Well, the "big" case of "Fat Nick" Minucci was finally decided. Guilty of hate crimes and assault charges, he was sentenced to 15 years in jail by a judge who could have given him 25 years. Minucci is the 20-year-old from Howard Beach, New York convicted of attacking a young black man looking to rob cars in the predominantly white neighborhood. In New York, this was headline news.

All the usual suspects were there like "Reverend" Al Sharpton( yeah, the term is used lightly here) and all the assorted "civil-wrongs" players. But even a guy like Sharpton knows a place like New York is easy territory for a conviction against a white man in a "racial" case. It has become as predictable as the sun coming up. Years of hyping up some crimes and totally downplaying others( the majority) have led to a "crackdown" on the safe, politically incorrect case and a shrug at the more common and usually more violent ones without the racial/religious hype. Yelling out anti-black slurs, anti-gay slurs or anti-Semitic slurs accompanied by even the slightest of action can get someone thrown in jail for longer than someone brutally beating down another person of any race or religion but saying very little. This is where we are at and it is happening all over.

Some will say this is no big deal since it is just so wrong and damaging to do something along racial and religious lines. First, it is punishing someone based on a thought which is scary and secondly( and most importantly) it is becoming very obvious "hate crimes laws" are an outrageous lie and huge violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Simply put: white males are the target in too many cases. This is certainly true in diverse cities all throughout this nation. Despite all the hype surrounding hate crimes- it makes up less than one percent of all crimes- the leveling of the charges are often political. In Minucci's case, some type of confrontation occurred and the word "nigger" was used. He chased after the young blacks and caught up to one and proceeded to hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Not nice stuff, indeed. Little was given to his story of an attempted chain-snatching of a friend. He received the usual tongue-lashing by a judge in the case whom could have sentenced him to a fascist-like 25 years in prison. He received 15 and could be out in about 12.

Meantime, a little after this case occurred, a young white man named Thomas Whitney got into some sort of argument with several Muslim men near a nightclub in Manhattan. Yelling "white mother!@#$," they proceeded to beat him and killed him. They then robbed him. All were eventually caught and charged with robbery and murder. No hate crimes. Police mentioned something about race not being the main motive. And that was that. No pressure groups. No politicians. No media. Nothing. That is the norm in countless cases.

And New York is far from being the only city like this. When white tourists were being murdered in Miami wandering into majority black neighborhoods, race was hardly mentioned. The savage murder of three-year-old Stephanie Kuhen in Los Angeles where a driver named Tim Stone made a "wrong turn" in a gang-riddled, non-white area. The animals in the area proceeded to run up on the car, block it in, and started shooting. Mr. Stone was shot in the back. The child was killed and her two-year-old brother, Joe, was shot in the foot. Arrests were made with race becoming a rare mention. Imagine the other way around? The examples for any city are too numerous to list here.

Most condemning are the government statistics. The National Crime Victimization Survey and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports are the standard used to observe crime trends. Of the roughly 770,000 interracial crimes observed in the most recent study, a whopping 85% were black-on-white. Also shown was the fact more crime is committed on whites by blacks than the "vaunted" black-on-black crime newspapers, politicians and academia speak about because it is safe to do so.

Why is this mentioned? Because anyone with a brain would know some, if not many, of these crimes had a racial component to it but were simply brushed away. A serial rapist targeting women of a certain race will usually receive no hate crime violations. A murder where money was stolen suddenly becomes a "murder-robbery" like the unfortunate Mr. Whitney from New York and it ends there. The rare white-on-black or white-on-Asian rape, murder or assault starts out as an assumption race was part of it and an epithet thrown in becomes grounds for a hate crimes charge. The other way around the use of race must be overwhelming. Challenges to the constitutionality of hate crimes laws have been made in the past and defeated. However, the challenges were regarding the vague nature of the law. Also, challenges occurred years ago. Increasing data and a challenge based on a failure to protect citizens on an equal basis should be the direction here.

While saying something to hurt someone's feelings based on the very make-up of a person is nasty and low, it should not lead to increased penalties if accompanied by action. Why not simply punish the action itself? This is particularly true with something that can become so political. Because if words become the basis for a prison sentence even the most ardent defenders of hate crimes laws may wind up the victim to it.