Rutgers Case Jury Convicts on All Charges

I hope Dharum Ravi had some good laughs over what he did to Tyler Clementi because Ravi could be going to prison for a number of years. As the New York Times reports, the jury in the much watched case found Ravi guilty on all charges, including tampering with evidence. One can only hope that a powerful message will be sent to other would be cyber-bullies as a result. The jury's decision to convict was bolstered by the abundance of Internet and social media evidence that isn't as easily erased as some bullies might believe. I hope word of the conviction - and whatever sentence is given to Ravi - gets around, especially among the Christianist and bubba sets who often seem to believe tormenting gays and those deemed "other" is great sport. Here are highlights from the Times story:

[F]or members of the jury, some of the most convincing evidence of Mr. Ravi’s guilt came from Mr. Clementi’s own complaints and online behavior after he learned of Mr. Ravi’s spying. And Mr. Clementi’s words echoed even more powerfully because he was not available to repeat them.

“It was pretty hard to think about Tyler, because he wasn’t present to give his thoughts,” said Kashad Leverett, 20, of South Amboy, N.J., after he and 11 other jurors delivered a guilty verdict on all charges, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, on Friday. “But in the evidence that was provided, it showed that he believed he was being intimidated because of his sexual orientation.”

It was a case with a pixelated paper trail seemingly like no other: Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, text messages, e-mails and other online chatter that together added up to a mountain of proof of Mr. Ravi’s guilt, some jurors said.

Other charges were hotly debated but led fairly quickly to votes to convict on other charges, including evidence tampering and witness tampering, Ms. Audet said. “There were text messages missing from his phone but not missing from other persons’ phones,” she said.

The bias intimidation charges were the most difficult to agree upon, jurors said. And what tipped the scales there, they said, was that Mr. Ravi had discussed spying on Mr. Clementi not just once, but repeatedly, even inviting his online friends to watch Mr. Clementi and the other man in a second encounter. That, said Ms. Audet, is what elevated the case from one of teenagers behaving cruelly and insensitively to a crime. “To attempt a second time, is what changed my mind,” she said. “A reasonable person would have closed it and ended it there, not tweeted about it.”

An important component of the bias intimidation charges was whether Mr. Clementi felt bullied. Jurors said he left ample evidence that he did: he complained to his resident assistant, he went online to request a room change, he saved screen shots of Mr. Ravi’s more offensive online posts, and he viewed his roommate’s Twitter feed 38 times in the two days before he killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. “We’ll never know exactly what he was feeling,” Ms. Audet said. “I can only assume.”

[S]he hoped her own children would draw heartfelt lessons from the tri al.I hope they use their heads and think before they do this,” she said. “Text messages, tweets, e-mails, iChats are never gone. Be careful. I’ve already told my kids, be careful. If you’re going to put something in writing, be able to back it up. Unfortunately, Dharun, he’s learning the lesson a very hard way.”

It's sad that Ravi has ruined his own life. What's even sadder is that he drove Tyler to end his life. But worse of all is that "godly Christians" are striving daily to denigrate and disseminate lies about LGBT people and maintain an atmosphere where conduct such as Ravi's is deemed utterly acceptable and where the tormenting of gays is morally acceptable.