Hate Expectations: Police and Prosecutors Are Quick to Claim the Presence of Racism — but Juries Are Not So Sure

A peculiarity of the case's outcome is that Weston, the man who supposedly had the most extensive ties to hate groups in the Bay Area, was the one allowed to walk free. Allen says that Weston started the fight with the Cauich cousins and was the most violent once the fisticuffs began. "In my mind, they gave the worst participant a deal in this case," Allen says. "If anyone was more guilty than anyone else, it was him." Weston could not be reached for comment. Hanlon said Weston has left San Francisco and would not be available to speak about the case.

The lasting coup to emerge from the case for the DA's office was a list, provided by Weston as part of his plea agreement, of roughly 40 "skinheads" based in San Francisco. Weston also gave the names of three groups that Hwang says are active in drug-dealing and other criminal activity: The South of Market Area Skinheads, Bay Area Skinheads, and San Francisco Independent Skins. Hwang acknowledges, however, that "our local skinheads are probably not as organized" as white-supremacist groups elsewhere.

Joseph Schell

Former USC lineman Chris Brymer was acquitted of all charges following a hate-crime trial last year.

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More About

• Robert Allen
• Nancy Meskan
• Justin Meskan
• Trials
• Racial Issues

The question of how seriously to take the local skinhead threat is further complicated by the defendants' backgrounds in the state prison system. In California prisons, racial segregation is the rule. Inmates will often offer nominal allegiance, without further involvement, to a race-based gang in exchange for protection. In the case of the Aryan Brotherhood and other white prison gangs, this is known as "running peckerwood." Meskan tells SF Weekly that this was the category he fell into during his time in prison.

Once they get back outside, some lower-rung hangers-on will maintain some of the trappings of those prison gangs' ideology, Meskan says, but it's no longer serious; the ex-cons are not foot soldiers in a criminal organization driven by racism. "I've been in this city quite a few years," he says. "I've been in quite a few scenes. Honestly, skinheads in this city? I don't think I can name five."

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups throughout the country, says that "40 skinheads in some kind of semi-organized group in San Francisco does sound unlikely." He acknowledges, however, that skinheads can be tough to track because they move arounda lot.

According to Andrews, Allen's lawyer, the three defendants ran with a social circle of drunks and meth-heads, some of whom might have had a fondness for Nazi schwag. "They're a bunch of speeders who hang around town," Andrews says. "The connection is basically drugs and alcohol. There's nobody sitting around reading Mein Kampf."

The very idea of a hate crime is controversial in some quarters. When hate-crime statutes were first established decades ago, civil libertarians argued the laws were criminalizing thoughts and beliefs, instead of actions. The early 1990s saw a flurry of constitutional challenges to states' hate-crime laws, which ended with the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court decision Wisconsin v. Mitchell.

The case was an interesting one, involving the beating of a white 14-year-old by a group of African-Americans who had just watched the film Mississippi Burning. Enraged by the film's depiction of racist violence committed by whites in the American South, they decided to "move on some white peoples," according to court records. Convicted of a hate crime, one of the perpetrators, Todd Mitchell, appealed the case on the basis that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

In a unanimous ruling, the high court decided that states had a right to punish hate crimes more severely because of their effects on the wider community, and that the statutes had precedent in federal anti-discrimination laws. Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted in the decision that the law did not target speech or belief except for that attached to criminal behavior.

The theoretical underpinning of hate-crime legislation is based on a few notions about why crimes motivated by bias should be punished more severely, according to Potok. For one thing, they hurt people beyond the immediate victim. If Klansmen burn down an interracial couple's house, he argues, every interracial couple within 100 miles will feel terrorized. Hate crimes are also more socially destructive than most ordinary offenses, since they tend to fracture communities along ethnic or religious lines.

"Prosecuting hate crimes as hate crimes essentially has a salutary effect," Potok says.

California's present-day hate-crime laws make it illegal to select the victim of a crime based on his or her race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or disability. But enforcing that law is more complicated than it sounds.

The state's current standard is that bias must be a "substantial" part of a perpetrator's motivation against a victim for a hate crime to have taken place. In theory, this means that if a black man robs a Chinese-American because he wants the $50 in the victim's wallet — but also has some bias against Asians that contributed to his selection of a victim — he could be subject to a hate-crime enhancement on a robbery charge.

Hate "doesn't even have to be a major reason why" a crime was committed, says Ryken Grattet, a sociology professor and expert on hate crimes at UC Davis. "It doesn't have to be a situation where bias is the sole element. I'm not sure that they have nailed down the question of what amounts to a 'substantial' factor."