Is hate-crime law a potential tool for abuse?

Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that federal hate crime legislation making its way through Congress "is an exercise in political grandstanding" and a potential tool for abuse by prosecutors.  She adds:

Our criminal-justice system is designed to err on the side of acquittal, which helps ensure that the innocent remain free. The wholesale federalization of crime - of which the vague and misleading hate-crimes proposal is a prime example - is a threat to that principle.

-SS