Columbia, SC (AP) – when Jarvis McKenzie closed his eyes with the man in the car, he could not understand the hatred he saw. When the man picked up a rifle, shot over his head and screamed: “You will run better, boy!” When he crawled behind a wall, McKenzie knew that he was black.
McKenzie told his story a month after the shootout because South Carolina, together with Wyoming, is one of two states that do not have their own hate crimes laws.
About two dozen local governments in South Carolina have adopted their own hate crime regulations to put pressure on the Senate in South Carolina, to vote on a draft law in which stiff punishments are proposed for crimes that are driven by the victims’ hatred because of their breed, religion, sexual orientation, gender or ethnicity.
A decade of the pressure of companies, the survivors of a racist massacre of the church in Charleston, which left nine dead, and some of their own Republicans were not enough to influence senators.
Local administrations say goodbye to hate crimes, but with very straightforward punishments
Richland County, where McKenzie lives, has a hate crime ordinance and the white man, who can be seen on surveillance camera film material, which records the rifle and shoots through his open car window before going to his neighborhood on July 24, is the first to take the charges.
However, local laws are confined to offenses with punishments that are confined in a month in prison. The proposal for hate crimes supported by managing directors could add years to convicts for assault and other violent crimes.
McKenzie was sitting at the same place on the edge of his neighborhood at 5:30 a.m. and waiting for his supervisor to pick him up to work. For him and his family, every trip out of unrest, if not at fear.
“It is heartbreaking to know that I get up every morning. I stand there and don’t know if he had seen me before,” said McKenzie.
The efforts of the right of hate crime have stalled since 2015
The lack of a nationwide hate crimes law quickly became a wound in South Carolina after the shooting of nine black attachments in the Emanuel Am Church in Charleston in Charleston. After a summer of the racial dispute in 2020, the managing directors made it a priority, and the house in South Carolina passed its version in 2021.
But in 2021 and in the next meeting in 2023, the proposal in the Senate of South Carolina remained without coordination. Followers say that the leadership of the Republican Senate knows that he will say goodbye as more moderate members of their own party, but they keep it buried in the calendar with procedural movements.
The opposition takes place mainly in silence and the draft law is only mentioned in passing, since the Senate records other objects, as in May 2023, if a debate about guidelines for the curriculum of history on topics such as slavery and segregation briefly a long -term democratic legislator who asked the Republican Senate Chairman Shane Massey.
“The problem at the moment is that there are a number of people who believe that it not only feels good legislation, but also bad legislation. It is not bad politics because people support hate, but because it promotes the division,” replied Massey on the ground of the Senate.
Supporters say that federal laws of hate crimes are not enough
Opponents of a law on state hate crimes indicate that there is a federal federal law and the shooter of the Charleston Church is therefore in the federal lesson.
But federal civil servants cannot pursue any cases, participate in the juvenile people, they only have confined time and resources compared to the state, and these decisions are made in Washington, DC instead of on site, said the sheriff Leon Lott, the sheriff of Richland County, who crowded to the hate offense regulation in his district.
“It is common sense. We make something very simple complicated and it is not complicated. If you commit a crime against someone, just because of hate for you because you are, religion, etc., we know what that is,” said Lott.
The Democrats in the Senate were particularly frustrated in this year’s meeting because the senators discussed tougher punishments because they had attacked attacks in healthcare or police dogs, but hate crimes came now nowhere.
Followers of a State Hass Criminal Police Act say that South Carolina’s resistance to encourage white supremacists.
“The subliminal message that says that if you are racist and commit a crime and want to address someone for your breed, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or whatever you are here,” said McKenzie’s lawyer Tyler Bailey.
Governor says
Republican governor Henry McMaster understands why local governments say goodbye to their own laws of hate crimes, but he said that South Carolina’s laws against attacks and other violent crimes are challenging enough that judges can give maximum punishments if they believe that the main motivation of crime is hatred.
“There is no love crime. There is always an element of hatred or disrespect or something,” said the former prosecutor, who has been added, he fears the danger that the investigators are trying to go to someone’s opinion or speech.
But some crimes scream to give people more support in our society, said Lott.
“I think it is very important that we all protect. My breed, their breed, the breed of all, their religion, there must be protection for it. That gives us our constitution,” said the sheriff.
And while the man who was charged with a high and tightened nature because of assault and battery, because he had shot on McKenzie, has been in prison for up to 20 years of prison.
“I have the feeling that someone is watching me. I have the feeling that I am being persecuted,” said McKenzie. “It frightened me.”
