Posted on 03/20/2012 7:14:37 AM PDT by reaganaut1
LAST week, a New Jersey jury convicted Dharun Ravi of invasion of privacy, and for good reason. Mr. Ravi activated the webcam in his room at Rutgers so he could watch his roommate, Tyler Clementi, meet up with a male date. Worse, he broadcast his plans to do it again over Twitter, inviting his friends to watch. That kind of spying should be out of bounds on a college campus.
What’s out of whack about Mr. Ravi’s case is the harsh punishment he now faces: as much as 10 years in prison, for a 20-year-old who’d never been in legal trouble before.
Mr. Ravi could go away for years because, on top of spying, he was convicted of a hate crime: bias intimidation, a conviction probably influenced by Mr. Clementi’s subsequent suicide. According to New Jersey’s civil rights law, you are subject to a much higher penalty if the jury finds that you committed one of a broad range of underlying offenses for the purpose of targeting someone because of his race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation.
The idea of shielding vulnerable groups is well intentioned. But with the nation on high alert over bullying — especially when it intersects with computer technology and the Internet — these civil rights statutes are being stretched to go after teenagers who acted meanly, but not violently. This isn’t what civil rights laws should be for.
New Jersey passed one of the country’s first hate crimes statutes in 1981, outlawing the burning of crosses or placing of swastikas to terrorize and threaten violence. In 1990, the legislature added extra prison time for racial, ethnic or religious prejudice.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ravi should not have taped his roommate. He should also not have had to live with a homosexual who wanted to use their shared dorm room for trysts.
Who wants their dorm room turned into a bath house?
Let him go free.
Idiocy.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but nerds will never hurt me.
Until they achieve political office. Then they're a #$%&ing menace.
He was also convicted of witness and evidence tampering which is why he’s facing the sentence he is.
As far as I am concerned, it was a non crime. The jury members were idiots. This incident is a classic case as to why perverts are nothing but trouble (for themselves as well as everyone else)
So he had his own webcam on in his own room and he got busted for it?
What a miscarriage of justice. If his roommate didn’t want his behavior broadcast all over the world he should have checked to make sure the cameras were off first.
Just because a pervert got embarrassed that his perversion was made public is no reason to send an innocent kid to jail.
“It’s a slippery slope”
Yea. Well, folks here (and you know who you are) are as much to blame as any of the liberals. You know, the bunch who are supposedly against “big government”, but advocate for new laws and sentencing guidelines to “get tough on crime”.
When everyones a criminal the the government has total control.
Dui, domestic violence, legislated minimum sentencing, gun laws, child support statutes etc. all have been corrupted in the name of being more secure. And, it’s all about the money and control. If it were just money then it wouldn’t be so dangerous.
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