If the courts wanted to take the brutality of the acts into question (dragging a person behind a truck versus shooting him, for example), that would be okay by me.

I totally agree here, because brutality is still an action that the aggressor takes. If a white man brutally beats and abuses a black man, and then kills him, he should be punished harshly for that action, regardless of whether he was a racist or not. The same should apply if the agressor was black.