More on Nooses

I think a lot of people have the idea that anything that personally offends you is somehow a hate crime. I see newspaper accounts of the controversy in Jena, Alabama, which quite baldly state that the problem is that three white kids went unpunished for committing a "hate crime" (hanging nooses in a tree on the school playground) while six black kids were charged with attempted murder for an "altercation" with a white student. Actually it was a good deal more than mere altercation. An altercation is an argument with a lot of back-and-forth including perhaps some shoving or shouting. There was no argument between the white student in the black students in the Jena assault. The white kid walks out the door, blam, he gets hit in the head with a vicious blindside shot he never saw coming, falls to the ground, hits his head on the concrete, is rendered unconscious, and gets the shit kicked out of him.

As for the three white students who hung the nooses not being punished, the fact of the matter is they were punished. They were kicked out of school (it was later reduced to a suspension), and assigned to an alternative school for the rest of the year. It's true they weren't criminally prosecuted. But so what? No one ended up in the hospital as a result of their hanging the nooses. Apparently a lot of the students, including blacks, thought they were all great fun.

The final and most important point: what the kids did was not a crime. According to the district attorney there is no state law against hanging nooses from a tree. It is not a crime. It only becomes a hate crime if you do that in conjunction with something that is actually against the law, say giving someone a blindside shot he never saw coming.

That brings up another point. Apparently in New York city the law is different. As soon as a noose was found hanging from a doorknob of a black Columbia University professor, the NYPD hate crimes unit was assigned to the case. I wonder what would have happened if the professor had found a slip not instead of a noose hanging from her doorknob. Nooses are illegal but what about slipknots. Suppose it was a knot that didn't slide. We used to practice tying knots in the Boy Scouts that were specifically designed not to slide. That way you could tie them around your waist when being lowered down a cliff or winched up to a helicopter without having all the air squeezed out of you.

What if it's not a knot at all? What if somebody had just hung the section of rope over the door? Is that a hate crime? Suppose it wasn't rope, but merely heavy string? What if it was rope but it wasn't hanging on the doorknob but rather lying on the floor in front of the door? Suppose it wasn't in front of the door but across the hall? What if it was was 30 feet down the hall? What if the rope was hanging from a tree in front of the building in which the professor's office was located? If we are going to define hate crimes these are things we should know. What does the law say? Is the law an ass?