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."

Comments

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty gay... err, I mean retarded... err, I mean lame, err...

Damn unfortunate

[Stargoat]

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.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[Metabolife]

Next time you wrong someone and they end up killing themselves due to their own unrelated emotional problems, you might just change your mind.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[roeguard]

I initially felt sort of bad for Ravi, for the same reasons everyone else has stated.

Then I read that he had been offered a plea that would have avoided all jail time and probably avoided any deportation issues. And he turned it down. So he has admitted all the particulars of the "cyber-bullying", but refuses to accept a slap on the wrist and instead decides to take the fight all the way to a jury verdict? Sounds to me like he really thought he hadn't done anything wrong at all -- completely justified in actions.

You have to be some sort of serious bigot to think what Ravi did was completely okay, and so if he thinks himself so justified to deny any wrong doing at all then I have no problem with him rotting in a cell for (up to) 10 years and then being expelled from the country.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[EdIII]

The point is going to be ignored and forgotten by the end of next week.

Most people don't understand just how long 10 years really is. That punishment would not nearly fit the crime.

Sure he was an asshole, but I don't think he was actually trying to set out to kill the man, or cause the man to kill himself. Just stupid actions on top of more stupid actions.

Young people can be cruel and callous. However, that is equality. It makes no difference that the young man was gay. Every man, and every woman, has to deal with people like this, and a lot of stupid stunts pulled in high school and college. Yes, some of those stunts can be very invasive and designed to humiliate people. Welcome to college.

While it is sad, that young man made the decision to end his life, there is a larger issue. That real issue here is not that Ravi recorded an intimate moment and broadcast it, it is that the fact this young man was gay and got "caught" engaging in homosexual activity and the loss of privacy caused enough stress upon him that he concluded that the only way out was suicide. That's sad and indicative of the depressing state of affairs in our society.

If society were a little bit different that young man could have just been pissed off that Ravi secretly recorded him with his boyfriend. Pursuing other remedies available to him through the administration and local law enforcement would have been considered long before he ended his own life.

Of course, even that is an assumption. Some people have such a low threshold for stress that it does not take much to make them snap and take other people with them.

This whole situation is a tragedy and nothing really positive is going to come out of putting Ravi in prison for 10 years. The only positive outcome here is increased awareness and tolerance for others. Punishing people with years in prison for bullying is not going to be that effective at preventing young people from doing what they do.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[mjeffers]

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.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[girlintraining]

I think the entire concept of a "hate crime" is wrong. Isn't stuff like this already covered by "making threats" and "intimidation"?

Yes, it is. But when someone makes a threat based on certain characteristics of a person, such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, they are disgracing the very foundation of this country, as well as any country that would consider itself a democracy: Namely, that all people equal under the law. But that equality doesn't start with the law, rather it is the product of a deeply-held cultural belief, which the law reflects and follows from. Democracy is, at its very core, about creating great people, who can then do great deeds for its own citizens: All the great scientists, engineers, poets, writers, politicians, are a product of this cultural belief. If a person is not able to rise to a point where they reach their full potential, that harms the whole. Within that context, hate crime legislation is specifically a response to the behavior of others which is overtly limiting and damaging to this most central of beliefs.

I'm all for equality. I don't think you should discriminate against someone because of their skin color, beliefs, sexual orientation, any of that stuff really.

But you're a man of words, and not of deeds. You stop short of giving your belief any teeth, any hope of implimentation. What you are saying is "discrimination is wrong, but if you do it, you shouldn't be treated any worse for having done so." There is another school of thought: That is, for people who are predatory, people who discriminate overtly and sufficiently to break the law, more severe punishment is called for because they are not as easily deterred as someone who lacks a strong motivation, or had a momentary lapse of judgement.

you're hiring them for a job the only thing that should matter is their skills

Except that nobody hires based only on skills. That's a myth, an illusion -- most people hire other people based on their likeability, which is exactly how it sounds: How much like you the person being interviewed is. That, right there, is the loci of discrimination: a person is either like you, or unlike you. A person like you will naturally receive more favors from you. The law steps in here and says: This is not what makes for a great society. A great society must rise above petty differences.

You can't fix discrimination by being more discriminatory.

Neither can you fix it by ignoring the problem, or not recognizing that people who are motivated to commit crimes on the basis of minority attributes are far more likely to continue to commit similar crimes against those possessing said attributes than a person who exhibits the same behavior, but is not motivated by hatred. A man who hits someone while drunk at a bar might only do that once in his life. A man who hits someone at a bar because he's wearing a skirt is far, far more likely to do it again.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[binarstu]

I think you could make a point without sending someone to prison for ten years...

From TFA: "He rejected a plea deal in December that would have kept him out of prison and offered him assistance with immigration authorities."

He clearly could have avoided doing time. Instead, he and his lawyer tried to argue that (from this article): "He hasn't lived long enough to have any experience with homosexuality or gays," attorney Steven Altman said in closing arguments this week. "He doesn't know anything about it. He just graduated high school."

Evidently the jury didn't find it very convincing.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[Ronin Developer]

You may wish to read up on wire-tapping laws. At least in the state of Pennsylvania, BOTH parties have to agree to the recording or it is illegal. Period. The exception to the rule is a court-ordered wire-tap.

About ten years ago, an acquaintance of a friend of mine was arrested for illegal wire-tapping his EX-girlfriend's phones and placing surveillance equipment in her bedroom. This wasn't video and it wasn't meant as bias-intimidation...but, he WAS stalking her. He did jail time also.

What Ravi did is not about a troubled man committing suicide It's about illegally invading the privacy of an individual when they had every right to privacy. And, that invasion was done to intimidate and harass that young man. The victim was obviously troubled. However, it is clear that Ravi's actions most likely contributed to the Clementi's decision to take his own life - the harassment, intimidation and embarrassment of his "outing" pushed him over the edge. Was this Ravi's intent? Not likely. He was not charged in the death. He was charged with invasion of privacy, harassement and bias intimidation because he targeted a gay man - the bias intimidation made it a hate crime.

Gay or not, everyone is entitled to live a life without some asshole making your life a living hell. If your spouse videotapes their spouse while they are with their adulteress/adulterer (let's not imply it's always the guy who cheats, okay) in their bedroom and broadcasts it to the world ... we might feel it was justified. Despite the fact that what the spouse was doing was hurtful to the other, videotaping and sharing it with the public without their knowledge is illegal - the marriage certificate does not change that fact nor does it give them such rights. Instead, it should be used in a divorce court to make one's case of the infidelity. Hit the bugger in their wallet. That will get the message across.

Ravi will get what is coming to him - hopefully a ten year sentence (he'll serve three at most) and then deport his butt out of this country to India. His parents, will have to live with the knowledge they raised a criminal, miscreant and despicable human being. Their honor has been lost. Sucks to be him.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[serano]

Hate crime laws exist to address the fact that certain attacks are a type of terrorism that affect an entire community. If a man kills his wife, that is horrible, but it doesn't cause everyone other wife to have reasonable fear that they will likewise be attacked. If a random guy walking down the street in a gay neighborhood is gaybashed, that pointedly does strike terror in an entire community. It deserves an additional deterrent.

Re:Damn unfortunate

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re:Well good!

[Stargoat]

SmallFurryCreature, you're a right asshole. No one, not prisoners, not women, not anyone, deserves to be raped. People should not be placed into prison to be raped. If prison is not enough punishment, then punishment should be changed. But to expect, or in your evil case, demand that someone be raped in prison is wrong wrong wrong.

Ask yourself you conservative 'not a bleeding heart anymore' nutjob, what would Jesus have you do? Answer: Certainly not have a prisoner raped.

SmallFurryCreature, you should beg your creator for forgiveness and help for being more compassionate. Shame on you.