Dharun Ravi Trial: Hate Crime Or Stupidity?

theodp writes "After a 17-month wait, 20-year-old Dharun Ravi went on trial Friday for using a remote webcam to spy on an encounter between his roommate and another man in their Rutgers dorm room. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself days later, jumping off the George Washington Bridge and igniting a national conversation on cyberbullying and gay teen suicide. Ravi is charged with multiple counts of bias intimidation as a hate crime, invasion of privacy and hindering apprehension; he faces up to 10 years in prison and deportation. Defense lawyers on Friday argued that Ravi's actions were the mark of an ignorant teenager, not a hateful homophobe. 'He may be stupid at times,' said Ravi's lawyer. 'He's an 18-year-old boy, but he's certainly not a criminal.' The New Yorker recently offered an in-depth look at the case and the questions it raises. BTW, this might be a good time for Microsoft to retire that Hallway commercial ('Jason gets stranded in the hallway when his roommate is 'tutoring' lady friends in their dorm room. Luckily, with Windows 7, his laptop can now work like an HD DVR. So Jason can entertain himself while waiting. And waiting. Aaand waiting some more.')."

Comments

Commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

No question that commercial is moronic, but it doesn't have any relevance to the spying via webcam thing. Timothy's trying a bit too hard to find something to bash Microsoft about this time.

Re:Commercial

[the simurgh]

he admits he set up the webcam to record his roommates sexual encounters to prove he was gay and then set out to tell everyone. he's a guilty of a hate crime as if i were him I'd be glad they didn't put a felony charge on there so they could get try and get him on the victim's suicide.

Re:Commercial

[mcgrew]

It's not that "being gay" is a hate crime, but otherwise I'd agree. What if it was a married woman being filmed having sex with her illicit lover who killed herself afterwards? It would be exactly the same thing, yet wouldn't be a hate crime.

Outing someone is a hate crime? That makes no sense to me. However, the invasion of privacy is horrible in any case.

Re:Commercial

[countvlad]

Why does this have to be a hate crime?

Isn't the whole point of "equal protection under the law" to give us all the same protections of the justice system? Why should it matter who's privacy was invaded, who was beaten, or who was killed? Shouldn't all of these acts of evil be abhorrent in our society regardless of why they were committed? Isn't it hypocritical to cry for "equal rights" and then write laws which are, by definition, unequal? It's a sad, narrow minded overreaction to the injustices of the past.

Hate crime law, like the Jim Crow laws of the last century, are a backward and draconian implementation of justice and social regulation that are a slap in the face to equality. The sooner we stop drawing distinctions like these, the sooner we'll progress to a society that is open and accepting of so called "alternative lifestyles."

Incidentally, what this man did was a horrendous invasion of privacy and fully deserves to be considered a felony. He should be tried in a court of law and regardless of the outcome should be exported (obviously at the end of his sentence if found guilty).

Re:Commercial

[cowboy76Spain]

I don't agree.

If I try to catch a girlfriend cheating on me and post the video all over the place to show what a slut she is, it's stupid, it's childish, and it's selfish.

But it's not a hate crime.

There is no evidence that he had a general hatred of gays or was persecuting the gay community as a whole. Only that he wanted to "out" his roommate. And as despicable as that may be and as terrible as the end result was, that is NOT a hate crime.

The very fact that he wanted to out the guy shows the intent. Would he had do the same thing had the roommate being dating, say, the head cheerleader? I do not think so. I don't think he would have posted the news in twitter, either. He wanted his roommate marked as gay in front of the community, assuming that the community would shun him. That alone makes it a hate crime.

The difference between hate speech and being just an asshole is when being an asshole is so common place that it becomes a social problem. Lets say that this Dharun guy was not worried about his roommate being gay, but by him wearing Star Trek costumes. So he spies on him and "outs" him as a Star Trek fan. Ok, a little weird but there is no really social opinion against trekkies. Nobody would care / gossip / harass about that.

The trouble is that outing him as a gay, in an ambient where homophobic bullying is allowed(*) can really cause a problem. Think that he was not filming a 30 something adult who might give a shit about what his coleagues might think, but another teenager who probably wanted to blend in the crowd. It is really a very different thing.

* Note that I don't say that bullying from a majority or else, but even a very small vocal minority can cause really problems if the rest of the population does not stop them(think of the Scottsboro nutcracks). And we know that bulliers are rarely opposed by those who do not want to become targets.

Re:Commercial

[realityimpaired]

When said invasion of privacy is done with the explicit purpose of humiliating the target, and leads to their suicide days later, then yes, it is an assault (psychological), and should be considered a hate crime. He's lucky he didn't get charged with negligent homicide: he should have known that his actions had consequences, and "not thinking" about those consequences is not an excuse. He's above the age of majority, and can be held legally responsible for his actions, regardless of whether he considered their effect.

Consider: this kid was away from his family, and his parents for the first time. He was just beginning to understand himself as gay, and quite likely had a very conservative family (most gay kids with liberally-minded parents come out long before they go off to University, at least in my experience). His roommate decided to film him having a homosexual encounter for the purpose of outing him, at a time when he was very likely only beginning to understand it himself. Coming out is not a question of waking up one day and saying "dad, I'm gay". First you need to come out to yourself, which can itself be very traumatic, and very difficult, especially if you've lived your whole life being taught that homosexuality is wrong. He was not ready for that kind of realization, and to have it happen in a public forum, on film and quite possibly his first ever, pushed him too far. Left to his own devices, he probably could have come to grips with his homosexuality or discovered a way to deal with it, but he was denied that chance by an act of bigotry. As a reasonable adult, particularly one who is aware of the situation with gay rights in the US, can you possibly tell me straight-faced that this couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the suicide?

Psychological abuse is still abuse, and this was motivated by the fact that he was gay. Whether it was done "for the lulz" or to humiliate him or to cause him actual harm is irrelevant, as the main reason behind it was the fact that he was gay, and that is somehow wrong.

Re:Commercial

[jbolden]

Perfectly legal acts combined with illegal acts can be consider actions in furtherance of a crime. For example driving the car with the money away from the bank is still a crime even though taking that exact same route for another purpose isn't.

The prosecution is going to have to prove a lot here. I'd rather they stop playing games and charge people engaged in bullying that leads to a death with involuntary manslaughter.

Re:Commercial

[Opportunist]

Well, to be fair, intent plays a big role in many crimes involving people. Wanting to kill someone changes manslaughter to murder. One could argue that the distinction also serves as adding a "thought crime" element to the fact that a person died.

New classification needed

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a new legal category, Asshole. Beyond Guilty or Not Guilty the Asshole standard would be added after guilt or innocence so we could find someone was Not Guilty but still an Asshole.

Re:New classification needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Filming someone having sex without their consent goes far beyond "bad manners." Bad manners would have been to knock on the door when you knew what was going on, just to interrupt them. Voyeurism, even without filming, is a type of sex crime. Filming makes it worse. Posting the thing on the internet raises it to a whole extra level of violation of privacy and invasiveness.

The amazing thing is that such simple stuff would need to be explained to anyone.

And, "Oh, gee, sorry Officer. I was just being stupid" isn't a defense. It's not a defense when you claim you didn't see the speed limit sign, and it's not a defense when you trample someone's very reasonable expectation of privacy in their own room.

Get a grip, people.

Re:New classification needed

[bhagwad]

If a particular action has no penalty or consequence, then it's meaningless for the government to mention them. And it's arrogance if they do.

Re:New classification needed

[517714]

The whole concept of hate crime is ludicrous. Hate is motive, separate from the crime. If the prosecution can show that the accused hated the person they allege he/she acted against, they have a motive to show the jury which makes their allegation more credible. Making such hatred a separate crime violates equal protection and the basic freedom to think as one pleases regardless of how warped those thoughts may be. Laws are designed to punish actions, not thoughts. Thought crime should be reserved for dystopian fiction. Hate crime laws have been passed to pander to special interest groups and do not serve the public in general.

Re:New classification needed

[Curunir_wolf]

Sure, and that's the goal. This whole "cyberbullying" / "hate crime" meme is all about an attempt to off-limit certain types of speech. The fact that the subject killed himself makes this the perfect storm of a way to promote this idea. And the idea is: "You're not allowed to criticize certain people." Sexual orientation minorities are one of those protected classes that are to get this kind of special dispensation. Heterosexuals and fat people are fair game (as Michelle Obama's campaign has made clear), as are pretty much all white people, and old people, too (ageism is never criticized as hateful or bullying, for instance).

So in spite of the portrayal of anti-bullying (and especially "cyber bullying") campaigns as an effort to end reduce suffering of the young and adolescent, the rather obvious true goal is only to protect certain groups against criticism. Note that criticism of Christian beliefs, and those of Mormons, Catholics, and often even Jews is defended as legitimate and never considered "bullying", no matter how inflammatory and hurtful the rhetoric used against them.

Even politicians and law enforcement have started using the terms, claiming that they are being "bullied" by citizens simply for criticizing their public policy actions and decision, and initiating law suits to stop them. This latest movement, to conflate any criticism of government overreach with "anti-government" anarchists or even "paper terrorists".

This is a truly frightening development, that will lead inevitably to the erosion of free speech to such a degree that the only thing recognized as "free speech" will be a narrowly-defined set of "approved speech".

Somehow

[bytesex]

I don't think that the action (suicide) is warranted by the crime (published observation). Don't get me wrong - it's a totally creepy thing to do, and it's not up to me to judge what motivates anyone, but if *that's* what it takes for you to commit suicide, well, then you've got other problems ahead of you.

Re:Hate crimes...

[digitalaudiorock]

Bull-fucking-shit. The vast majority of crime is all about money or some other gain and has nothing to do with hate at all. These guys outed this guy in a huge public way, knowing full well the stigma associated with all of it, and knowing full well it could ruin his life. "hug and run liberal establishment"??...what the fuck does that even mean?

Re:News For Nerds

[ThorGod]

What does this have to news for nerds whatsoever? I'll tell you the answer: nothing.

Actually, many of us nerds were bullied in school. I, for one, was bullied and appreciate hearing society put some pressure on bullies. This very egregious example of bullying deserves the light of day.

Re:Hate crimes...

[MightyMartian]

It probably means they hate queers too, and think this guy's actions were just a-okay.

oh pelase are you blind ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowing the US society at large is still quite homophobic, at least to a great part, do you REALLY think that outting a male making out with anotehr male has no homophobic connotation ? It would have gone nowwhere if it was two hetero, and chance is that the guy would not have published it or the hetere male would simply have garnered brownie point. But you have to be utterly blind to not see that outting homo male , was done with the intention of damage. It usually *always* is.

Re:Hate crimes...

[hey!]

The funny thing is, all crimes against another person are hate crimes. Putting a special label on them is stupid and obtuse.

Actually, "hate crime" is a serious misnomer, and it leads to misunderstandings like this. "Hate crimes" aren't crimes of passion; they're more akin to *treason* because they're crimes against liberty.

Suppose you roll into town for the KKK meeting, and you pick out a black family's house at random for a cross burning. You have nothing in particular against the people living in that house. Although you're a racist, it doesn't even mean you can't have *cordial* relationships with individual blacks *as long as they stay in their place*. So the cross burning isn't particularly directed to the people living in the house. It's a message to *everyone*: *I* get to decide who lives where. *I* get to decide how you worship God. *I* get to decide what opinions you can express.

And anyone who doesn't play by *my* rules had better look out.

This gets complicated because these crimes often mixed with personal hatred; that's the reason for the misnomer. When you lynch a black guy for dating a white woman, you surely have *particular* hatred directed at that man. But you're also saying "*I* get to decide who sleeps with who," and *that's* the part of your act that's crime against liberty. The intention isn't just to hurt the man you hate, but to strike fear into anyone who doesn't live the way you think they should.

Wrong questions..

[pablo_max]

I cannot dispute that this guy is a complete asshole and should certainly be punished in someway. Deported at a minimum. Not so sure about prison though. I have a hard time believing he envisioned the room mate killing himself. Either way, he gets to live with that.

For me, the real question is fundamental. Why, in the modern "free" world does being outed as a homosexual cause one to prefer suicide rather than live with the shame?
As a society, would it not be better to address such a fundamental social problem than to simply treat the symptoms?

Re:Hate crimes...

[betterunixthanunix]

One of those deserves just having the cops splitting them up and the other jailtime.

Really? Why does one deserve jailtime and the other does not? Why do only some victimized groups get this special protection? Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?

Hate crimes laws are another way to increase our prison population, without being as overt as the war on drugs. The pattern is familiar: first, the media lets everyone know about the terrible things being done to some particular group; then people lobby for that group to be included in hate crimes laws, with the media pointing to the progress being made by such lobbying; then the laws are amended so that another group receive this special protection. Meanwhile, society goes on victimizing other groups, using various slurs and expressions, and ignoring their plight -- people say they were "gypped" all the time, but nobody bats an eye at it (now imagine if someone said they were "nigged").

Now homosexuals are the victim group de jour, and in 20 years it will be another group. The great thing is that the media can actually seed hatred for a group, then return decades later to talk about the plight of that group (sometimes without even stopping their own encouragement of the hate). While the media was trumpeting the progress of laws to protect black people, it was simultaneously stoking the flames of fear and hatred by portraying black men as dangerous criminals. The media keeps telling us that we should respect homosexuals and treat them like everyone else...and then portrays gay men as particularly effeminate or somehow not being as masculine as straight men.

If you dare question the special legal treatment of homosexuals, you are a homophobe -- and in a particularly ironic twist, you might be accused of being a closet homosexual (by the same people telling you not to harass people for being gay). Naturally, the opinion of a homophobe on these topics is totally irrelevant, whereas the opinions of someone arguing to lock homophobes in prison for long periods of time are important to the conversation.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem here. We are not addressing the problem (the victimization of particular groups), we are just expanding the size of the prison population. Hate crimes laws are worse than knee-jerk reactions: hate crimes laws have been carefully planned out.

Re:Hate crimes...

[Myopic]

You have equated "crimes are motivated by a mindset" with "all crimes are motivated by hate". To do so is to equate thinking, with hating. That is wrong, so wrong that I have to assume you didn't really mean it (except that you've said it twice now). As so many others have pointed out, most crimes are motived by things other than hate, such as greed. So I assume you are trying to equate "a criminal feeling greed" with "a criminal hating a person who has what the criminal wants". Is that what you are trying to do? If so, then I have to disagree strongly. To do so would be to reject many ways of distinguishing hate from other forms of thought.

Re:Hate crimes...

[cdrguru]

We are starting to get into the idea that there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. Hate against a protected class (say, a minority) is a different level of hate under this thinking. Clearly different from the sort of hate that many African Americans have against white people because they have been brought up to believe that all white people are slavers and want nothing more than to re-enslave the black race.

No, sorry, you don't get to do that. Hate is hate. It is a destructive emotion but it is little more than emotion. Once we start prosecuting hate we are a short way away from prosecuting "conservatism" which to many is far more destructive than hate. Any internal throught process is then fair game regardless of its expression in actions. As much as I would like to prosecute Pollyanna-ish liberals for their beliefs in a "go along to get along" world, it is not the way to organize a society unless one is actively striving for 1984. Because if it were possible to do such prosecutions, you can bet it would be fashionable to prosecute all sorts of undesirable attitudes or the "wrong sort of thinking."

Once you start prosecuting people for what they believe, trouble is bound to follow. And by definition "hate crimes" are clearly prosecuting someone for what they believe or are thinking.

If you want to make the world safe for homosexuals, the place to start is not with what people are thinking but what they are doing. Simlarly, if you want to make the world safe for Jews "enhancing" sentances for swastica-painters because of what they believe is not the right way to do it. Instead, increase the penalties for external actions - like painting a swastica - which is something at least everyone can see.

wow, you have no idea about GLBT issues

[SuperBanana]

If the video showed a naked guy with a small penis, or a girl fucking a horrendously ugly guy, that could be every bit as embarrassing for the small-dicked man or the woman in question as this was for the homosexual man.

No, actually, and this goes to show how ignorant you are on GLBT issues.

GLBT individuals don't face "embarrassment." They have to face things like
"being disowned by their family"
"fired from their jobs"
"excommunication from their religious communities", and
"being a target of physical violence."

While we should work towards a society where GLBT people don't have to hide - it's still their choice when they come out and to whom.

You know what this was? This was kid who grew up in a country where being gay is illegal, who found himself living with a gay roommate, was really threatened/offended/bigoted, and decided to "out" the kid to get rid of him. Just spend a few minutes with Google - India's views on homosexuality are amongst the most hostile on the planet.

Re:wow, you have no idea about GLBT issues

[general_re]

For that matter, India's views on just about every social issue are extremely hostile. They make the US look like a bastion of liberal tolerance.

Comparatively speaking, given the state of most countries, the US is a bastion of liberal tolerance.