Hate-Crime Laws Upheld in 2 Cases by State Justices : Rulings: Supreme Court supports gay-bashing convictions of two teen-agers and will allow prosecution of four men in San Diego County for assault that allegedly was racially motivated.

The state Supreme Court upheld California’s hate-crime laws Monday and ruled that prosecutors do not have to prove bigotry was the sole cause of an attack or threat.

The laws make it a crime to injure or threaten someone because of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or disability and add as much as three years to prison sentences for felonies motivated by bigotry.

In two unanimous rulings, the court upheld the gay-bashing convictions of two San Francisco teen-agers and allowed the prosecution of four San Diego County men for a baseball bat attack that was allegedly racially motivated. The justices rejected arguments that the laws violated freedom of speech.

The laws’ “aim and effect are not suppression of speech, but the protection of individuals in the exercise and enjoyment of their rights,” said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, who wrote the lead opinion in both cases.

Referring to one of the laws, she said it “punishes the discriminatory threat of violence, not the thought behind it. Wide channels remain open for expression of racist, homophobic and other discriminatory ideas.”

Challenges to the laws were based on a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning a St. Paul, Minn., ordinance that banned cross-burning and other racially symbolic acts known to cause alarm or resentment. But a year later the high court upheld a Wisconsin law that increased punishment for bias-motivated crimes, bolstering hate-crime laws on the books in about half the states, including California.

The chief importance of Monday’s cases was the standard they set for future prosecutions.

Each of the California laws applies to crimes that are committed “because of” the victim’s race or other personal characteristics. The court said prosecutors do not have to prove that bigotry was the sole or predominant cause of the crime, only that it was a “substantial factor” in the crime.

The court also said a prosecution for violence or the threat of violence motivated by bigotry requires proof that the defendant intended to violate one of the victim’s civil rights, and that the defendant had the apparent ability to carry out the threat.

A civil rights lawyer said the rulings confirmed prosecutors’ broad authority to use hate-crime laws, while cautioning them to steer clear of marginal cases.

“California prosecutors have been very selective in choosing which crimes to prosecute as hate crimes,” said Brian Levin of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project, which filed written arguments in the case.

Two 17-year-old females and two young men attacked two homosexual men in San Francisco’s Castro District in August, 1990, the court said. Each side accused the other of provoking the conflict. One of the gay men was knocked unconscious by a kick to the head.

Both young women were convicted in juvenile court of felonious assault motivated by the victims’ sexual orientation and of interfering with the victims’ civil rights. One woman served about seven weeks in Juvenile Hall.

The San Diego County case, which has not yet gone to trial, involved an October, 1992, attack on three men in the community of Alpine. The four defendants included a man who had allegedly learned his wife had been raped by a group of Mexicans in the area.

One defendant was alleged to have talked about “hitting home runs with Mexicans.” The victims, clubbed with baseball bats, metal pipes and a table leg, suffered fractures and cuts.