When Is a Hate Crime Not a Hate Crime?

On Thursday, February 2, just after midnight, Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old high school dropout, entered Puzzles Lounge. After being served two drinks, Robida asked if it was “a gay bar.” When told that it was, he assaulted patrons with a handgun and a hatchet, wounding three men, two seriously. He fled home, left a note for his mother that apologized and expressed his love, but added, “I have to go out by my means.” He then took her car, picked up his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Bailey in West Virginia, and drove to Arkansas where he shot and killed a part-time police officer. After a 16-mile chase, Robida crashed his car and then shot Bailey in the head before he shot himself. He died the following day. 

According to news reports, when New Bedford police searched Robida’s bedroom they found “homemade posters disparaging African-Americans and Jews, neoNazi literature and skinhead paraphernalia,” as well as an empty coffin.  

The first response to the attacks—by police, the media, and spokespeople for gay groups—was that this was a “hate crime” that specifically targeted homosexuals. Although Bristol District Attorney Paul F. Walsh Jr. has stated that Robida seemed to have no connections to any known groups that promoted anti-Semitic, racist, or anti-gay ideology, filling one’s bedroom with Nazi regalia suggests at least a serious predisposition to social malignity.  

After the attacks, the media reached out to national gay spokespeople such as Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), who stated that “the hatred and loathing fueling” the New Bedford attacks “is not innate, it is learned” from the likes of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Reverend Pat Robertson, and others on the Christian right who are “obsessed with homosexuality.” Clarence Patton, the acting executive director of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, argued that such violence was a reaction to queer political organizing: “It happened in Massachusetts during the fight to secure same-sex marriage rights, it happened in San Francisco for the same reasons.” Neil G. Giuliano, president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), saw the New Bedford incident as an attack on the entire gay community: “This act of defamation highlights the need for all of us to do what we can to combat the hatred and bigotry our community still faces.” 

Over the past three decades we have created the term “hate crime”—a violent, or sometimes simply verbal, expression of vehement and vicious dislike for a specific group. We have a federal law that adds extra sentencing penalties to crimes that target people because of race, religion, and nationality; 22 states include sexual orientation as a protected category. There has been a decade-long fight by gay rights groups to include sexual orientation in the federal law, although there is almost no evidence that these laws function as a deterrent. Up until last May, the ACLU had opposed federal legislation for fear that it would interfere with protected free speech. Other civil liberty groups argue that hate crime legislation is discriminatory and selective in the categories they protect. For instance, vigilantism against suspected or convicted criminals—say sex offenders—would not be a hate crime. 

Interestingly, gender, despite the struggle by many feminist groups to become a protected classification in many states, is almost never used in cases of rape or domestic violence. If it were, rape could be classified as a hate crime directed specifically against women and the criminal penalties for rape and sexual assault—almost all against men—would increase tremendously.  

But the biggest problem with hate-crime legislation is that it is predicated on the idea that physical and verbal attacks against protected groups are all fueled by ideological animus. The reality is that not all violence against gay people is, by its nature, homophobic or ideologically hateful. Matt Foreman’s blaming Pat Robertson and his cohorts for the Puzzles Lounge attacks feels wildly off-base. Such easy connections between words and actions are not only difficult to prove but often specious and selectively constructed. People may argue that there was a particular animus against homosexuals in this case. After all, when Robida went into Puzzles Lounge that Thursday night he asked if it was a gay bar. But given that we now know that Robida was on a suicide trip, Puzzles Lounge may well have been the easiest available outlet for his hate-filled emotions. 

Robida was a poor, high-school dropout living in an economically devastated city. The Boston Globe reported that New Bedford social services investigated complaints that he was neglected. He lived alone with his mother who was blind and physically disabled, confined to a wheelchair. News reports quote Robida’s friends—including lesbians—who claim he never said anything negative about homosexuals. While people should be held responsible for their actions, if we are going to deal effectively with this kind of violence, we are going to have to understand it better in all its manifestations. 

The case of Jacob Robida raises questions about not only how we look at—and classify—violence, but also how we deal with it legally. Hate crime legislation is intended to deter crimes against specific groups of people by adding extra prison time—usually called “penalty enhancement”—to their sentences for the “intent” to harm people based on ideological animus. Like all laws they are imperfect. It is not clear if Robida would have been tried under hate crime legislation since he never vocalized a specific animus against homosexuals at the time of the crime (or elsewhere in his life, on-line, or in the personal effects in his room). It is clear that hate crime laws did not deter Robida from his violent attack and if he had gone to prison for these actions he probably would have been denied the basic mental health care he needed. 

Did Jacob Robida commit a hate crime? We will never know. Ronald K. Crumpley was the son of a conservative Baptist Christian minister. After the 1980 shootings, many gay groups blamed his family’s religious beliefs for his actions. He was later found to be mentally ill, is still considered dangerous, and is confined to a New York state psychiatric ward. Twenty-five years ago I would have agreed with gay groups and the media that what Crumpley did was a classic hate crime. But as horrifying and deadly as it was, I am not sure I would say that now.