How much is intentionality relevant to specific crime(s) in the US?
<p>Let's say, person A who is not fluent in English, calls somebody else (B) by a derogatory or racist name or names, which might generally fall under some law restricting such speech (eg. hate speech) and gets sued for that.</p>

<p>Does it matter from legal perspective, if it can be proved that A either doesn't happen to know that this word is commonly understood as derogatory, or he was explicitly mislead by somebody else that it was a normal everyday word without any negative connotations, therefore, it can be proved that A didn't <em>mean</em> any harm to B by his speech?</p>

<p>In the US, there are no (and can be no) laws against hate speech. You also cannot sue a person for using an ethnic or similar epithet. A false accusation, however, might be grounds for a defamation lawsuit. Word connotations do not matter, what matters is the denotation, for example calling someone a "rapist" denotes a specific criminal act.</p>

<p>Even calling someone a rapist isn't necessarily defamatory, since hyperbole abounds especially on the internet, so in order to actually be defamation, the statement would have to be understood as a particular accusation (a form of unlawful sexual assault). A defamatory statement has to be made with reckless disregard for the truth of a statement, which is not the case in the situation you describe (perhaps the person correctly said that so-and-so is a therapist, but was ineffective in their use of English). </p>

united-states freedom-of-speech