interesting case because it brings up a glitch with hate crimes law read as being generally thought of as victims being a certain race or ethnicity rather than simply ideologically supportive of that race; excerpt:

Henrico County General District Court Judge Thomas Bondurant, Jr. convicted Harry Rogers, 37, of six misdemeanor counts, including four simple assault charges, one destruction of property charge, and one failure to stop at the scene of an accident charge. Bondurant handed down the maximum one-year sentence for each of the charges.

After conducting a series of in-depth interviews with witnesses and victims, Henrico Commonwealth Attorney Shannon Taylor in July charged Rogers with seven additional felony charges – four counts of assault with hate crimes, two counts of felonious attempted malicious wounding, and one count of felony hit and run.

Rogers was found not guilty of the four hate-crime charges. His attorney argued that the enhancement was not applicable to Rogers’s conduct in this case because the victims he hit were all white.

Rogers still faces the three remaining felony charges, which Judge Bondurant certified to the Circuit Court grand jury.

In a statement to the New York Times, Taylor said she believed the hate-crime enhancements were necessary regardless of the victims’ race.

“You were still being selected for race,” she said. “You were still being considered inadequate, inferior because you were supporting the African-American community that the Klan 100 percent says in its own written materials — and part of their ideology that they believe — are lesser human beings.”

As an contrary example, the massacre of a bunch of Sikhs in their temple in Wisconsin, some could have been converts of white race. Likewise with Jews, is the hate crime against the ethnicity or the religion, and where do you put converts?