How Hate Crimes Are Handled in the Houston Area

HOUSTON – When a person in Texas intentionally commits a criminal act against a person or their property because of their race, sex, color, disability, religion, age, national origin, or sexuality, it is a hate crime.

However, Texas does not technically have a hate crime category. But if you can prove that someone intentionally committed a hate crime for one of the reasons above, that criminal will face harsher penalties under the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act.

James Byrd Jr. was murdered in 1998. Three white men from Jasper, Texas, chained the 49-year-old black man’s ankles to a van and dragged him nearly two miles down a road, then left his mangled body outside an African-American church.

Byrd’s family worked to get Texas state legislators to pass a hate crimes law. Governor George W. Bush did not support the initiative. He said, “All crimes are hate crimes.”

In 2001, when Rick Perry was elected, he supported and then signed the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Act.

“Technically, there is no hate crime in the (Texas) penal code,” KPRC 2 legal analyst Brian Wice told us, explaining that the law can make penalties harsher for criminals.

“This is a sentencing enhancement that increases the length and severity of an alleged offense by a penalty group if the prosecution can demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the motivation for the crime was the victim’s race, creed, color, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identification or posture, or their status as a peace officer or judge,” Wice said.

President Barack Obama signed a federal hate crimes bill into law in 2009.

“Simply put, a hate crime must include both ‘hate’ and a ‘crime,’” the U.S. Department of Justice explains on its website.

Hate crimes are on the rise in Texas, according to the Justice Department’s website, with nearly 57 percent motivated by hatred against race, ethnicity or ancestry.

In 2020, there were 288 racial/ethnic/descendant hate crimes and the latest statistics from 2022 show that number has increased to 350.