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."
First, we've already established for a long time that mindset matters. Each of these scenarios is a different crime with different sentencing guidelines
1) Driving a car drunk with your spouse in it and getting into a crash where they die
2) Walking in on your spouse cheating on you and killing them in the heat of the moment
3) Meticulously planning how to kill your spouse over the course of several months
In each case we have the same result (due to your actions, your spouse is dead) but we already recognize that your mindset (drunk, angry in the heat of the moment, systematically planning someone else's death) matters.
Second, hate crimes are added on to other charges because hate crimes are actually a seperate crime. If you were driving drunk with a black friend in the car and crashed it's different than if you went and lynched someone. In the second case, you not only wanted to hurt the person directly involved but you wanted to send a message of intimidation to people like them.
In this particular case, I think the jury did the right thing by rejecting the hate crime charges. It seems as it Ravi was dumb, insensitve and certainly invasive of his roomates privacy but it doesn't seem like this was a crime intended to intimidate the community.
That real issue here is not that Ravi recorded an intimate moment and broadcast it,
Can we clear up one thing that was repeated all over the internet and is still being repeated here:
There was no "broadcast."
Ravi and one friend viewed something through a webcam for a few seconds. After that, on a subsequent evening when Ravi was asked to stay out of the room, he tweeted that he was going to set up a public viewing. For various reasons that I've read in conflicting accounts, this more public viewing never happened. (I believe Ravi claims he decided not to do it long before the time came.)
So, the "invasion of privacy" seems to be based on two people across the hall spying through a webcam for less than a minute. This was certainly a jerk thing to do, but is it much different from two people across the hall quietly opening the door and peaking in? How many college students do this to spy on a roommate?
I'm not speaking about possible bias or motivation or whatever, but the invasion of privacy did NOT involve a recording or broadcast, at least according to reliable news sources I've read.