Law Commons^™

Bias Crime: A Call For Alternative Responses, Abraham Abramovsky

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The argument for enacting laws to punish and deter bias crime does not always benefit from clear and unambiguous examples of bias driven murder. A frustrating factor in some of the widely publicized reports of bias-related assault is the element of ambiguity: where a member of one race or religion injures a member of another race or religion, even perhaps articulating the difference between attacker and victim by means of an expletive or other statement, the question inevitably arises whether the attack was the product of bias alone, or did other factors, such as an intent to rob or rape, …