Hate crimes compare-contrast

Granted, the hate crimes are different in that one is a murder and the other inolves beatings with a metal bar, but let's take a look at the legal response in Russia and the United States.

From MosNews:

A court in Voronezh, central Russia, found a young man charged with murdering a Peruvian student guilty and sentenced him to 16 years in a high-security prison, the RIA-Novosti news agency reports.

The 13 suspects aged between 15 and 19 went on trial on charges related to the killing of an 18-year-old Peruvian student last October.

Three others —- another Peruvian, a Spaniard, and a Russian —- were wounded in the incident and had to be hospitalized, in the southwestern city of Voronezh.

One of the suspects was charged with racially motivated murder, the others with robbery and hooliganism. State prosecutor Ivan Kovalev said investigators believe there is “substantial evidence this crime was committed out of ethnic and racial hatred.”

Other men accused in the case were given sentences ranging from one to five years in prison. One of the accused was amnestied, while another was given a suspended sentence.

The Boston Globe [Via Steve Gilliard]:

A judge spared a white man from a prominent family from a prison term today when he sentenced him for beating two black teenagers in what prosecutors called a racially motivated attack.

Instead, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Charles Spurlock gave Josiah Spaulding III to five years probation and 200 hours of community service at the Pine Street Inn or another homeless shelter. Spaulding, according to his sentence, will also have to visit the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, make a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and remove his tattoos with Nazi symbolism...

In July, the judge issued a split verdict in a bench trial on charges that Spaulding beat two 17-year-old black girls with a metal baton in a subway station on Nov. 22, 2002. According to prosecutors, he was with a group who shouted racial slurs at the teens on the concourse of the Park Street MBTA station. Spurlock found Spaulding guilty of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, but exonerated him of civil or constitutional rights violations.

"Freedom of speech" and all that.