PHOTO | LUKE BRASWELL

North Carolina, like most southern states, have limited enhancements or legal enforcement for hate crimes. Among four states in the U.S. with no hate crime laws, three – South Carolina, Georgia and Arkansas – are in the South.

Hate crime pays in North Carolina.

Reports of bias crimes have spiked over the last four years, especially in the South, where the legal response is generally weaker because of impotent or nonexistent state laws. That lack of prosecutorial muscle has drawn new attention after the Feb. 23 shooting death of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.

State prosecutors declined to press charges against former Brunswick police officer Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, who shot Arbery during a confrontation in the street. The killing became a national story with the release of a video showing the McMichaels initiating contact with Arbery after he ran around their pickup truck. After local prosecutors recused themselves from the case by citing their relationship with the elder McMichael, the pair were charged last week with murder and assault with a deadly weapon.
Georgia’s attorney general referred the matter to the U.S. Justice Department for investigation under federal law.

Four states — South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, and Wyoming — lack any state hate crime statute. Georgia passed a law in 2000, but did not define protected categories such as race, sexual orientation or religion, and four years later the state Supreme Court struck the legislation down as “unconstitutionally vague.”

As a result, there’s no state hate crime law to charge Arbery’s assailants.

Bias crimes motivated by race, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability were up 17% nationally in 2018, according to the FBI. Such incidents in North Carolina were up 12% in 2017 to 166 known hate crimes, compared to 148 the previous year. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would expand the state’s hate crimes law to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity and disability, stalled in General Assembly committees.

“I don’t understand why,” said Rep. Nasif Majeed, a Charlotte Democrat who sponsored the bill in the lower chamber. “I thought we as a body of legislators should send a strong message to people that we don’t tolerate hate crimes.”

Three Democrats – Sens. Jay Chaudhuri of Wake County, Valerie Foushee of Orange, and Mujtaba Mohammed of Mecklenburg – are co-sponsors of the upper chamber bill, which would add a felony bias enhancement and require creation of a hate crime reporting database at the State Bureau of Investigation and training for law enforcement and prosecutors. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore did not respond to emails seeking comment.

North Carolina’s current statute prosecutes hate crimes as a misdemeanor.

Vulnerable in the South
Prosecuting bias crime can be difficult even with hate crime laws because statutes don’t necessarily recognize all categories of people that can be targets.

Most states generally assign race, religion and national origin as reasons for hate crimes, but according to a 2018 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, 13 exclude sexual orientation and 33 don’t include gender identity. North Carolina ignores both. The probe noted that while some states make it possible to charge suspects with a hate crime specifically, others provide only increased sentences for an underlying crime, such as murder, assault or vandalism.

Of 10 southern states that have hate crime laws, four – North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia – don’t add enhanced penalties for sexual orientation. No southern state has penalties for crimes committed because of gender identity. In 2018, 55% of the transsexual women reported to have been killed in the U.S. lived in the South, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Barring a change of mind by Republican lawmakers, hate crime legislation will likely remain stalled in North Carolina. But Democrats, who have an opportunity to seize control of the House because of redrawing of district lines as the result of a lawsuit, aren’t giving up.

“We’re in the minority in the House,” Majeed said. “It died in committee and that’s how [the Republican majority] do. “Since they have the majority, they have control of the committees. It’ll never get to the floor with the current configuration.”

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