Not that there is any such thing as a hate crime, as opposed to what, a love crime? It is noticeable though that while some such crimes – real and imagined – generate enormous publicity and at times even more outrage, others generate hardly any. The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax was one such incident. […]
Between 1980 and 1989, the word racist appears in the NewsBank database 29, 360 times. Between 1990 and 1999, it appears 196, 782 times. Between 2000 and 2009, it appears 383, 519 times. Finally, between 2010 and 2019, it appears a staggering 913, 811 times. NewsBank is a fluid medium that is constantly updated, including […]
How much evidence does it take to prove a man guilty? In the case of Jussie Smollett, there was bundles of it. The story he told was extremely improbable if not ridiculous, and in due course the police found both CCTV evidence and a paper trial linking his two helpers (and former friends) to the […]
ABC 7 Chicago | 'Social justice' actor goes mental after being sentenced for faking his own hate crime.
UK Column | Co-hosts Mike Robinson and Patrick Henningsen with the end of week news round-up.
After the England football team lost to Italy in a penalty shoot out, its black players were subjected to what has been called “racist abuse”, overwhelmingly on-line. Any story about race that reflects negatively on white people is click bait and cannon fodder for the news media, be it on-line, press, radio, or TV, and […]
The phrase “hate crime” has been in common usage since only the 1980s, but actual hate crimes have of course been around a lot longer. So too have hate crime hoaxes. The most notorious such hoax of that decade was the Tawana Brawley case. The 1990s saw the two arguably worse hate crime hoaxes in modern history: the murder of Carol Stewart in Boston by her husband, and the murder of her two young sons by Susan Smith in Union County, South Carolina.
A major problem detectives often have when investigating serious crimes is that victims will exaggerate, embellish, or even lie outright. Of course, some victims are not really victims at all. Jussie Smollett springs at once to mind, but even genuine victims cannot always be trusted. A classic example of this happened at Bolton, Lancashire, in October 2013. A young woman told police she had been raped; her attacker then ran off with her handbag and phone.
We’ve all heard the expression when you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. An extreme example of this was the sad case of the senior Australian judge Marcus Einfeld who lied to get out of a $77 speeding ticket in August 2006. That lie was compounded with lie after lie until he had even dragged in his own 94 year old mother. In March 2009, he received a sentence of 3 years imprisonment – 2 years without parole.
