-- JessicaCohen - 20 Apr 2010 Earlier today, a jury on Long Island convicted a 19-year-old of manslaughter in the killing of an Ecuadorean immigrant. According to media reports, he and four friends had been "beaner-hopping" - a shockingly crude term for cruising around looking for Mexicans and other Hispanics to target with violence - when the defendant stabbed Marcelo Lucero. The incident brought national attention to growing racism by whites (mainly) against Hispanic/Latinos, immigrants and non-.

It got me thinking...Should hate crimes be punished with increased sentences? Such charges often come with higher sentences than the same conduct does without the "hate" element. I always thought that we had hate crimes because when you attack someone because he's Hispanic or gay or White (etc etc) you're attacking the entire community, rather than that one individual. Does this make sense? Taking criminal law now, it's hard to square "hate" with traditional mens rea requirements...does such a murder connect back to traditional common law notions of malice? In other words, do our modern frameworks fail in this respect?

I guess we could say that a person who commits a hate crime should face a high sentence for general deterrence purposes - society I'm sure agrees that killing or hurting someone because he has X characteristic is societally loathsome.