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6/19/00 11:20 a.m.
Justice Should Be Color-Blind
A vicious mob attack demonstrates the fraudulence of hate-crimes laws.

By Cristopher Rapp, NR associate editor

t's the sort of crime that normally makes headlines. Late one night last October, Troy Knapp, 35, and Gary Thornburg, 34, were riding their bicycles down a quiet street in North Charleston, S.C., when they were accosted by a mob. According to witnesses, more than a dozen young men cornered the pair and beat them savagely with trashcans, metal pipes, and fists. By the time help arrived, the thugs had scattered, taking the bikes and leaving the two men bloody and battered.

Knapp got the worst of it. He was unconscious when help arrived, and sometime thereafter he slipped into a coma. His skull had been broken in two places. The swelling was so bad that a large section of his skull had to be removed; the doctors inserted the section of skull into Knapp's abdominal lining in order to preserve it until it can safely be reattached to his head.

When Knapp finally emerged from the coma two months later, he could barely recognize motion and sound. For a time, a collapsed lung necessitated the use of a breathing tube. A former auto mechanic and the father of a 13-year-old son, Knapp now lives in a mobile home with his sister and her boyfriend, who care for him around the clock. He is bedridden, and his left hand is paralyzed, with limited movement in his legs and all along his left side. He has to wear a diaper.

In the meantime, local authorities arrested 16 suspects, ages 14 to 22. In May of this year, seven of the men were indicted on armed robbery and lynching charges. Charges were dropped against one of the men; the rest have been released on bond.

A lynch mob, in the heart of the Deep South, chases down two innocent people and beats them mercilessly — one within an inch of his life. Throw in the fact that the victims and attackers are of different races and that federal hate-crimes law applies — the headlines practically write themselves.

But Knapp and Thornburg are white, and the men accused of assaulting them are black, which according to the current dispensation means the normal rules don't apply. A Nexis search reveals that outside the local paper and a few AP stories that no major newspaper chose to pick up, there have been no headlines. No television network, save the invaluable Fox News, has bothered to report the story. Federal prosecutors have declined to prosecute the case as a hate crime.

Make no mistake: Hate-crimes laws are a travesty of justice — criminals should be prosecuted for what they do, not for what is in their hearts — and they should be repealed. But is there any doubt that were the races reversed — if a white mob in South Carolina had savaged a pair of black men — things would be different? We'd be getting solemn lectures from the New York Times editorial page about how the South hasn't changed much, and about the Klan, along with constant reminders that until recently the Confederate flag flew over the state capital. But most of all we'd be hearing about the need for hate-crimes legislation. Instead, we've heard almost nothing at all.

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