The hate crimes package disappears from the House of Representatives committee

Michigan House lawmakers voted the hate crimes legislation out of a state House committee on Tuesday.

Currently, the state has no hate crimes law. The closest we come is the 1988 law banning ‘ethnic harassment’.

It prohibits intimidating or threatening anyone because of their race, color, religion, sex and national origin. The bill moving out of committee would update that policy by adding protections for sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, age, ethnicity and association with any of the listed groups.

Package co-sponsor Noah Arbit (D-West Bloomfield) said targeting someone because of a perceived identity deserves additional punishment.

“We cannot introduce a bill that will end racism, or Islamophobia, or anti-Semitism, or transphobia, or whatever. But what we can do is tackle hatred when it is accompanied by a criminal offence. That is the scope of these laws,” Arbit said during the House Criminal Justice Committee meeting on Tuesday.

The package would include different penalties depending on the nature of the violation and the cost of property damage.

However, any violation would be considered a misdemeanor.

Arbit had helped shepherd another hate crime package through the House of Representatives last year. But it stalled in the Senate over concerns about freedom of speech.

Critics of that earlier package believed its test was too ambiguous to determine whether something fell under the category of a hate crime. Among the concerns was a phrase that referred to threats “by word or deed” to commit any of the prohibited actions.

Arbit said the new version of the package takes extra care to protect freedom of expression.

“While freedom of expression, including hate speech, does exist, is a protected right: no one has a constitutional right to commit a criminal offense, or threaten to commit a criminal offense, against anyone else … because of how they look, how they speak, how they worship or who they love,” Arbit said.

The new package would explicitly prohibit the use of violence, causing bodily harm, stalking, and damaging someone’s property to make ‘real threat’ to do any of these things based on the identities mentioned.

A ‘true threat’ would be identified as ‘a statement in which the speaker intends to convey a serious expression of intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a particular individual or group of individuals, including unlawful material damage to the property of a particular person or group of individuals. a particular individual or group of individuals.”

It would apply to “communication with reckless disregard,” but not if the person was unaware that their words could be construed as such threats.

The new package is now before the full House of Representatives awaiting further action.

Meanwhile, another similar version of the new hate crimes legislation that the Senate previously passed remains in the House committee.