Amy Davidson's lead in The New Yorker pretty much sums up how I feel about this:
How can one make emotional sense of the verdict in the trial of Dharun Ravi, whose roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped off the George Washington Bridge?
It's a case the press reported poorly, turning as it did on a jury's interpretation of a complex intertwining of New Jersey law and attempts to read the mind of the defendant, a Beemer-driving, cocky young man who though he and his buds wrote the latest word on coolth:
Ravi faced fifteen charges involving, in various configurations, invasion of privacy, intimidation, and bias, for acts involving setting up a webcam to watch an encounter between Clementi and a man he brought to the room they shared, and tweeting about it. The jury found him guilty, even though they dismissed some of the elements that had been alleged against him. Under the law, there are three paths one can take on the way to “bias intimidation”: one can get there purposely, knowingly, or—and now we leave the mind of Dharun Ravi—if an act did intimidate and if a reasonable person would feel targeted because of sexual orientation. Each of these tests was applied to two incidents, each with two aspects (watching, showing), and in some of them the jury didn’t feel the first two tests were met. But they didn’t need to be; the jury didn’t have to find that he had acted with hate himself. The point was the way he exposed Clementi to hatefulness. It is enough, apparently, to shove someone toward the fire, even if it doesn’t burn inside you.
For adults- especially those who were college freshmen in pre-Internet days- the case is hard to fathom. We can't know what it's like to live in a world of constant interconnection with a universe of friends and strangers intermixed, and sometimes one in the same; of how what we think we said among others we could trust in a forum can be discovered and repeated and rebroadcast and repackaged in instant and unimaginable ways. The Internet is a sort of funhouse world, offering tantalizing come-ons to entry and then turning terrifying with no notice (It's hard enough for adults- I've had my share and then some of people trying to stop me from writing here by all kinds of means, including things they wouldn't like a bit if the same tactics were turned on them- much less trying to imagine you're being dissected on Twitter and can drop an anytime you like to get the latest reviews of your corpse. When I was in high school the worst things to fear were the telephone, gossip, and slam books. The Internet (remember Hot or Not?) is all that in hyperspeed. To have a teenager's minute-to-minute seismograph of self-esteem in the Internet Age must be pretty horrific more often than not.
Mostly this is a case where no one won anything. The Clementis don't get their son back. They may have enough evidence to pursue a civil case against Ravi- who is probably a typical well-to-do kid in that all his trappings come from his parents' money. But they don't get their son back, and they have their own set of now irresolvable questions to live with.
The Ravis may lose their son through deportation to India. He has certainly lost his reputation, unless he chooses to trade its tatters for stardom in the right-wing radio/TV/column/book world of advanced victimology studies; ethnic types who fall afoul of the PC police are evergreens in that universe. His educational career is in a shambles.
No one wins, no one learns anything.
How can one make emotional sense of the verdict in the trial of Dharun Ravi, whose roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped off the George Washington Bridge?
Ravi faced fifteen charges involving, in various configurations, invasion of privacy, intimidation, and bias, for acts involving setting up a webcam to watch an encounter between Clementi and a man he brought to the room they shared, and tweeting about it. The jury found him guilty, even though they dismissed some of the elements that had been alleged against him. Under the law, there are three paths one can take on the way to “bias intimidation”: one can get there purposely, knowingly, or—and now we leave the mind of Dharun Ravi—if an act did intimidate and if a reasonable person would feel targeted because of sexual orientation. Each of these tests was applied to two incidents, each with two aspects (watching, showing), and in some of them the jury didn’t feel the first two tests were met. But they didn’t need to be; the jury didn’t have to find that he had acted with hate himself. The point was the way he exposed Clementi to hatefulness. It is enough, apparently, to shove someone toward the fire, even if it doesn’t burn inside you.
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