one gets no sympathy or lenience.
The fly in the ointment, at least until the flies get organized and that expression goes the way of the nigger in the woodpile, is the DA gets to decide if it's a hate crime or not. Now you've taken away the judge and jury, the core of our legal system, and put a (wo)man's fate at the whim of the DA.
The DA not only doesn't have to prove it, he doesn't even have to say why, even if he's badgered by curious reporters.
So there are pros and cons to the existence of hate crime as attachment to another crime, but to me, anything that bypasses the legal system and makes one man(DA) the sole arbiter of your intentions, sucks.
Sucks = Illegal, Immoral and Unconstitutional.
