Soudabeh Sabour       

Prof. Brown

English 1 B

July 31, 2013

                                                    Commentary number three

          Rachel has written about the problem of bias-motivated violence and/or efforts to combat this problem through “hate crime” legislation. Her thesis statement is “while it is true that crime motivated by prejudice is a moral tragedy against humanity, hate crime legislation is ethically wrong because it flaws the judicial system and throws off the balance of equality. Her introductory paragraph is quite attracting attention of the reader. I liked her title as well. It is catchy. She states that she is not accepting crime motivated by prejudice and the consequence is flaw of judicial system and imbalance in equality. So she has considered the principle and the consequences at the same time. The criteria she talks about is that although laws are meant to deter hateful behavior, but are they really doing that and fixing the problem? Her criteria arguments provide compelling support for her theses. And everything she uses to convince the readers are relevant to her thesis.

In the first paragraph she says that hate crime legislation is distorting U.S. law system. Because the judicial system is based on evidences that can be proven, while finding out whether a crime happened out of motives depends on the criminal’s character and is not easy to be judged. She uses an article called “hate crime” from A Critical Perspective to support her thesis. She thinks it is not easy to find out what a person thinks in order to judge him/her. In this paragraph she focuses on the difficulty of the judgment of a hate crime and how it imbalances the right of equality.

            In the next paragraph she states the effect of hate crime legislation on people of different ethnicity and how this will affect human equality. She quotes an article to support it. She thinks that this law will take the U.S claim of having equality protection under the law, under a big question mark. The flaw of this would be inequality between some people who are more protected than others. I believe she has been successful to make a skeptical mind accept her criteria. And I did not find any area that I as a reader can challenge. And finally she sums up in the final paragraph a summary about the whole essay to convince the reader about her idea.