Slashdot Mirror
Rutgers Student Ravi Convicted of Bias Intimidation and Spying
In 2010, Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi used his computer's webcam to spy on the activities of his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi, and commented about it publicly on Twitter. Days later, Clementi committed suicide. Ravi was indicted on 15 charges, going to trial last month. Now, reader doston sends word that the trial has ended, and Ravi has been found guilty on all 15 charges, though the jury returned a not guilty verdict on aspects of certain charges.
"After less than three full days of deliberations, the five men and seven women of the jury found Dharun Ravi, 20 years old, guilty of invading the privacy of his 18-year-old roommate, Tyler Clementi, and his dorm-room date. They also found that Ravi was motivated by bias under a New Jersey hate-crime law that had been largely untested so far. ... The jury had been asked to decide Ravi’s motivations when he trained his webcam on Clementi and his date on two separate occasions in September 2010, in a case that set off a national conversation about cyber-bullying and treatment of gay youth. ... Ravi faces up to 10 years in prison on most serious bias intimidation convictions, but is likely to receive a lesser sentence based on sentencing guidelines because he is a first time offender. The India-born Ravi, who has spent most of his life in the U.S. as a permanent resident, faces the possibility of deportation as a result of his criminal conviction. He rejected a plea deal in December that would have kept him out of prison and offered him assistance with immigration authorities."
It's damn unfortunate for everyone involved. But even worse, Ravi is also going to have his life ruined by a man who decided to end his own. What Ravi did was punch in the nose wrong - not 10 years in prison and deportation. Heck, the stupid stuff we did on our floor in college was just as bad or worse. I'm sure 99% of every man who went to college in the dorms can say the same.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The guy is a dickhead who violated another persons very reasonable expectation of privacy and then spread it around. Note that his defense never denied any of it, just claimed it wasn't so bad after all, haters will hate it seems and because this poor guy can be deported that another person felt so bad about having his private live revealed that he killed himself does not matter. Neither has this guy ever made a serious apology, the only thing he feels sorry for is himself.
Now, please tell me why I am a lousy human being for not feeling sorry for this dickhead and thinking poetic justice would be to put a webcam in his cell as he finds a husband during his stretch.
Society has certain rules, they are not that hard to get. Nobody could possibly think that what he did was not morally wrong, yet he did it. Now he cries that its effects on him are to big. The effects HIS actions had on his roommate don't come into it. Let him make a serious effort of atonement BEFORE the jury found him guilty. I never buy it when a criminal says he was so sorry, AFTER his lawyer wrote the speech for him. Maybe I am just not a bleeding heart anymore. And if you think, this is just what 20 year olds do... then it says a lot about you.
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I think what Ravi did was wrong, and had tragic consequences, but I have a problem with the term "hate crimes," and giving certain segments of society special protections over other segments of society. There should be other crimes that he could be charged with (invasion of privacy laws, etc.), but to charge someone having a particular belief system is wrong. I don't have a problem with considering intent when it comes to sentencing, but it seems entirely improper to consider it as a crime in and of itself.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Yeah, he definitely was guilty of invasion of privacy and most certainly was an asshole of extraordinary magnitude. But am I the only one kind of creeped out by the idea that something as vague as "bias intimidation" can get you ten years in prison? I mean, what the hell even *is* that?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If I have a choice, I don't want him in my country.
You know, this isn't just your country. If I had a choice, I would reject plenty of folks from my country. Your judgement about deportation being a punishment should be weighed on every crime.
This kid did something stupid and he might get deported to a country he didn't grow up in, and might not know at all. Other kids do stupid stuff like this all the time (even resulting in injury or death), and if they get punished at all, don't get sent to an effectively unknown country.. maybe they spend some time doing rehabilitation or restitution, or perhaps some incarceration (very unlikely 10 years).
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Please note that the State uses a plea bargain as a way to avoid the effort of actually going to trial. Not saying this guy wasn't guilty, but the fact is that only a tiny fraction of criminal cases actually wind up in front of a jury. Why? Because the State says "take this deal or we throw the book - and the chair and the desk and the whole goddamn building - at you". It's not even remotely fair; it is a blatant attempt to intimidate people out of their right to a trial by jury. Of course, the juries are generally not aware of this, and are almost certainly unaware of the deal initially offered.
"Bias intimidation" is even more idiotic that "hate crime". What kind of idiots are we electing as legislators? Oh, right...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You'll notice the GP didn't say anything about a right not to be offended. He was talking about intimidation.
Hate crimes are not simply crimes where someone has said "I think gays are bad". Nobody has outlawed that. They're crimes where someone's said "I'm going to beat you up, or kill you, because you're gay."
This is about violence being used to, or with the effect of, intimidate a group of real people who have done nothing wrong. Sometimes motives matter. This is one of those cases. If it doesn't matter, if violence and killing is no worse if the intent is to intimidate a group of people, then convict Bin Laden for manslaughter and have him do community service.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I dislike the concept of hate crimes laws.
But I dislike a lot of things, and one thing that hanging around with gay and trans people has taught me is: We appear to need these laws, in that in their absence, people get away with a lot of crap.
Here's the thing. Someone said this was "punch in the nose" wrong behavior. Well, think of what happens if people decide that punching people like you in the nose is okay, or possibly morally obligatory. So it's not that some guy punches you in the nose once; it's that everywhere you go, about 10% of the time when you walk into a public place, someone punches you in the nose.
The cumulative effect is wildly different from what you'd expect if you just looked at the severity of a single offense and multiplied by the number of times it happens. It turns out that there is a big difference between "sometimes people are a jerk to you, it happens, you deal", and "people are systematically and consistently a jerk to you and anyone like you no matter what you personally have or haven't done."
I really don't see a problem with this outcome. You bully a lot of people, especially people that you know to already be subject to excessive harassment, and sometimes things go very wrong. Solution: Don't bully people, and especially don't bully people you know to be members of groups that are systematically bullied by lots of other people. If you do, you take the risk that the bullying will go horribly wrong and people will blame you for it. Possibly because, if you hadn't done it, that wouldn't have happened.
Basically, what the comments here do is illustrate, to me, why hate crime laws are a necessary thing; because the world is full of people who, never having been the subject of systematic harassment, are quick to dismiss it as no big deal and think it's funny when it happens to people they look down on. So we do need a way to clarify that, yes, this really is a big deal, and really is a problem. Congratulations! The reason we need hate crime laws is that a significant number people, some of them slashdot commenters, have not yet reached the level of empathic response to other peoples' circumstances that we would typically expect from an autistic teenager.
(... And I know, because I was an autistic teenager, and I was a little better than what I'm seeing here. Not much better, though.)
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If you look at the actual breakdown of the charges Ravi was convicted of, you'll notice that he was acquitted of all the bias intimidation sub-charges that he knowingly intimidated Clementi. The one that he was convicted of, which caused the bias intimidation guilty verdict was that "under circumstances that caused Tyler Clementi to be intimidated, and considering the manner in which the offense was committed, Clementi reasonably believed that he was selected to be the target of the offense because of sexual orientation".
So basically he was convicted not because Ravi had any bias when committing the act, but but because Clementi believed that the act was committed out of bias.
That's a very scary verdict because it basically states that it doesn't matter whether or not you have any real bias when committing a crime. You can still be convicted of bias intimidation if the victim believes you are biased. In other words, it's not what you believe, it's what someone else things you believe.
With that precedent, you can use bias intimidation charges to charge and convict preachers for preaching against homosexuality in churches or comics for making "inappropriate" jokes in comedy houses.