Gender-bias hate crimes: what constitutes a hate crime from a potential juror's perspective?

The current study explored hate crime in a nontypical scenario. Label of the crime (first-degree assault vs. bias-motivated assault) and gender of the victim were varied within the context of an attack perpetrated within other gender dyads (i.e., when the victim was female, the perpetrator was male, and vice versa). Results indicated that participants in the assault condition were more likely to find the defendant guilty than those in the hate crime condition. Participants also made differential attributions of victim blame, such that those in the assault condition found the victim to be more mentally unstable than those in the hate crime condition.