Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 25, 1993 TAG: 9309020321
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN LEVIN and ALLAN C. ROSENBERG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The court's position stands in proud contrast to the agitation at universities across the country to silence those whose often offensive views do not comport with the political orthodoxy on campus.
In ``Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed,'' professors Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt of Northeastern University set forth a strong case that crimes motivated by hatred are qualitatively different from ``ordinary'' crimes. Bias crimes are more likely to involve violence and to require hospitalization. These crimes often occur serially and involve multiple attackers.
Bias crimes directly and forcefully interfere with the exercise of the victims' civil rights and spread terror throughout entire communities. At their worst, bias crimes can engulf a city in a continuing cycle of violence - witness the reaction in Los Angeles to the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny.
As in other areas of criminal law, in which more harmful crimes are typically punished more severely, the Supreme Court has conclusively recognized the right of the states to counteract the increased personal and social damages that result from crimes motivated by hatred.
The chief justice differentiated the Wisconsin statute from a St. Paul ordinance that the court struck down last year in the case R.A.V. vs. St. Paul. The St. Paul law prohibited the burning of crosses and the use of other offensive symbols in certain circumstances.
The Wisconsin statute addresses only conduct that was already criminal, and, unlike St. Paul's ordinance, it does not punish the defendant's underlying beliefs. Consistent with living in an open and free society, people who hate remain free to express their bigotry in any legal way they wish.
The Mitchell decision leaves intact what Justice William J. Brennan Jr. set forth in Texas vs. Johnson as the ``bedrock principle'' that underlies the First Amendment: ``Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.''
The Supreme Court's R.A.V. decision rightly dealt a fatal blow to the ``hate speech codes'' in force at many public universities. Even the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, which conducted an extensive victimization survey in 1989 and found that nearly one of every four minority students at predominantly white colleges was abused or harassed because of prejudice, maintains that bigoted and hurtful speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Knowledge is a far more potent weapon than any speech code could ever be. ``Nigger,'' ``kike'' and ``dyke'' simply do not exist in the public discourse of most of us who have been affected by ``The Diary of Anne Frank'' or the Rev. Martin Luther King's ``Letter From a Birmingham City Jail.'' Universities should not muzzle the ignorant; they should educate them.Stanford Law School Professor Gerald Gunther, a First Amendment scholar, profoundly expressed these ideas when he wrote: ``The lesson I have drawn from my childhood in Nazi Germany and my happier adult life in this country is the need to walk the sometimes difficult path of denouncing the bigots' hateful ideas with all my power, yet at the same time challenging any community's attempt to suppress hateful ideas by force of law.''
It is an unfortunate fact that bias-crime laws are needed now more than ever. A 1993 Stanford study shows that, although reported hate crimes increased about 20 percent across the country in 1992, only about 1 percent of offenders are ever brought to justice.
Victims are reluctant to report bias incidents, police are often unaware of the nature of these crimes, and the laws in most states are too weak or too narrow to achieve adequate deterrence. In New York, for instance, gays are disproportionately murdered and assaulted in hate incidents, yet the law does not cover sexual orientation. Delaware, which has a notable Ku Klux Klan presence, has not yet passed a hate-crime law other than one dealing with church desecration.
The lesson to be learned from the Supreme Court's stance is clear: Hate crimes are a completely different story from hate speech. The state may not punish people for their beliefs, but it has an obligation to deter the status-based violation of civil rights. This obligation, like the constitutional obligation to protect free expression from government censorship, is inviolable.
\ Brian Levin, is legal affairs director for the Center for the Study of Ethnic and Racial Violence, and the principal author of two briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the Mitchell case. Allan C. Rosenberg is an associate at the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in Los Angeles. They wrote this article for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
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