Are hate crimes - cromes motivated by racist, sexist, sectarian or anti-gay feelings - any worse than a crime motivated by greed, rage, intoxication or sexual jealousy? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. It does seem particularly shocking when someone is killed over a physical trait they can't control. But are the murder victims of any kind of horrific slaying any less dead? No.
Two juries have reached verdicts this week in the UK and two judges have passed down sentence. In both cases, two young men were killed after walking a female friend to the bus stop. In one case, a nice young man was killed with an ice axe in an unprovoked attack. In the other, a nice young man had his face kicked in and was stomped to death in an unprovoked attack.
In both cases, they were killed because their attackers perceived that the victim had crossed some sort of racial boundary. Anthony Walker was killed because he was black, lived in a predominantly white area of Liverpool and had a white girlfriend. Christopher Yates was killed because he was white and had spoken to some Asian men on a drunken rampage. His killers did not appreciate a white man interfering with "Asian business".
The sentencing for Anthony's killers is complicated, but basically 20-year-old Paul Taylor's sentenced started from 30 year minimum tarriffs because it was a racially motivated crime and was reduced to 23+ years because he pled guilty. Michael Barton, 17 years old, gets a minimum sentence of 12 years as a juvenile and then got a top-up of 5 years and 8 months because the crime was racially motivated.
Christopher's killers Sajid Zulfiqar, Zahid Bashir and Imran Maqsood (26, 24 and 22 yrs old) get 15 years each (half as much of the basic sentence of Anthony's adult murderer) because the judge determined that his murder was not racially motivated. It was so determined because Christopher's murderers had attacked people of other races during their destructive spree. True, they caused a ruction in a curry house (Asian victim), but they also accosted and shouted racial abuse at black victims. It seems particularly daft to me that racially abusing a black person means your murder of a white person wasn't racially motivated.
Neither family is happy with the tariffs handed down and feel the sentences should have been longer. I'm not too happy either.
I'm generally againt specific penalties or top-ups for hate crimes, because nearly all murders are motivated by hate. In the juxtaposition of these two cases - one a "hate crime" the other not - one young man's tragic slaying somehow weighs more than the other's. Each set of killers had hate in their hearts. The law should apply equally regardless of the skin color of the victim or the murderer.
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Around the blogosphere: The law is an ass again from London Blog seems fairly reasonable to me, and rather predictably there are responses which smack of unpleasant racism themselves here and in the comments here.
Tags: crime, criminal justice, racism, Politics, London, hate crime
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It makes me pretty angry. They were both about as clear examples of racist murders as it was possible to have. I'm equally upset by the television media's different reaction to the two murders - the Walker case got far far more coverage from BBC and Channel 4, the Yates case was virtually ignored from what I saw. The recent conviction of several Pakistanis for the racist abduction and murder of a teenage boy in Glasgow was also ignored by BBC/C4. There seems to be a clear double standard by the media, courts and government agencies in deciding what counts as a racist attack.
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