NCJ Number
183630
Date Published
2000
Length
17 pages
Annotation
The 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming, produced a vocal and widespread demand for more powerful hate crime laws and for a tempering of the anti-gay rhetoric of conservatives.
Abstract
In another case in Pennsylvania in 1987, a gay individual was murdered by two men who were later sentenced to death for the crime. At the same time, anti-gay violence organizations reported several cases in which such homicides resulted in relatively light sentences. The author believes that current academic and popular representations of violence in the United States tend to obscure institutional violence of an epistemological nature, specifically, violence exercised by the state. Current ways of understanding violence contribute to the tendency of those working against hate crimes to settle for oversimplified formulations of identity. The resulting constructions of hate crimes permit an enduring and fatal rationalization referred to as the separation of bias from violence. The author offers suggestions on how hate crimes can be conceptualized differently to call attention to the more complex interactions between violence, identity, and the law. 32 notes