Three teens involved in vicious hate crime to be given probation

Deleted User wrote: »

So your new and correct definition just described genocide as a mass hate crime yet you refuse to accept that hate crime exists or should be legislated.

I don't think it should be treated than any other form of mass murder or conspiracy to mass murder. Let's suppose I plan to kill 4.5 million Irish people and succeed in killing 2 million. If I was charged with 2 million counts of murder and a further 2.5 million counts of attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder, the subsequent sentencing would surely prevent any re-offending, as would the sentencing for conspiracy to murder 4.5 million people if I succeeded in killing nobody.

I feel this is a massive straw man anyway. Genocide and hate crime are not the same thing. Genocide can only be analogous to mass murder (or conspiracy to mass murder) on the same scale - whereas a hate crime can involve any number of people from one to thousands.

My point is, if I get assaulted because someone saw that I had a fancy smartphone and wanted it, or I get assaulted because someone overheard my Irish accent and has a problem with Irish people, at the end of the day I've been assaulted and whatever scumbag assaulted me will do so again because a scumbag is a scumbag. I genuinely don't see further defining this as helpful in any way - not if we want to reach a point in society where demographic becomes irrelevant.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

My point is, if I get assaulted because someone saw that I had a fancy smartphone and wanted it, or I get assaulted because someone overheard my Irish accent and has a problem with Irish people, at the end of the day I've been assaulted and whatever scumbag assaulted me will do so again because a scumbag is a scumbag. I genuinely don't see further defining this as helpful in any way - not if we want to reach a point in society where demographic becomes irrelevant.

So you don't see a difference between someone who's motive is to get your smartphone, and someone who's motive is to actually hurt you?

By that logic, you should also not care if you are hurt by accident, or if you are hurt on purpose by someone.

I'd love to see how you'd react to a 2 year old running over your toes on their tricycle.

Arsemageddon wrote: »

The initial attack started because the lad was gay (clue for ya - It's in the headline to the story)

A hate crime is a crime motivated by racial, sexual, religious or other prejudice. In countries which have hate crime legislation it means the guilty party gets a harsher sentence. The rationale behind this approach is blindingly obvious.

As for 'all crime is hate crime', I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Any chance you might explain?

I suspect they had no motivation at all, if it hadn't been that family it would have been sombody else that they goaded into a reaction so that they could have their 'fun'.
Personally I hate the whole notion of hate crimes and the hierarchy of victimhood it creates, though obviously I feel a stronger gut reaction to an assault when it involves a vunerable person and I think that should absolutely be a factor that is taken into account when it comes to sentencing.

There's no shortage of people that live in a constant state of fear in their own homes thanks to roaming gangs of feral kids that own and terrorize some neighbourhoods. I spoke to a guy on a course once that was in the process of moving house, he sold up after a year of being terrorised by a gang of eight or nine 12-16yr olds. It started with him asking them to move on because they were making a lot of noise drinking outside his house and sitting on his garden wall. That simple request meant he could no longer park in his own area (car vandalised twice), had his windows broken, had a hole kicked in his front door and all kinds of really, really vile things said to his wife and daughter who would be taunted by these teens when they walked down the street. He lived under a constant threat of violence and becaues of the age of those involved the police couldn't or wouldn't do anything.

The problem isn't the lack of hate crime legislation, the problem is the utter abandonment of whole comunities by the authorities who have left good people and many, old, vunerable and defenseless individuals at the mercy of these depraved and violent thugs. Address that and you'll find the only legislation you need is already on the statute books.
The truth is, and the guards admitted it to the guy, that there is no place to put these kids so the courts can't lock them up and the counsel won't evict them because that would be just moving the problem along and again, they don't have enough social housing to move them to anyway.

If this problem is to get fixed it needs comunity policing, specialist detension centers built for young offenders and I'd suggest the dutch model of 'scum towns' built out of shipping containers where you get dumped if you're evicted from counsel housing because of anti-social behaviour. The chilling reality is that people like those girls do the things they do because there's no real sanction on them, and yes things like this happen all the time, they just don't get reported because it doesn't involve a jucy headline like 'hate crime against gay teen'.

yoke wrote: »

So you don't see a difference between someone who's motive is to get your smartphone, and someone who's motive is to actually hurt you?

Not if both of the aforementioned do me a serious head injury and land me in hospital. The end result is that I've been landed in hospital with a serious head injury.

By that logic, you should also not care if you are hurt by accident, or if you are hurt on purpose by someone.

This makes absolutely no sense. No person who violently assaults you is doing so "by accident". They chose to attack you and try to do you a serious injury, whether that be in order to get your stuff or in order to feel like they've satisfied some sick desire to hurt a certain demographic.

I'd love to see how you'd react to a 2 year old running over your toes on their tricycle.

Sure, because opposing certain laws is totally the same thing as not believing in the age of majority
If an adult ran over my toes on his or her bike because they'd run a red light, I'd certainly want to see some kind of dangerous driving charge implemented. This one is a particularly sore point for me to be honest as my daily walk to and from college is riddles with light breaking gob****es who render green men entirely redundant.

bb1234567 wrote: »

Stupid, we need to recognise certain crimes as hate crimes to determine increased risks that certain minorities have of being abused over the average person.

I'd tend to disagree, as I mentioned in my previous post I dislike the devisivenes of the notion of hate crimes and hierarchy of victimhood it creates. I believe that equality before the law means just that and assault is assault regardless of the motivation.
Take two theoretical examples, two innocent men are targeted, one because the thug that attacks him believes that he his a gay man, the other is a victim of a purely random attack.
The first manages to brush it off and refuses to allow himself to be disuaded from expressing who he is regardless of what some mindless thug thinks, the other has his confidence badly shattered and begins to suffer panic attacks and agrophobia which makes him reluctant to even leave his own home.
I would argue that a stiffer sentence is due to the perpetrator of the second attack then would be the case for the first.
When it comes to addressing how to deal with such assaults, I don't think clasifying the crimes differently is the right thing to do. I would address the complex issues involved by making it mandatory for a judge to take into account a victim impact statement when it came to sentencing people that have commited crimes against a person like assault and intimidation. In that way the victim, who often is forgotten as soon as a verdict is arrived at, returns to the center of the notion of justice and the judge can consider additional penelties based on other factors related to the crime.
So in the first case, if the young man in question is now afraid to be open about his sexuality because he fears an assault, that should be taken into account. It would be the same for the young man suffering agrophobia and panic attacks. The judge would have to look beyond the cuts and bruses and consider the devastating impact the attack has had on his life when sentencing the criminal.
I would also consider it proper that the judge could also take into account broader societal implications of the crime (because crime doesn't happen outside a society and does have implications for it), if for example ther had been a spate of attacks on gay people then it would be right for the judge to consider a harsher sentence because of the broader chilling effect such an attack would have for members of the gay comunity. In other words, let the punishment fit the crime rather then tailoring a crime to punish sombody based on the percived motivation for the crime, or making the motivation a crime in and of itself, because when you start down that road you can end up going in some scary Orwellian directions.
I really don't know of course, there are many complex issues at play and I don't have all the answers, but I do feel that enacting such hate legislation is a move in the wrong direction and feels tokenistic and unlikely to address the actual root causes of a problem and possibly even makes them worse.

Little CuChulainn wrote: »

http://www.herald.ie/news/mum-kicked-and-burned-by-girls-after-defending-her-son-from-gay-abuse-31025969.html

Well, as long as they apologise very nicely. I realise that these girls are under 18 and have no previous but this seems excessively lenient for the nature of the crime. Do you think they should get off without a recorded conviction?

no . these bits of vermin are a danger and need to be off the streets

lazybones32 wrote: »

Is a "hate crime" different from a "love crime"?

Drunken teens will probably start on anyone who they think couldn't kick the $hit out of them. Who can say it was motivated by sexuality?
The same probably would have happened if he was straight but that story wouldn't be newsworthy...

Probably but they were shouting homophobic slurs at the families house so it appears like a hate crime, even if it wasn't and they would have attacked regardless of whether the son was gay or not.

I really have to stop reading this thread because it is making me irrationally angry.

The justice system in this country is an absolute joke and that judge is a disgrace.

the judges hand are probably tied by the laws, he didn't make them, can only enforce them.

these girls behaved in an appalling way and if they don't get sent to jail, then they should be on their best behaviour for the rest of their lives because if they leatned nothing from this then heaven help anyone who has to deal with them in the future.

as they are under 18, the parents should be held somewhat responsible too. seems to me that a bit of work teaching them to be proper humans is on the cards hopefully.

shameful behaviour though