fortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States and both the Wisconsin and federal governments have chosen to address this problem in a way that is grossly unconstitutional. The most obvious arguments against the Mitchell decision are those dealing with the First Amendment. In fact, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state statute was unconstitutional in their decision, which the U.S. Supreme Court overruled. The Wisconsin Supreme Court argued that the Wisconsin penalty enhancement statute "violates the First Amendment directly by punishing what the legislature has deemed offensive thought." The Wisconsin Court also rejected the state's argument "that the statute punishes only the conduct of intentional selection of a victim". The Court's contention was that "the statute punishes the because of aspect of the defendant's selection, the reason the defendant selected the victim, the motive behind the selection." The law is in fact a direct violation of the First Amendment, according to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which said, "The Wisconsin legislature cannot criminalize bigoted thought with which it disagrees." If there is a principal underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. The Supreme Court was heard to utter such noble phrases as recently as 1989, in Texas v. Johnson. Unfortunately these idealistic principles seem to have been abandoned during Wisconsin v. Mitchell. Clearly, Mitchell's act of assaulting another human is a punishable crime, and no one could logically argue that the First Amendment protects this clearly criminal action. However, the state's power to punish the action does not remove the constitutional barrier to punishing the criminal's thoughts (Cacas, 337). The First Amendment has generally been interpreted to protect the thoughts, as well as the spe...