I have often said I don't believe in "hate crimes," by which I mean I don't believe that one's motivation for committing an offense ought to be considered an aggravating factor at sentencing.
I don't know that I'm right about that, it's not an opinion that I feel particularly strongly about--I do think that we ought to do our best to understand why anyone commits any sort of crime--but so far no one has been able to talk me out of my general belief we ought not ask jurors or jurists to assay a defendant's state of mind. I think an assault is an assault, no matter what the assailant thinks of the victim. A murder is a murder whether it is motivated by pecuniary interest or idiot loathing.
Still, it's not hard to understand the outrage when victims are selected on the basis of who they are--the color of their skin, the way they worship or the way they may have voted (if they voted).
It's easy enough to deplore the behavior of people like Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Brittany Herring (aka Brittany Covington) and Tanishia Covington, who last week were charged in connection with the abduction and torture of a mentally disabled 18-year-old man that was broadcast on Facebook Live.
In case you didn't see it, the chilling 28-minute video shows the victim crouching terrified in a corner, his hands and feet bound and his mouth taped shut, while Herring--who's apparently shooting the video with her phone--smokes a blunt and narrates some of the action. She pans back and forth from her face to the victim as the two men alternately kick and punch him in the head and cut his clothing with knives. One of them then appears to cut the victim's scalp, causing it to bleed. They pretend to tap ashes into the wound.
Meanwhile an off-camera voice shouts "F--- Donald Trump" and "F--- white people." After about 15 minutes, one of the men says the victim "represents Trump," and threatens to put him in the trunk of a car and "put a brick on the gas."
At least that's what the Chicago Tribune says happens in the video. I didn't have the heart or stomach to watch it myself.
Police say the attack may have gone on for up to five hours. They found the victim -- who was from Crystal Lake, a city northwest of Chicago -- wandering the streets in shorts and a tank top and sandals, in obvious "distress."
Maybe it's important to say that Hill, Cooper and Herring are 18 years old. Covington is 24. That means they're all adults. They can go to prison for these actions, and it seems likely they will. Of course, plenty of people have called for stronger punishment--there are online petitions calling for them to receive life imprisonment and the death penalty.
I'm pretty confident that none of the alleged perpetrators are terribly sympathetic characters. At least two have them have previously been arrested and charged with serious offenses. The other two had been arrested for non-violent offenses. The van in which the disabled man was (voluntarily) picked up and transported to the apartment where he was assaulted was allegedly stolen.
There's no doubt a crime was committed here, there's no doubt that the people in the video behaved in a despicable manner. There's no excusing this. These people were not raised right.
But I don't know why they were shouting about Trump. I don't know whether they were sincerely involved in some sort of misguided act of political dissent or whether they were just yelling nonsense. Maybe they thought that the anti-Trump rhetoric would inoculate them from criticism from people (like me) who are anxious about our President Elect. Maybe they thought they could effectively affect political change by abusing a man with diminished mental capacities. Maybe they (wrongly) believed their acts were justified.
I don't believe any of that. I think they were bullies, who thought that it would be fun to publicly humiliate someone who may have believed he was among friends. I don't think there's anything sophisticated or complicated about the attack. I think it's just the sort of stupid sad thing that unhappy people with impoverished imaginations and little empathy can get up to when they get a little high and feel a little bulletproof.
And while we can debate the reasons that our society produces so many people like this, we probably can't, with any degree of precision, ascribe any particular motive to this sort of ugly transgression. Did they choose their victim because he was white, because he was a Trump supporter? Who knows? I doubt it. It more likely had to do with his pliability, the ease with which they could dupe him, but maybe it simply came down to the fact that he was available when they wanted to make a show of their capacity for cruelty.
My point is it doesn't--and shouldn't--matter. What we ought to address in court is the offense committed, not the unknowable spinnings of four discrete minds. By all means, let's consider any mitigating circumstances, let's allow those accused to defend themselves in any way they see fit, but the law doesn't need to understand or censure the failures of conscience that lead people to do bad things. All it needs to consider are the bad things things themselves.
And it should go without saying that this works both ways. While it may very well be true that some of us are more likely to be targeted by bigots than others, it is dangerous to suggest that some lives matter more than others. (The better, more accurate slogan would have been "black lives matter too" for that's what people really mean when they invoke the phrase; to pretend otherwise is to engage in disingenuous debate.)
It's fair to pay particular attention to vulnerable targets and to try to protect those subject to attacks based on their inherent physical characteristics or the dictates of their conscience. But we shouldn't assume hate informs every atrocity, or makes any particular atrocity somehow worse. When you're being kicked in the face it doesn't much matter whether your attacker is acting out of racial disgust, self-loathing or odd detachment --it hurts just the same.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/10/2017