The Hate Crime Double Standard

The entire concept of 'hate crime' has never made any sense to me. If someone makes a conscious choice to kill another human being, is the victim any less dead because the perpetrator disliked their protected characteristic versus a dislike of another, unprotected characteristic? Does the husband who kills his spouse because he hated her deserve less jail time than a killer who murders a black person because he hates black people? If you think so, aren’t you putting the dead spouse on a legal protection level below the dead...