[Assam] [assam] Webcam Spying Case: Indian student Dharun Ravi gets 30 day jail term, probation

[bhuban.baruah]

Times of India (May 21, 2012)

Indian student Dharun Ravi will serve a 30-day jail term beginning May 
31.
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY: A former Rutgers University student who was 
convicted of hate crimes for using a webcam to view his roommate and 
another man kissing days before the roommate killed himself will go to 
jail for 30 days.

A judge gave 20-year-old Dharun Ravi a 30-day jail term and then 
probation on Monday.

That resolved the latest 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