Tyler Clementi Trial Begins
Tyler Clementi was a gay Rutgers violinist who hate-crimed himself by throwing his gay ass off a tall bridge. Since you can’t bring the dead to justice, his roommate, Dharun Ravi, is being charged with a “bias crime” for using a security device to determine that his roommate was banging an older dude in his dorm room. This unknown older gay man’s identity is being protected for some reason (probably a school official), but the jury pool has been selected and the trial is about to begin.
From the DailyMail here:
A prosecutor told jurors Friday that it was no mistake that a Rutgers student used a webcam to spy on his roommate’s intimate encounter with another man.
‘The defendant’s acts were deliberately planned to invade Tyler’s privacy,’ First Assistant Middlesex County Prosecutor Julia McClure told jurors to open the hate crime trial of Dharun Ravi, ‘and to deprive him of his dignity.’
Nineteen-year-old Ravi faces 15 criminal charges, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, a hate crime punishable by up to ten years in state prison. The case spurred a national conversation about how young gays are treated when news of it broke in September 2010 after Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide.
To convict Ravi of bias intimidation, prosecutors would need to show he acted because he was anti-gay. The trial is going forward because Ravi, 19, rejected a plea bargain offer that would have let him avoid any jail time and receive the state’s help if federal authorities tried to deport him to India, where he was born.
The prosecution knows it can’t get a conviction of Ravi. His co-defendant, Molly Wei took a plea deal that basically amounts to counselling, three years probation, and no criminal record. They tried the same bargain for Ravi. But the prosecution knows it has no crime here. A webcam is a legitimate security device installed in Ravi’s room. There are no laws against “stripping dignity” from people committing sodomy on one another.
And face it, Clementi was mentally ill. The suicide proves it. How can you punish one of his acquaintances for the death due to mental illness? The prosecution is going after thought crime and it simply can’t hold up in court.
