In recent weeks, black and Hispanic students at Trinity International University, a small Christian school located just outside Chicago, have been the unhappy recipients of threatening letters. The letters targeted the students for racial reasons, and contained personal threats of violence. Last Thursday, after a black woman student received a letter that threatened to harm her with a weapon, authorities became so worried for the safety of minority students that they evacuated dozens of them from campus; they returned to classes yesterday. Today the rash of hate crimes at Trinity International has been solved. The perpetrator was a black female student who did not want to be at the school, and who created an elaborate hate crime hoax to try to convince her parents that the school was too dangerous for her to attend. Alicia Hardin is a nineteen-year-old Chicago native. After confessing yesterday, she was charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and a felony hate crime; if convicted, she could do five years in prison.

UPDATE: Now she says she didn't do it.

I do not support the concept of 'hate crimes' (aren't all crimes based in some sort of malice or ill will?). I can see it appropriately being used as an aggrivating factor in sentencing for some act that is itself illegal, but as a stand alone it seems to cross the line into 'thought crime'.

I agree with krm here. But Ms. Hardin certainly found a way out of that school. The downside is that she now may receive an opportunity to study for free.

"Aren't all crimes based in some sort of malice or ill will?"

Yeah, and "racism" is simply a particular form of //intense dislike//; "misogyny" is simply //advocacy of superior persons//; and "homophobia" is simply //pro-procreation//.

"Hate crimes" are mislabelled. In general they target crimes against individuals that have the effect of intimidating some larger group. That is terrorism, and we have laws agianst terrorism already, with the difference that most people consider them uncontroversial and support them.

Jim, I thought of terrorism too, and I wondered if 9/11 had forever co-opted that word for us.

If you have to distinguish between the two, I think the differentiation between Terrorism and "Hate Crimes" is the intended scale. A "Hate Crime" would affect the target only or the small local group of people by which he or she was singled out. Thus, spraypainting "Blacks off Campus" or the "N-Word" on a given Penn State african american studnet's door would only directly affect that student or blacks at 'State but not students at Dickinson or Bucknell. Meanwhile, 9/11 however was not directed just against New Yorkers.

That said, splitting hairs gets tricky. By that argument a consiglieri for the Klan could argue that burning that cross on the Smith's yard for trying to get out the vote was directed only at the Smiths and not any other "uppidty blacks" in town or the region. That's a pretty well greased slope.

So to overuse another overly-used term, Terrorism is Fractal. It's scale invariant.

(I think the other thing this case brings up is what do we do with students where, even despite our best efforts at providing mentoring and retention and positive "freshmen experiences," some students just DON'T really want to be there, and are there because their parents are still holding their strings. I know of cases where studnets have scuttled their academic careers because they wanted to go somewhere else, while their parents demanded that they go to a school that had nothing for them as far as their desired degree.)

Punish folk for acts not thoughts or stupid, verbal, racist, sexist, genderist, and agist public expression. We should use shunning against the bigots in this world; we should socially isolate them. When they act illegally, isolate them physically for life. Premeditated Homicide deserves a life sentence with no chance of parole.

There's not a lot of information about why this girl is at a college where she's miserable. Maybe her parents are making her go there, maybe she threw a fit to go there and regrets it now, and couldn't bring herself to tell her parents that.

Motivation tends to be accounted for in the penalty phase of most legal proceedings, save hate crimes (and rarely actionable crimes like treason, sedition, etc). Making hate crimes its own category amounts to an attempt at thought control. Punish people for what they do, not for what they think: isn't this a basic tenet of a free society?

Luther, I agree. I've always thought the "hate crime" concept was dangerously close to thought police.

We can articulate why what this girl did was bad. She created an atmosphere of fear and distrust, and cost the school a lot of money (putting minority students up in a hotel, which was the right thing to do). And she did all this for selfish, immature reasons. So what do you call that?