In the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements of the early 2020s, Democratic members of Congress struggled to respond adequately to their constituents’ demands for retribution for acts of hate and rehabilitation for victims of bias-driven crimes. In response to this outcry, California Representative Ted Lieu (CA-36) drafted legislation known as the Stop Hate Crimes Act of 2023, calling for the lowering of the statutory burden of hate crimes in the United States. In this research paper, I examine the implications of the proposed change and compare it to existing legislation dating back to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, aiming to answer the questions of what goal hate crime legislation was initially intended to achieve and why that goal has shifted in modern policy. I review landmark cases such as Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993), Dawson v. Delaware (1992), U.S. v. Miller (2014), and Burrage v. United States (2014), analyzing how motive, which is not normally an element of a criminal charge, plays the biggest factor in determining criminal liability of a hate crime and how changing the statutory burden in determining motive becomes an unconstitutional regulation of beliefs.
