Comment by BonesJustice
9 years ago
> slippery slope that is always brought up never materialized
The targets of the 234,341 criminal insult investigations conducted by German police last year[1] might argue otherwise. A few thousand of those were elementary school kids. Sixteen were preschoolers.
> courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech
Bless your heart. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your personal experience is untainted by exposure to actual courts. Prosecutors in the United States are not exactly known for rigorous exercise of discretion, and defending yourself in court can be ruinously expensive even if you prevail.
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[1] https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...
Investigations are not convictions.
...and your point is?
You do not need to convict or even formally charge someone in order to have chilling effect on speech; when the police investigate you for a crime, and the mere possibility of being charged and convicted hangs over your head, you will think twice about what you say.
And while I know little about German jurisprudence, I do know that prosecutors in this country do not need to attain a conviction in order to destroy someone's life. Once a prosecutor claims you are guilty, plenty of people will believe it no matter the outcome, and that's on top of depleting your life savings on legal representation. I urge everyone to keep this in mind when contemplating how European-style hate speech laws (or any proposed laws) would play out in the United States.
The stats I linked above suggest a clearance rate of 89% for criminal insult investigations. While that number dwarfs the 56% average clearance rate for criminal investigations across Germany, it is unclear to me whether those figures describe how many investigations led to convictions, indictments, a suspect being formally charged, or merely the positive identification of a suspect. I believe the term generally refers to the proportion of investigations that lead to a suspect being formally charged, but I wasn't certain, so I left that figure out.
Feel free to dig deeper.
My point is that those cases are the result of people reporting them to the authorities, who are then obliged to investigate. That the vast majority of them go nowhere is a good indication that the system works, in a country with 10's of millions of people with a single digit percentage of fringe elements you'd expect roughly that number of reports (actually, somewhat more).
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