Man Who Attacked Jewish Couple in Santa Monica Faces Minimal Charges, No Hate Crime Enhancement
“the victim is recovering from multiple dog bites to his thighs and posterior, as well as from the emotional trauma of the attack”
We recently highlighted this story. The alleged attacker was wielding a baseball bat, had a dog, and was screaming ‘genocide’ as he ran toward the couple. What he was doing was pretty clear.
Now we are learning that the charges he is actually facing are quite minimal, and there is no hate crime enhancement. It’s just ridiculous.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
After Santa Monica attack, setting dog to bite Jewish victim, man charged but not with hate crime
After allegedly stalking a couple in Santa Monica because they were wearing Star of David necklaces, threatening to kill them, and commanding his dog to bite one of them, a suspect was charged on Thursday – but not with a hate crime modifier, upsetting the victims’ advocates.
Nay Min Tar was charged with one felony count of criminal threats and one count of misdemeanor battery, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, after an incident last Sunday in which Tar allegedly set his Italian mastiff on a couple.
A friend of the victim, legal scholar Benjamin Basire, told The Jerusalem Post that Tar had targeted the pedestrian couple because they had been wearing Star of David necklaces, and had followed them for almost two blocks prior to the attack.
Tar allegedly threatened to kill the couple. “You’re a Zionist, mother f**king pedophile, mother f**king Jewish,” the 49-year-old Illinois man said from his vehicle while waving a bat through the window, according to a video of the incident published by Basire. “Child killer!”…
Basire said that the victim is recovering from multiple dog bites to his thighs and posterior, as well as from the emotional trauma of the attack.
The police are scrambling to defend the decision, not to add the hate crime enhancement.
The Jewish News Syndicate reports:
Santa Monica police defends not calling attack on Jews a hate crime
The Santa Monica Police Department defended its decision not to call an attack on a Jewish couple, in which a man was captured on video displaying a bat and chasing after them with a dog, a hate crime.
“The fact that the filed charges do not include a hate crime enhancement does not mean the reported language or conduct was acceptable, nor does it diminish the impact on the victims or the broader community,” the Greater Los Angeles area department said on Thursday.
“Criminal threats remain a serious charge and reflect the threatening conduct reported during the incident,” it said.
“Hate has no place in Santa Monica,” stated Darrick Jacob, the police chief. “We understand the fear and harm these incidents can create, not only for the victims, but for the broader community.”
“Our responsibility is to respond quickly, document the facts thoroughly, and pursue accountability through the legal process,” he added.
The police department said that it “understands the concern this incident caused, particularly among members of the Jewish community and others who viewed the video or heard reports about the incident.”
All the talk about ‘hate has no place here’ is nothing but lip service.
Anyone with a functioning brain knows what was happening here.
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Comments
I suggest that this cretin be charged federally if the state seeks to give him a shrug for this incident.
Deliberately setting a mastiff on someone is a lot more than battery. A human is no match for a dog that size and plenty of people have been mauled to death by dogs. I think that’s attempted murder, myself.
A person who acts in this manner with malice aforethought should not be allowed to walk amongst us.
True justice would have been a .45 slug in the brain of the dog and the scumbag dog owner, on the spot.
Or the dogs fault
“I’ll get my dog on you!”
Pulls gun in response.
“My dog will be on you before you can shoot ‘im.”
“I’m not planning to shoot the dog. I’m planning to shoot you.”
How about we throw him in the ocean?
There shouldn’t be hate crime enhancements. Just the crime and the customary sentence. Jews are not special.
I don’t care for the “hate crimes” concept.
As I posted earlier this year:
“Thoughts” are only important insofar as they can establish intent. (Proving “intent” is, or at least was, necessary to prove “guilt.”) Past that, a consideration of thoughts applies penalties for holding constitutionally-protected ideas that society considers offensive. People serving additional time for “hate crimes” are literally being punished for their opinions (on politics, race, religion, etc.).
Motive has been a legitimate factor in sentencing for as long as we’ve had a criminal justice system. Every judge, in sentencing every crime, takes motive into account. But it’s up to the judge’s discretion, and the motive doesn’t have to be proven to the jury. All hate crime laws do is make the enhancement mandatory, but at the same require the prosecutor to prove the motive to the jury beyond reasonable doubt.
BULLCARP, Milhouse.
Motive has NEVER been an ELEMENT of a crime. It can be used to establish intent and to provide evidence a particular person did the crime, but it is not an ELEMENT of a crime – until the Marxists came along and made it a part to enact their grievance-mongering.
Using motive in sentencing has always been unjust, as well. Sentence them for the crime committed. Period.
GWB, you are the one full of it here. I didn’t say “element of the crime”, I said “factor in setencing”, and that is the absolute truth. You can’t find me a time when motive was not a factor in sentencing. Sentences have always taken motive into account, and been harsher if the motive was reprehensible. And at least occasionally it was an element, e.g. statutes from 250 years ago singling out murder for hire as a more serious offense.
What you are advocating is in fact a radical change to our legal system, and not one that significant numbers would support.
Motive has always been indicative/evidence of guilt. But you can think “I hate his kind, so I will kill him” all you want, and that’s not an offense. If you do kill a person out of hatred, your anti-whatever screeds you posted on X can be used as evidence to demonstrate motive, but the motive itself isn’t a crime, only the action predicated on the motive. If motive were a crime, you could criminalize any thought of a crime (“I want all the money in the bank”) and then tack on extra punishment for it. If “hate” becomes an element of a crime, this is one step away from criminalizing the hate alone. This is not a slope we should ever want to be near, as it is not only slippery but unstable as well.
Motive shouldn’t be confused with intent. If your intent is to make someone suffer when you kill them, that’s a valid reason for more punitive sentencing. But the fact that you killed someone because he was “an X” doesn’t make the crime “worse” for the victim. The victim will be dead whether he’s shot or tortured to death, but the torture would indicate “depravity” and the suffering caused to the victim, and would validate a harsher sentence. (Indeed, the torture itself is a crime, even if the victim had survived.) Killing someone for their race, religion, sexual orientation, or politics does not make the victim deader. As I stated, it punishes the criminal for having objectionable thoughts, rather than purely on consideration of what the perpetrator actually did.
Any criminal act can be parsed into so many separate crimes, it should be possible to enhance a criminal’s sentence by charging for every possible offense, and then sentencing him at the maximum allowed for each proven offense, with time to be served serially. This would at least punish actual crimes.
No, Dave, you are misstating both the facts and the law. You cannot find a time in our history when motive was not a legitimate factor in sentencing. Nor can you find a time, until hate crime laws came along, when the motive had to be proven to the jury. Until then, and still for motives other than this, it was entirely up to the judge to discern the criminal’s motive and sentence accordingly. You should applaud the fact that hate crime laws require a jury finding that this was the motive.
If a motive isn’t proven to the jury, the judge can’t morally “assume it” when sentencing.
They can and routinely do, and have for centuries; but hate crime laws stop them from doing so. They still do assume motives other than hatred, and take them into account, and those motives do not have to be supported by the evidence; they can just be the judge’s personal bias.
Only in the case of hate crime laws can judges not make such an assumption, and must put the question of motive to the jury, which must make a separate finding that the crime was motivated by the defendant’s perception that the victim belonged to a larger group.
That should be something you would applaud, not condemn.
A crime committed against an individual because of his membership of a larger group is a crime against the entire group, and thus deserves a harsher sentence. Every member of that group is a victim of the crime, every member has been intimidated, so the sentence must reflect that.
It’s the difference between a vandal spraying his tag on a wall somewhere, and someone spraying a swastika on a home in a Jewish neighborhood. When you see graffiti the most you feel is annoyance; when you see a swastika you feel fear because you’ve been put on notice that they’re coming for you.
Then count up the number folks in that neighborhood impacted by the menacing and stack the charges. So if there’s 300 people in that neighborhood who were subjected to the menacing/terroristic intent of that swastika then homeboy is facing 300 separate counts and have the sentences to run consecutively.
And even that is malarkey.
IMO the clear intent is to inflict an emotional response of fear into the members of the community (aka terrorism) by premeditated actions of selecting that particular neighborhood with a particular demographic composition and the deliberate choice of a well known symbol. A menacing charge for each member of the community impacted seems like a reasonable analogue/substitute for goofy ‘hate crime’.
That would require proving specific intent with regard to each individual victim, when the criminal doesn’t even know them. He could always say, “Well, I didn’t mean him“. It’s the same way that US law rejects the concept of group libel; if you make a false and defamatory statement about a large group of people, none of them can sue you for it, because in each case you can say “I didn’t mean you”. For instance, “Jews are all thieves”. The courts have drawn the line at 25 people; if the group is smaller than that then they can sue you, if it’s larger then they can’t.
Also, your proposal would still require proving the motive, since that’s the only way in which all those other people were harmed. And it would result in even harsher sentences than the current hate crime laws do. And it would be a nightmare to find all those people and bring them into court. I don’t understand why you would want this, rather than the simple solution of directing the judge to take the motive into account in sentencing, provided that the jury found it to have been proven by the evidence.
A crime committed against an individual because of his membership of a larger group is a crime against the entire group
No, it isn’t, Milhouse. It’s a crime based upon the acts committed. Motive is irrelevant to the crime itself, and (until “hate crimes”) has never been an element of a crime.
No, every member is NOT a victim of the crime. That’s bullcarp from honor-based societies NOT founded in Judeo-Christian jurisprudence.
Spraying a swatiska on a home in a Jewish neighborhood is nothing but vandalism and a potential threat. And I say “potential” because most of the people doing that bit are stupid cowards who wouldn’t come for you because they’re too impotent.
I don’t care about any historical trauma any group has experienced. Get over it and live by Rule of Law. Not emotional malarkey.
Why do you people keep harping on “element of the crime”? I never said that, you keep bringing it up like it’s a memorized talking point.
Motive quite often is an element of a crime. There are many crimes that specify motive as an element, and you’ve never ever in your life raised any objection to those, until it comes to “hate crime” laws.
But I wasn’t even talking about that. It’s an indisputable fact that no matter how far back you go in our justice system, motive has always been a factor that judges have considered in sentencing. And sometimes that has even been entrenched in statutes, e.g. murder for hire.
And yes, every single member of a targeted group is a victim of any crime committed against anyone for no reason other than that person’s perceived membership of that group. The crime is aimed at the entire group, and the specific victim need not even actually be a member; what matters is that the criminal perceived him to be a member, and that’s why he did it. Therefore any member of the group would have substituted for that victim. Thus it’s aimed at all of them.
This has nothing to do with honor cultures. It’s straight out targeting of victims.
A crime committed against an individual because …
… is a crime against the entire group…
The group in this case is always an abstraction and the above is always false.
That is utter bulldust. A group is not an abstraction; it’s an identifier. The set of people with a particular identifier is a concrete set, and a crime can be targeted at the entire set.
That’s why terrorist acts committed against Americans for no other reason than that they are Americans (or that the criminal perceives them so to be) are crimes against the entire nation, and are treated much more harshly than the same acts committed merely against individuals for reasons specific to those individuals.
The crime separate from the vandalism isn’t the motive, it’s the intent and the effect. In this case, the intent is to cause terror and the effect is terrorizing to the community. (The motive may or may not be clear. See my comment below.) Making terroristic threats is a crime, terrorizing a community is a crime. Being a Nazi or a liberal isn’t a crime (both of these states of mind can provide motive.) A swastika is just a symbol, and one hijacked by the Nazis as it is thousands of years old. There was a home near where I live that had a roundel at the peak of its garage roof. The roundel had a white field and on it was a blue swastika clockwise and at rest (unlike the Nazi swastika, which is clockwise and stated, that is, tilted). I couldn’t believe that someone would display such a thing, but I recognized it as a religious symbol. It was on the garage for a long time, but was eventually taken down. I don’t know whether the owner moved or someone convinced him to remove it. My point being is that some people can be panicked by something that actually innocuous. We don’t generally punish people for doing innocent things that frighten the public when the act itself is lawful. Putting up a swastika is lawful. Putting it up, or painting it on, someone else’s property is not. Nor is it lawful to intend the symbol to terrorize. Again, we’re at “intent.” Not motive. Motive is behind intent. A person putting up a swastika to terrorize has the intent to terrorize. But he may be motivated to do so because he’s a Nazi or because he’s a liberal trying to gin up fear of “white nationalists.” Neither motive is criminal, but the intent is. We might enhance sentencing based on intent, but we should not enhance sentencing based of motive. They are not the same things.
Let’s amend that to ‘NOBODY is special’ and return to the operating presumption that your group membership/tribal affiliation doesn’t elevate or diminish your worth as a fellow human being nor provide greater/lesser protection.
Hate crime statutes are essentially goofy speech codes and Orwellian thought crimes. They will be misused by ideologically minded DAs to pick/choose to whom they are applied via their discretion ….just as we see here the ‘good guys’ will not often benefit but the leftist wokiestas likely will. IMO the use of the Dog and baseball bat should elevate the charges to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Charge felonies instead and the value of any theoretical hate crime enhancement is reduced.
Some people are special. Just because we’re all equal before the law doesn’t mean we’re actually equal. It just means the law must ignore any such differences.
And no, despite this particular case, the history of hate crime laws is that they have not been enforced in only one direction. The history shows that they have been enforced impartially.
Hate crime laws do not punish someone for being an antisemite or a white supremacist or homophobe or what have you. They punish someone for committing a crime against an individual for the reason that he perceived that person as a member of some larger group.
When a white supremacist harms a black person for some reason other than his race, that is not a hate crime and is not charged as one. That’s why prosecutors take time before deciding to add a hate crime enhancement to a charge. It’s not enough for them to find that the accused does have such a hatred in his heart, they must find convincing evidence that that was why he committed the crime.
If there is a problem with hate crime enhancement, then get the legislature to remove it from the criminal code. If Santa Monica would simply charge the perp with an appropriate charge, then maybe your opinion would be worth it, but, you and I both know that the perp will walk. BTW, Jews are special, just a blacks, whites, Asians and all other ethnic/cultural groups are special when you direct violence to them on the basis of their identifying group.
Asians don’t trade on special, average IQ 105. Blacks trade on it because the low average IQ of 86 makes it a way of making a living. Which group do Jews identify with?
Jews being special is a misreading of the Talmud, in the first place. Jews not being special is what makes Judaism the basis of Western morality. (Every person is a Jew, being the correct reading.)
“Trading” is irrelevant. The law doesn’t care who “trades” on what. Your obsession with this “trading” nonsense speaks a lot about you.
No, it is not a misreading of the Talmud. According to Judaism, Jews are special, and both the Torah and the Talmud say so explicitly. You are not required to believe it, but it is what it is and you have no business pretending otherwise.
As far as I know Levinas never set foot in a yeshiva, was not a scholar of the Talmud, and his musings have no basis in it.
Look up Chouchani.
Who is this “Chouchani” other then Levinas’s supposed mysterious mentor? You know nothing of him except through Levinas.
The district attorney makes the actual charging decisions, not the police department.
Here us the DA’s news release:
https://da.lacounty.gov/media/news/man-charged-criminally-threatening-kill-victim-santa-monica-third-street-promenade
The news release does not contain any discussion about Jews.
It reminds me of the press saying a Sioux City man did ____, when the man does not speak any English.
The problem isn’t the ability to charge for a hate crime itself (or, rather, I should say the ability to charge a hate crime isn’t the only problem). The government simply can’t be trusted to use hate crime enhanced charges in an fair way that promotes equal justice. In the current climate in many jurisdictions hate crime enhancements form a one-way street and impact only some elements of society while other elements have the privilege of escaping the enhancements, sometimes despite clear evidence of the hateful nature of a crime. Governments can’t be trusted to exercise such power evenly and fairly, the power must be denied to them.
Agreed. My outrage here is that hate crimes are always lodged against one group, but never another. Same as victimless gun laws (like possession) are always lodged against law-abiding* people but are the first things dropped for real scumbags.
(* I won’t even type “otherwise” law-abiding, because the most of those violated laws themselves violate the clear Second Amendment prohibition.)
That is just not true. It appears to be true in this case, though not all the evidence is in yet, but if so this case is an exception. These laws are not some new experiment. We’ve had them for many decades and have seen how they work, and they are applied as impartially as any other law is, i.e. not always.
I don’t believe in either hate crimes or hate speech; or rather, I don’t believe hate should be criminalized. Just charge them for what they did at the highest severity possible, Avoid plea bargaining whenever possible. For the sentence avoid just probation, Sentence to the maximum prison sentence possible for the crimes committed. That is all I want to see,
Of course I would prefer that turds making unprovoked attacks on random people like this guy be shot dead in the street and then strung up as an object lesson, There is way too much violence from the usual suspects to tolerate the usual permissiveness by progressive DAs and judges,.
Hate crimes violate the basics of English common law upon which our system of law is based. Motive is irrelevant to the crime (except to demonstrate intent) and should never be considered. The crime is committing the act. Period.
That is a misrepresentation of the common law. Under the common law motive is very relevant in any criminal case. It’s a factor in categorizing the crime in the first place, and it’s a factor in sentencing. For instance laws going back at least to the 18th century treated murder for hire more harshly than murder for ordinary motives.
Even admitting this is true, it is equally true that hating Jews (or anyone else) is not a crime, while intending to kill someone for some type of personal gain is. If Charlie hates Jose because he’s Mexican that’s not proof that he killed Jose out of his hate. If he planned to kill Jose (and this can be shown in court), this is evidence the crime was premeditated, and this information is used to specify the charge (first-degree murder). It doesn’t matter why Charlie planned to kill Jose, only that he planned to do so and effectuated his plan. But Charlie can hate Jose with all his might, and this is not a crime. Planning a crime is part of a crime. Wanting someone dead because you hate them is no more a crime than wanting to steal all the money in a bank. They are both nothing but thoughts. When mere thoughts and opinions (“Jews are greedy”) can be used to enhance sentencing for actual crimes, this is indistinguishable from punishment for having the thoughts (even if you might make an argument that the thoughts aren’t actually being punished).
Are you sure this is what we want? We trust government to effect such a policy with fairness and equality?
Conversely, are some crime victims deserving of greater retribution because of who they are compared to other victims? Aren’t all victims of crime entitled to equal justice? Or are some entitled to enhanced justice?
You seem to have completely misunderstood hate crime laws.
No, it isn’t. Intentions are never crimes. But they’re relevant to actual crimes committed as a result of them.
Indeed it’s not, and that’s why the prosecutor must prove to the jury’s satisfaction that this was indeed the motive for the crime. And it’s only thanks to hate crime laws that he does have to prove it to the jury; without such laws he only has to convince the judge, whose personal biases may lead him to accept such an assertion without proof.
When it comes to sentencing it certainly matters, and always has.
People are always talking about murder and other such serious crimes, but hate crime laws have limited utility in such cases because sentences are already fairly harsh for them. If a state executes murderers, it can’t do worse for a particularly heinous murder. Hate crime laws are mostly relevant in the case of lesser crimes, where there’s a much larger range of available penalties.
The history shows that they have done so with the same fairness or lack thereof that they enforce all laws.
Isn’t the fact a dog was used racist in and of itself? That’s what our grievance mongers have said for decades.
And ditto to all those saying that in a proper society (politely armed) both the dog and the man would not have been able to attend their bail hearing due to being unalived.
This is Los Angeles, California. While the picture above does not show the ethnicity of the attacker, Nay Min Tar; other pictures of him in various newspapers make it clear that he is a “protected class”.
If a “protected class” attacks someone Jewish there it is really not considered a crime. Expect either deferred prosecution or a very short probation.
Subotai Bahadur
until the jews and their supporters are willing to
1) protest and get aggressive against politicians
2) riot
they will be snickered at by law unenforcement
it couldnt get any “hatier” than what was seen
maybe its another political ploy by not charging the pos with the hate crime
now trump has to have the doj come in which would further “soil” the pr and that in itself can be/would be the distration needed so karen bass can have her posse refocus on why she must lead instead of
donald j pratt
correction: distraction needed
Nice to know I can cruise into Santa Monica and drop N Bombs while setting a dog on a black guy with minimal punishment. Good Times.
Reminds me of the way ordinary Germans in the 1930’s started attacking Jews. The German courts being sympathetic to their anger gave them a pat on the head and sent them on their way. History does repeat itself. The DOJ needs to intervene and bring federal civil rights charges against the perpetrator. Next they need to investigate the Santa Monica police department and the DA for civil rights violations. This was how the federal government ere t rooted out racism in the 50’s and 60’s.
Maybe the solution is to make a criminal court finding of a hate crime a legal finding allowing for further civil punishment with the finding acceptable evidence of said violation. Maybe even add on mandatory monetary punishments to both the individual and an accredited charity of the group targeted.
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