Judge Glenn Berman was about as merciful as he could have
been Monday in sentencing Dharun Ravi, the 20-year-old former Rutgers
student convicted of spying on his roommate, Tyler Clementi, with a
webcam a few days before Clementi committed suicide in September 2010.
The
judge sentenced Ravi to 30 days in jail, as part of three years of
probation. Ravi also got 300 hours of community service and was ordered
to pay a $10,000 fine. Given what he did, how he has handled himself,
and the maximum sentence he was facing — 10 years in prison — Ravi
should consider himself lucky. Very, very lucky.
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| Dharun Ravi received a sentence of 30 days in jail and three years
probation for spying on his gay roommate and posting images of him
kissing a man. The roommate committed suicide days later. MEL EVANS
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/05/23/2198121/merciful-end-to-a-tragic-case.html#storylink=cpy
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It was an
emotional morning in court. Everyone who spoke — the judge, the lawyers,
the families of Clementi and Ravi — wrestled with the terrible weight
of Clementi's death, and the extent to which it was caused by Ravi's
callous and cruel decision to spy on Clementi while he had a date with a
man (known as M.B. through the trial) in the room Clementi and Ravi
shared at Rutgers.
I felt my heart pulled by both families.
Clementi's father told the judge, "It's hard for me to imagine the
humiliation he felt from having someone film his most intimate moments."
He mentioned how often Clementi checked the Twitter page where Ravi
braggingly posted his spying plans as evidence of how disturbed his son
was by his roommate's salacious bid for attention. Clementi's brother
James said, "Tyler's final days and hours were filled with fear, shame
and a despair so great it ripped him away from me forever."
Ravi's
parents, on the other hand, denied any link between their son's actions
and Clementi's death. Ravi's father, Ravi Pazhani, said his son
harbored no prejudice toward gay people — the underlying rationale for
the bias conviction that was the reason Ravi faced multiple years in
prison. That seemed like an understandable defensive note to strike;
less so was Pazhani's angry tone and comments lashing out at "the
vengeful, malicious, selective prosecution."
But I began to see
why Pazhani felt he too had a right to be angry when he ended by saying,
"I have never felt so powerless in my life." And Ravi's mother,
Sabitha, weepingly recounted the effect of the mass condemnation of her
son. "It all started with the media ripping him apart," she said. "He
was devastated and broken into pieces ... as a mother I feel that Dharun
has really suffered enough from the past two years."
Ravi cried
while she spoke, but he chose not to explain himself Monday. In two
interviews after his conviction, he said he was sorry, but his
insistence that he acted without any anti-gay feelings at all just
wasn't plausible. Ravi said he turned on his camera only because the man
Clementi invited to the room, M.B., looked "strange." I don't buy it.
More believable, but not especially sympathetic, was Ravi's response to
the question "What were you thinking?" He answered, "I wasn't," adding,
"I got caught up in what I thought was funny, and my own ego."
I've
been opposed to Ravi serving prison time — not because I condone what
he did, but because a harsh sentence seemed out of proportion given the
stupid and jerky aspect of the invasion of privacy he committed. But I
wish he'd given a self-aware and mature accounting of himself. By
acknowledging, at least, that he can understand why it's wrong and
hurtful to spy and send a titillated tweet like "I saw him making out
with a dude. Yay."
I wanted some showing from Ravi, in other
words, that he has grown up. Instead, he stayed silent, and his letter
to the court, asking for leniency, was "unimpressive," as Berman put it.
The judge faulted Ravi's lack of remorse and humility and said,
"You can't expunge the misconduct and the pain you have caused." But
Berman rightly found that Ravi is probably not at risk to commit another
similar offense. He took into account Ravi's age — 18 at the time of
the spying — and his previously clean record. He said that Ravi didn't
contemplate the harm his misconduct would cause.
And he correctly
pointed out that in the New Jersey cases in which a conviction for a
bias crime has led to a long prison sentence, the bias was related to a
crime of violence.
The saddest aspect of this case remains the
missed chance Ravi and Clementi had to connect in the few weeks they
knew each other. Ravi had learned via online that Clementi was gay
before school begun. Jane Clementi recounted that when she and her
husband arrived with their son on the first day of school, the family
walked into his new room to find Ravi already ensconced at his computer.
"No greeting, no smile, no recognition, no nothing," she said. Ravi's
parents had to prompt him to acknowledge them.
To Clementi's
mother, in retrospect, the encounter was proof that Ravi had written off
her son. It's that act of turning away, with its lack of empathy and
compassion, that will continue to haunt us. As it should.
source from
http://www.kentucky.com/2012/05/23/2198121/merciful-end-to-a-tragic-case.html
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