That they are not (yet) creating a new crime is some relief, in that creating a new crime would bring us to the threshold of Orwell’s “thought-crime”.

As enhancement, “hate crime” has some parallel in existing statues. For instance in murder/homicide cases, the assessment of the state of mind (malice, premeditation) has a substantial effect on whether the perpetrator is charged with homicide vs. murder, and what degree of murder.

**That said, the “hate crime” category does put us upon a slippery slope with multiple troubling aspects. And I personally do not think we should set upon this path of creating “hate crimes”.**

Some of these troubling aspects include:

1) unequal protection – only certain favored classes of people are protected and people are protected only because they are considered to belong to a privileged protected class, which may or may not be evident to the perpetrator at the time of the crime. The fact that we treat people as parts of groups rather than as individuals, and that we afford special privilege by virtue of that membership is not a good direction for our society to be heading – except for those who want to perpetuate group conflicts.

2) unequal treatment of identical behavior – the same behavior gains different treatment depending on whether the victim is a protected class (gender, race) or a non-protected class (veteran) even though the thought-processes are indistiguishable

3) Difficulty in defining hate – since many crimes are motivated or aggravated by hate that could arrise from multiple reasons, it would take a mind-reader to determine at what point the perpetrator’s mental status crosses the forbidden line (and when).

4) difficulty of objectively assessing perpetrators state-of-mind at time of crime. This has to do with whether a a) there is a threshold action at the time of the crime required to invoke “hate crime” and b) whether premeditation is required. I would think both thresholds need to be present; otherwise we’re creating a crime after-the-fact.

And indeed, if we stick to these two thresholds in (4), we probably can enhance crimes under present statutes without needing to create a new enhancement. Especially since most incidences of what we would call “hate crimes” involve a group of perpetrators – where conspiracy and lynch laws would become applicable.

Where the slippery slope comes into play is when 1) the race, gender, etc. of the victim immediately becomes ground to investigage “hate crime” and to start a fishing expedition in the perpetrators past history ; 2) the victim’s past history by it’s existence becomes grounds for guilt without connecting said history to the crime at hand.

That the suspect wrote some inflammatory comments in the past or attended a Klan rally years prior should not be admissable or presumptive that the crime was motivated as a “hate crime” without some contemporary evidence, which comes back to my two thesholds above. (And for that matter, verbal insults in the heat of the crime should not be presumptive evidence of a hate crime.)

In other words, the danger is in creating an enhancement where the normal laws of evidence are reversed and the perpetrator has the burden of proof to prove that this does not apply.

Or even worse, that the law is moving from objective criteria of guilt (actions, physical evidence) to the subjective morass of evaluating thoughts and intuiting state of mind.

Also “hate crime” is rife with the potential for prosecutorial abuse and, as you mention, a method of punishing perpetrators for political opinions – or for enhancing the reelection campaign of the local DA.