It’s rare for Italian lawmakers from across the political spectrum to agree on anything. But on Tuesday, the lower house of Parliament unanimously ratified a law introducing the crime of femicide into Italy’s criminal code, punishable by life in prison.
(title from entry in NYT’s The Morning newsletter)
It’s a way to take the severity of the motivation into account when sentencing.
Someone who committed murder could have done so under all sorts of mitigating circumstances, classifying the crime as a hate crime speaks to the horrificly unjustifiable motivation, and is indicative of someone who should be less likely, or ineligible for parole.
Sure, we could just keep calling it murder, and take those things into account anyway, but I think it’s ultimately good to have these distinctions, and there’s plenty of other similar cases where we do distinguish between crimes based on intent, rather than outcome, particularly for crimes against people (you may, for example, apply your exact logic to the distinction between 1st and 2nd degree murder, or even murder and manslaughter. It’s not like a murder 1 victim is any better off for their killers crime being called murder instead of manslaughter)