Part of New Jersey’s Bias-Intimidation Law Is Ruled Unconstitutional
Source: New York Times
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s unusual bias-intimidation law was unconstitutional, dealing a potential reversal to one of the most well-known hate crime prosecutions in recent history.
The state’s statute on bias intimidation was the only one of its kind in the nation in saying that defendants can be convicted of bias intimidation if their victims “reasonably believed” they were harassed or intimidated because of their race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
The court, the state’s highest, unanimously ruled that the 2001 statute was “unconstitutionally vague,” because it does not give defendants fair notice of when they are crossing the line to commit a crime.
The court upheld other parts of the statute that make it a crime to intimidate someone “knowing” that it would cause offense. But it struck down the provision that bases a conviction on the victim’s state of mind, ruling that it criminalizes a “defendant’s failure to apprehend the reaction that his words would have on another.”
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