Not long ago, an Asian murder in Manhattan Chinatown, the United States, caused quite a stir in the local Chinese circles. Christina Yuna Lee, a 35-year-old Woman of Korean Descent, was brutally killed in her home early Feb. 13, and suspect Assamad Nash was arrested on the spot.
Nearly a week has passed since the case, and people continue to come to the apartment where Christina lived and use flowers, candles and slogans to express their condolences and build a temporary memorial.
However, on February 16, according to local media reports, residents found that someone had tried to destroy the commemoration, not only smashing candles, tearing up signs but also scattering flowers outside the crime scene. Such a move made the local Chinese feel angry, but also more uneasy in their hearts.
Chen Zuozhou, director of operations for the Chinatown Business Improvement Zone and Common Development Agency, is restoring the makeshift memorial erected for Christina, and he does not want children passing by to see such blasphemy.
In the past, there were incidents such as the death of Ma Yaopan, a Chinese man who was attacked, Gao Huimin, a Chinese woman, who was pushed off the subway platform and killed, and the attack on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and now Christina's case has undoubtedly added new scars to the hearts of the Asian community in New York. Many have called on authorities to focus on hate and violent crimes against Asians and to undertake judicial reforms to curb more crime.
But racial hate crimes have long been difficult to convict. Because police have difficulty finding evidence that the perpetrators poisoned victims for racist reasons, prosecutors are reluctant to try to file racial hate crime charges because they don't want to lose the case. This has led to hate crimes caught in a vicious circle of low numbers, lack of attention from the authorities, and lack of human and material resources, in which the demands of the Asian community are difficult to meet.
Racial hatred and violent crimes have raised concerns among Asians
Since Christina's case, residents of the Chinatown community have been at risk.
Chung Seto, 57, who has lived in New York City's Chinatown for more than 40 years, shared her thoughts with NBC reporters.
"Our community has been neglected for a long time," she said. "Chinatown didn't get financial help after 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, or even during THE CORONAVIRUS. This feeling of abandonment combined with the recent tragedy has made the entire community angry. ”
"I don't feel safe anywhere." YouMe Lin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American woman, said in an interview with NBC: "I felt very suffocated. ”
Audrey Lew, 28, told NBC that the panic had never been stronger than it is now, and no one had thought they would be pushed off the platform. The fear she experienced after Christina's murder was a familiar fear that her parents would warn her from an early age to stay home after dark and never to go home alone. Now "no matter what we do or what kind of self-defense weapons we have, these [tragedies] can happen to us." ”
Mars Nevada, who is of Filipino descent, said she moved from Nebraska to New York in December 2021, but she felt racial hate crimes were already widespread at the time, telling NBC reporters: "You see yourself in other women, [when they're killed] you think, 'God, this could be me.'" ’”
"The other day, I got off at a station and my friend was with me and he said this is where Gao Huimin was killed. I was like, 'Why are you saying that?' They said it was to remind me to remember to stand near the stairs and grab the railing. ”
Glo Lindenmuth, a 29-year-old of Filipino descent, said in an interview: "I used to put pepper spray in my bag, and now I hold it when I walk down the street. I put on heavy boots, not just because of the weather, but also for safety. When walking at night, I often use FaceTime to make video calls to friends or boyfriends. ”
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
According to the Pew Research Center's findings, since 2020, asian-American groups have been more worried about discrimination and violence than before the pandemic.
After the Atlanta spa shooting, the Pew Research Center quickly interviewed 352 Asian-American adults about their views on the social environment.
After counting the results, the researchers found that 32 percent of the respondents were concerned that someone might threaten or attack them, higher than the percentage of African-Americans (21 percent), Latinos (16 percent) and white (8 percent) who feared they had been attacked. Even 81 percent of Asian-American respondents believe that the number of violence against Asians is increasing, and researchers believe that Asian Americans are more insecure than other ethnic groups.
Screenshot from: Pew Research Center
This concern of the Asian community is also largely due to the increasing number of racial hatred and violent crimes experienced by Asian Americans since the outbreak of the epidemic. According to the AAPI Equity Alliance, the alliance received more than 10,370 reports of discrimination against Asians between March 2020 and September 2021.
62.9 per cent of them were verbally harassed and 16.3 per cent were maliciously shunned, and these discrimination incidents occurred in public, 31.2 per cent on the street and 26.8 per cent in the workplace. The feedback report also shows that Asian women like Christina and Gao Huimin are more likely to encounter discrimination incidents, with 62% of discrimination incidents occurring in women.
According to data released by the FBI, it was found that across the United States, hate crimes against Asian-American groups rose by 73% in 2020. While New York City's overall crime rate remains historically low, shootings and incidents of discrimination have risen during the COVID-19 pandemic. The NYPD said the number of incidents of discrimination reported by Asians in New York City rose 4.6-fold from 28 in 2020 to 129 in 2021.
But Manjusha Kulkarni, one of AAPI's founders, thinks there may be more people who experience discrimination or even hate crimes than the FBI counts.
Kurkani said that because some Asian immigrants have language barriers, even if they encounter discrimination incidents, they may not understand or dare not report the case to the police and not be recorded. Some of the more vulnerable Asians will also be afraid of being targeted by the immigration authorities because they do not have legal status, and they will not choose to call the police.
Racial hate crimes are difficult to convict
If the perpetrator is convicted of a hate crime, then he will face a more severe punishment, but the problem is that the current conviction of racial hate crimes in the United States is not only difficult to obtain evidence but also complicated.
In 2009, the U.S. government introduced the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crime Prevention Act, which is a federal offense for victims to cause bodily injury or attempt to use dangerous weapons to harm a victim because of their race, color, religion, ethnic origin, gender, political orientation, gender identity, or disability.
Section 249 of 18 U.S.C., "Crimes and Criminal Proceedings" (18 US Code § 249), sets out the penalty for hate crimes: if the perpetrator causes the death of the victim, attempts to kidnap, sexually abuse, or murder the victim, the penalty is any number of years or life imprisonment.
The crime is a consequence that every Asian-American wants to see, but the problem is that racial hate crimes are difficult to convict, which is one of the reasons for the low number of racial hate crime cases.
Image source: Screenshot of the New York Post report
The FBI made it clear on its website that "hatred is not a crime in itself for the sake of protecting freedoms of speech and other civil liberties." Only when the evidence proves that the victim was targeted by the perpetrator because of his race can the judiciary convict the perpetrator of a racial hatred crime.
Robert Boyce, retired NYPD inspector and ABC news contributor, said law enforcement officers responsible for investigating the motives of crimes often find no evidence and have to abandon investigations into racial hate crimes.
Boyce gave an example of how perpetrators of racial hate crimes would make some racist remarks at the time of the crime, attack victims dressed in national costumes, or the perpetrators left Nazi swastikas, nooses, and other racial symbols at the crime scene. If no evidence of racial discrimination is found at the scene, the police will also look at surveillance footage related to the case, the perpetrator's social media accounts, the perpetrator's past criminal records, and so on. Linking various details to hate crime allegations makes it easier for perpetrators to be convicted.
Boyce told ABC that a judge would not convict the perpetrator of an ethnic hate crime unless law enforcement or prosecutors conducted an in-depth investigation into the perpetrator, or the perpetrator clearly demonstrated a racially discriminatory attitude. He believes that it is not enough to let the victims be "protected", but must comprehensively investigate and crack down on racial hate crimes from the perspective of racial hate crimes, and make all information public so that people can recognize the true face of racial hate criminals.
But on the other hand, Scott McCoy, deputy director of the legal department of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization in the United States, said in an interview with ABC that it is rare for a criminal like that who beats a victim while shouting racial discrimination slogans at the crime scene. If the victim does not report the perpetrator's racial hatred because of a language barrier or because of an attitude of not wanting to make a big deal out of it, law enforcement will not initiate an investigation into the racial hate crime.
McCoy argues that once the successful prosecution of the perpetrators for racial hatred crimes is less likely to be won, the prosecutors will not risk accusing the perpetrators of racial hatred crimes. When the media reported on this case, they would not specifically mention racial hatred crimes, and the masses would lack understanding of the motives and subsequent punishments of racial hate crime offenders. Without social repercussions, the Government will not provide the law enforcement system with additional resources to address racial hate crimes
Others point out that, under the influence of systemic racism, some judicial practitioners themselves harbor unconscious prejudices and that the criteria for the conviction of racial hate crimes are so simple that some perpetrators who are likely to commit racial hate crimes are not accurately convicted.
For example, Robert Aaron Long, the perpetrator of the Atlanta shooting on March 16, 2021, was interrogated only for calling himself a "sex addict" and wanted to shoot massage parlor employees to get rid of the "temptation." Although Lang pleaded guilty to charges of malicious murder, felony murder, attempted murder and aggravated assault, he has repeatedly denied that he killed Asian-American women out of racial and sexist grounds.
Lang's attitude has caused many Asian American women to resent. They argue that linking Asian women working in massage parlors to providing sexual services is itself a deep-seated form of racial and sexism.
But in many similar cases in the United States, even when prosecutors are told of the possibility of racial bias motives in the case, when the courts have already imposed higher sentences on existing criminal offenses, some prosecutors believe that there is little benefit to continuing to prosecute criminals as hate crimes, and they lose the incentive to charge criminals with hate crimes.
Commenting on cases of Asian women victims, Sunny Hostin, ABC News analyst, lawyer and journalist, said they would even deliberately avoid racism when judicial officers tried similar cases. Under the influence of multiple factors, the incarceration of racial hatred crimes will continue to exist.
The "restorative justice" program may solve the problem
It is difficult to convict, perpetrators of racial hate crimes cannot be dealt with as they should be, and the grievances of victims cannot be redressed. Hate crimes not only cause serious physical and psychological harm directly to the victims, but also have a shock to the community.
Stanford University proposes ways to introduce the concept of "restorative justice" in case review to address the issue of racial hate crimes more comprehensively.
Ordinary sentencing belongs to the traditional form of judicial concept, and judicial personnel mainly value three things in the trial, namely", "Which laws and regulations were violated?" "Who violated these laws and regulations?" "How should a person who breaks the law be sentenced?" ”。
Restorative justice differs greatly from traditional criminal justice, paying more attention to the victim's response, noting "who has been harmed?" "What are the needs of the victims?" "Who is responsible for this?" "Why is he responsible for this?" "Whose interests have been affected?" "How to involve the affected people in the resolution of the case?" ”
In light of the dissatisfaction of some minorities with existing racial hate crime statutes and penalties, stanford law scholars have analyzed the characteristics of restorative justice, arguing that this legal concept can be seen from the perspective of minority victims, and even has the opportunity to involve those who also feel that their physical safety has been violated in an environment of thinking about how to punish, educate perpetrators, and safeguard the subsequent rights of victims.
Restorative justice focuses on communicating with offenders and victims, and even community representatives, with the aim of giving perpetrators a clear understanding that their actions have caused harm to the other person and admit that they have indeed done something wrong. At this level of consensus, victims and community representatives can agree with perpetrators on reparations items such as monetary compensation, education, community obligations, crime intervention programs, or accountability for victims of bodily injuries. After that, the perpetrators need to keep their commitments, while the community and the relevant justice departments need to support the physical and mental health of the victims and monitor the perpetrators' implementation of their commitments.
Photo by Giammarco on Unsplash
Scholars who study restorative justice say that when considering traditional criminal justice appeals against perpetrators, restorative justice communication procedures can also be carried out at the same time, and the two different modes of justice will not interfere with each other. Restorative justice often begins after the criminal review process has already begun in the case, such as when the perpetrator has been arrested.
If the perpetrator receives restorative justice, he will have access to the community sentencing circle. Restorative justice generally does not advocate the direct imprisonment of offenders, but rather places greater emphasis on the re-education process of offenders. In the case of racist offenders, the representative of the community involved in the discussion of the case may work with community members, local prosecutors, perpetrators and victims' families to supervise the offender so that he can avoid further harming a member of a particular ethnic group or get rid of racist ideas altogether.
The Stanford report says that when a criminal commits several crimes, each of which could bring him years in prison, the deterrent of incarceration is not so high for him. But restorative justice without imprisonment, punishment, supervision, and education can reduce the likelihood of repeat crimes.
Notably, Canada has introduced restorative justice procedures when minors are suspected of racial hate crimes.
Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper reported in April 2021 that an anti-Semitic slogan "Kill Jews" had appeared in a Jewish community in Victoria, British Columbia, and that local police immediately involved hate crime investigators in the case, causing considerable social repercussions. Under such pressure, the youth who caused the incident quickly turned themselves in.
Gillian Lindquist, executive director of restorative justice in Victoria, met with the youth at the request of the police. After an in-depth dialogue with Linquist, she decided to initiate the restorative justice process and three months later held a negotiating meeting for 3 representatives of the local Jewish community and the youth responsible. At the meeting, the youths involved realized how wrong they had been and agreed to fulfill the demands made by the representatives of the Jewish community.
Of course, restorative justice is more suitable for racial hate offenders who have committed lesser crimes and have no clear understanding of the facts of the crime, such as those who will verbally violence against minorities. If the crime is more serious and there is a case of injury and murder, the sentence may also be imposed first, followed by other compensation and restrictions. If restorative justice negotiations fail, victims can continue to prosecute the perpetrators.
Source: Canada and the United States must read
Disclaimer: Wisdom Yantai published this article for the purpose of transmitting more information. If there is a source labeling error or infringement of your legitimate rights and interests, welcome to contact the private message to correct and delete, thank you.