re debating special hate crimes laws in article apr midway uchicago edu thf midway uchicago edu said this sort of separate treatment by the law has no place in an equal society the solution to the fact that some classes are more vulnerable to attack or discrimination is to do what has always been done in response to imbalances in criminal activity and citizen protection to allocate law enforcement resources to more efficiently and effectively deal with the problems not to rewrite the law itself wdstarr so how do you feel about increased penalties for killing a policeman a federal employee or to use both scalia s and stevens s example increased penalties for threatening the president i m assuming that like all good people you oppose the marital exemption for rape so i won t bring that up in order of your questions i oppose it i oppose it i oppose it and huh wha where did that topic come from and what s it got to do with the discussion at hand when i was discussing the concept of different criminal laws for crimes against different classes of people and yes i do consider laws which allow mandate enhanced penalties following conviction based upon the convict s attitudes towards the class membership of the victim to fit into that category the category of classes i had in mind was that of the standard civil rights discussion classes based upon race gender ethnicity religion sexual orientation etc having you ask about classes based upon one s profession rather than one s personal characteristics caught me off guard and i had to think out the question from scratch what i finally decided was that the law should not recognize such classes because to do so would be to formally and officially declare some people to be of more worth than others and that would be anathema to the underlying american concept of equal treatment under the law last year when a federal crime bill was under consideration which would have expanded the federal death penalty to an additional fifty plus crimes including the murder of various federal officers hitherto not protected by that aura of deterrence critics pointed out the absurdity of having laws which made the death penalty available for the murder of a federal postal inspector but not for ther murder of a civilian teacher when the latter arguably provided a much more valueable service and therefore would be the greater loss to society this was an emotionally compelling argument but even the proponents of that viewpoint appeared to tacitly assume that the state should judge some lives as being more valuable than others on the basis of their contribution to society i view that doctrine as being both a personally repugnant and b repugnant to the equal protection clause of the th amendment accordingly i believe that there should be no laws which give any profession based class of people special protection via the mechanism of supplying stronger statutory deterrence of crimes against members of that class not even police officers federal officers or high ranking members of the executive branch of the federal government william december starr wdstarr athena mit edu
