Ex-student webcam spy case gets 30-day jail term
A judge gave 20-year-old Dharun Ravi a 30-day jail term and then probation today, resolving the first part of the legal odyssey in an unusual, emotional and tragic case dealing with the consequences of bad decisions by young people in the Internet age - but certainly not ending the debate surrounding New Jersey's tough hate-crimes laws.
Judge Glenn Berman said he would not recommend Ravi be deported to India, where he was born and remains a citizen.
The case began in September 2010 when Ravi's randomly assigned freshman-year roommate asked Ravi to stay away so he and a guest could have privacy.
Ravi went to a friend's room and turned on his webcam remotely. Jurors at his trial earlier this year heard that he and the friend saw just seconds of Clementi kissing the guest, who was identified in court only by the initials M.B. But they told others about it through instant messages and tweets. And later, the friend, Molly Wei, showed a few seconds of the live-streamed video to other residents of the dorm. Wei later entered a pre-trial intervention program that can spare her jail or a criminal record if she meets a list of conditions.
When Clementi, an 18-year-old violinist from Ridgewood, asked for privacy again two days later, Ravi agreed - then told friends how they could access his webcam.
But this time, the webcam was not on when M.B. came over. There was testimony both that Clementi unplugged it and that Ravi himself put it to sleep.
The next night, Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Jurors learned that he checked Ravi's Twitter feed repeatedly before his suicide.
After the suicide, gay-rights and anti-bullying activists held up Clementi as an example of the horrible consequences of bullying young gays. Even President Barack Obama spoke about the tragedy.
Prosecutors offered Ravi a plea deal that called for no prison time but would have forced him to admit to committing six different crimes. He turned it down.
After a trial that lasted four weeks, Ravi was convicted of all 15 criminal charges he faced, including four counts of the hate crime of bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and seven counts accusing him of trying to cover his tracks by tampering with evidence, a witness and other means.
The most complicated and serious counts were bias intimidation, two of which are second-degree crimes punishable by up to 10 years in prison. During legal arguments out of earshot of the jury, Berman called the law on the issue "muddled."
One of the issues: Ravi was convicted on one count only because Clementi reasonably believed he was being targeted for being gay. On that count, the jury found that Ravi did not knowingly or willfully intimidate him. But jurors found on the three other hate-crime counts that Ravi did know he was intimidating his roommate.
Just as Clementi became a symbol for a complicated cause, so has Ravi.
Several hundred supporters rallied at New Jersey's State House last week to denounce the way the state's hate-crime laws were being used on someone they said was not hateful. They were hoping Ravi would not be sent to prison and that the law could be changed so that someone in his situation again would not be found to have committed a hate crime.
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