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The Consequences Of Hate Crimes

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Something as powerful as discriminations creates a new category of criminal offenses. This is where we chalk up the term, a hate crime. The definition, provided by the Community Relations Service of the US Department of Justice, it is “a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.” (pg. 1) Hate crimes are typically different in the fact that they usually involve arson, vandalism, physical and verbal abuse, verbal threats of causing harm to install a sense of fear into the chosen victim. Due to the obvious fact of hate crimes, it leaves an affect on the victim that echoes through their thoughts throughout their whole life that could cause disorders like PTSD. When studied we find a pattern in the chosen victims among the LGBT community that are compared to victims of rape. When a hate crime is committed, the perpetrator often claims that the blame lays on the victim and that they deserved to be attacked. Fortunately, our judicial system created sentence enhancement for those who commit a hate crime (Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act 1993).
While some states have installed the us of the sentence enhancement and even added their own statutes in the mix, there are some who have not adopted this. There are 15 states that

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