This report of the Judiciary Committee, together with dissenting views, recommends passage of H.R. 1592 (short title—Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007), a bill to “provide federal assistance to states, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes…”. The bill would “provide assistance to state and local law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes, and would amend chapter 13 of title 18, United States Code, to make violent crimes against a person motivated by bias against characteristics for which there is a history of such bias-motivated violence a felony. It would also amend the Hate Crime Statistics Act to require the collection of data on violent crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s perceived gender or gender identity, as well as data on crimes committed by and directed against juveniles.”

This author voices skepticism concerning hate crime laws, which "appeal to the state with its alleged monopoly of violence to deploy the criminal law to control and punish violent acts by private citizens." The argument (if I understand it correctly) is that such approaches deflect attention from the broader structural and political origins of the inequalities hate crime laws are intended to punish, as well as trusting the very institutions that often inflict that oppression to now respond to discourage it: "The irony of expecting hate crime laws to remedy such inequality is that it looks to these very institutions for their implementation and focuses attention on individual bigots and their acts rather than on unresponsive institutions and unfair practices. Indeed, the prosecution of perpetrators of hate crime may implicitly legitimize current practice and deflect attention from ongoing inequities." The author notes that the killers of Matthew Shepard were not prosecuted for hate crimes yet were adequately punished for the crime, suggesting that the potential costs, both symbolic and actual, of hate crime laws may not be offset by any discernible benefits.

Pugh serves up an engrossing argument for improving state prosecution of hate crimes. The touchstone account reappearing through the text is the story of Megan Williams, who, for more than a week in September 2007, was beaten and sexually abused by six men and women. Although at least two abusers admitted that the fact that Williams was black as an precipitating cause of the attack, only one defendant was charged with a hate crime. While the prosecutor may wish to avoid the added complications of proving a hate crime motive, and be satisfied that the defendants earn stiff penalties on other charges, Pugh believes this deprives the victims and society in general of valuable closure on the hate motivations of the crime. Among her suggested improvements in hate crime legislation is the removal of the "double-intent" requirement that limits concurrent jurisdiction over hate crimes (i.e., "Under current law, to establish a 245(b) violation, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt (1) the intent to commit a crime of violence that was motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred, and (2) the intent to interfere with a victim's enjoyment of at least one enumerated federally protected activity." It was the lack of the second element that prevented federal involvement in the Williams case.). She also favors including Victim-Offender Mediation procedures in any new legislation, which in some cases can circumvent the problem of proof in a courtroom, and allow catharsis through confrontation between the victim and the offender, which benefits both parties as well as society.

The Matthew Shepard Act seeks to amend the federal hate-crime law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Although the act passed the Congress in 2007, then-President Bush threatened to veto the Defense appropriations bill to which it was attached if it came to his desk including that section. Hopes are high that the bill will become law early in the Obama administration. Woods argues that the constitutional authority to pass such a law is to be found not in the Commerce Clause -- an increasingly sketchy basis on which to exert Congressional power -- but in the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 5 enforcement power. He reaches his result by pointing out that the effect of the hate crimes is to prevent victims "from reporting their crimes to the police, influence police officers not to categorize or investigate their crimes as bias crimes, and prevent prosecutors from prosecuting their crimes as bias crimes," the remedy for which falls to Section 5 "to ensure a right of access to the courts."

As a category, hate crimes have had a hard row to hoe on the way toward acceptance by the general citizenry. The enhanced punishments attached to bias crimes are, however, argued to be worth any likely costs due to the broad and detrimental social impacts of allowing discrete groups to be targeted for violence. Backgrounding this thesis is that attackers act out of an antipathy toward the minority group, and even that a dominant motivation for the attack is to communicate this animosity to other members beyond the one actually attacked. Woods would contrast this prototypical hate crime scenario with another, one in which minority groups are targeted not out of animus, but out of convenience. "Consider a man who robs gay men cruising in public parks because he believes homosexual victims who seek anonymous public sex are less likely to report the crimes. Or, imagine a man who is looking to prove his masculinity to his friends and chooses to assault an Amish man because he believes that the Amish will not fight back by virtue of the pacifist commitments. Finally, consider a white man who is not racist, but only robs black men and women because he believes that racist attitudes will prevent the local police from investigating the crimes." These criminals do not themselves hold the hate typically underpinning bias crimes, but are aware of its existence and take advantage of that fact in planning their own misdeeds. The question is whether these, too, should be liable for the enhanced sentences meted out to prototypical perpetrator of hate crimes? Woods says, yes, and then attempts to justify this position. One could wonder, though, whether expanding the category to embrace these types of crimes could not weaken the rationale for the hate crime category as a whole.