Why hate crime convictions are so difficult to secure in US

There are growing calls for the suspect who killed six Asian women around Atlanta to be charged with a hate crime.

As prosecutors in the United States build a case against the Georgia man charged with murdering eight people, including six women of Asian descent, during a shooting rampage earlier this month, they could also charge him with an additional hate crime under a state law passed in 2020. But legal experts say that making the argument for a hate crime charge might not be as clear cut as convicting him of the killings. In order to make a hate crime charge stick, prosecutors would be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooter targeted his victims specifically because of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other factors. “With insufficient evidence, it would be difficult for the prosecutors, whether state or federal, to prove that the suspect had intended to murder these women due to a bias motivation,” said Janice Iwama, an assistant professor at the American University in Washington, DC who studies hate crimes and racial profiling.