How can one prove in a court of law that a certain crime is a hate crime based on the social media activity of the defendant?

It mostly works as a sentence enhancement. The jury is instructed once they find person guilty of underlying murder or assault in your examples, that (in california because google found it first):

To prove this allegation [for each crime] the People must prove that the defendant committed that crime in whole or in part because of the alleged victim’s actual or perceived ... [age/sex/race/ whatever protected class]

. . . The defendant acted in whole or in part because of the actual or perceived characteristic[s] of the victim if:

  1. The defendant was biased against the victim based on the victim’s actual or perceived [protected class] association with a person or group with (this/one or more of these) actual or perceived characteristic[s]);

AND

  1. The bias motivation caused the defendant to commit the alleged acts. If you find that the defendant had more than one reason to commit the alleged acts, the bias described here must have been a substantial motivating factor. A substantial factor is more than a trivial or remote factor. However, it does not need to be the only factor that motivated the conduct.

The jury can ask court how to fine tune it if that's not clear enough. If they find it was hate crime they add five, 10, etc years to normal assault or murder sentence.

Cali has several different kinds and there's a fed law as well, and all but a few states have them, though they may be slightly different. https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/1300/

Anecdotally, and wrong country, this came up for some reason under somewhat similar canada laws and it seems like it takes more than just being affiliated with racist groups for your murder example (defendant would need to be using racial slurs to victim too or something), and more than just a single slur in your toothbrush, etc example, in canada anyways, in one case that made the news.

/r/legaladviceofftopic Thread