Hate crime

A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) in a certain social group or race. Examples of such groups can include, and are almost exclusively limited to: sex, ethnicity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation. Non-criminal actions that are motivated by these reasons are often called "bias incidents".

Hate crimes are often committed by aptly named hate groups.

Types of hate crimes

 * Anti-Semitism
 * Lynching
 * Gay Bashing
 * Violence Against The Disabled
 * Hate speech
 * Murdering or torturing something because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or orientation
 * Forms of bullying against said groups if they are too extreme
 * Sexual violence against said groups
 * Islamophobia

Examples of hate crimes that have been committed

 * October 12, 1998, American homosexual student Matthew Wayne Shepard was kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and left to die in a field on the outskirts of Laramie, Colorado. The perpetrators of this crime Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson admitted that they committed the crime because Shepard was homosexual.
 * A offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan lynched a black man named Leo Frank on October 16, 1915 in an event that began the KKK's tradition of cross burning.
 * On June 17, 1998, three white supremacists - Lawrence Russell Brewer, John William King, and Shawn Allen Berry - kidnapped a 49-year old African-American man named James Byrd, Jr., took him to a remote county road out of town, beat him severely, spray-painted his face, urinated and defecated on him. They then chained him by his ankles to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him along an asphalt road for about three miles. Byrd was conscious for most of the ordeal, until he was finally killed when body hit a culvert, severing his head and right arm.
 * The torture and murder of Jennifer Daughtery, a mentally disabled woman, could be considered a hate crime against the disabled; the perpetrators of the crime, known as The Greensburg Six, never made a specific motive for their actions clear.
 * On June 17, 2015. white supremacist Dylann Roof committed a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing 9 people (all African-Americans) with his ultimate goal being to start a race war. Roof later become first (and as of May 2019) only individual who was given the death penalty for committing a hate crime.
 * On October 27, 2018, white nationalist Robert Bowers committed a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburge, Pennsylvania, killing eleven people in the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.