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Wednesday, April 28, 2004 Punishing hate crimes more harshly than others -- as Canada's Criminal Code now requires -- contains within it a troubling logic, as a case now unfolding in a California courtroom illustrates. In October 2002, Gwen Araujo was a 17-year-old woman with a secret: She was actually a young man. Born Edward Araujo Jr. in a town near San Francisco, Gwen had grown up feeling it was a mistake that she had a man's body. When she turned 14, she started dressing and presenting herself as a woman. But inevitably, there were rumours. One night at a house party with friends, a girl who had heard the rumours reached under Araujo's skirt and discovered Gwen's secret. For the next two hours, say prosecutors, four young men Araujo thought were friends beat her savagely. Finally, they strangled her and bashed her head with a shovel to ensure she was dead. It was a hideous crime, but it has become something more. Transvestite and transsexual activists have held it up as a symbol of the discrimination and violence they too often suffer. It was not just a crime, they say. It was a hate crime. The case has become notorious throughout California, in part because of its apparent similarities to the murder of Teena Brandon, which was depicted in the movie Boys Don't Cry. But it's also generating controversy because of a bizarre debate that underscores the problem with the very concept of "hate crimes." The lawyer for three of the accused men -- one has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter -- argues that while the murder was a hateful crime, it was not a "hate crime." Two of the men had previously had sexual relations with Araujo, he argues, and they felt betrayed by the revelation that she was biologically male. The lawyer likens it to a man who kills his unfaithful wife not because he hates women but because he hates this woman. Some criminologists agree. Hate crimes are often attacks by strangers, they say, because the criminal goes out looking for any member of the group he hates. Araujo's murder does not fit the pattern. To us, this is all esoteric and futile. Araujo's murderers committed an evil act and they did so out of hate -- whether hate for her or hate for transsexuals. Thus, they must be punished accordingly. Everything else is academic. It is absurd, even offensive, to suggest that the murder of Gwen Araujo would be less serious if the murderers only hated this transsexual and not any transsexual. Yet this is precisely the logic of hate crime laws. That logic is not only flawed, it is unnecessary. Value all people equally,
and punish accordingly, and there is no need to single out groups in the
criminal law. |