<p>I agree with Garland’s assessment. The conviction was based more on a very sad outcome than on the wrongdoing of the defendant. The defendant was also a victim.</p>
<p>I lost faith in our “justice” system 17 years ago. Nothing to restore it since then.</p>
<p>From what I’ve read he was convicted on a charge of tampering with evidence, and nothing about the webcam or that poor boy’s suicide.</p>
<p>Sent from my SPH-M930 using CC</p>
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<p>I think we can know what pain he caused. Imagine it was you, or worse yet, your kid. Don’t know if you have kids, Garland, but if and when you do, you’ll be able to imagine the pain he caused. I’m not talking about the suicide, I’m talking about the spying.</p>
<p>However, I agree Ravi’s sentence was just about right. What he did was despicable, but I believe he’s been through hell and back this past year. He’s a kid, who did a stupid, mean-spirited kid thing. I think he’s suffering enough.</p>
<p>Yes, I’m a parent. I’ve got two fantastic grown kids who would be much more likely to have been friends with Tyler than with Ravi. Ravi sounds like kind of a jerk. However, I’d also have been beyond angry if in the first week of school either of my kids, either my son or daughter, was being thrown out of their room so their roommate could have someone over who was a non-student, much older, and almost a stranger to the roommate.</p>
<p>Obviously, Ravi should have complained to the RA and STudent Affairs rather than handle it so dumbly.</p>
<p>I still have no idea about what pain was or was not caused. Horrible bullying goes on in K-12 schools all the time, the Phoebe Prince story seems like a prime example. I don’t see how this in any way equates. Both young men joked about it online. It’s too bad they didn’t talk face to face–that seems to be a fading art these days, unfortunately.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure what the right sentence is. But the privacy violation was in the context of being asked to vacate your room in the first weeks of school, in order to accommodate some unknown assignation with a person who appeared to have been brought in from the street or possibly off of some sex bulletin board. That’s different in my book from other types of privacy violations. </p>
<p>The suicide made this case complicated because it was simply impossible to try Ravi for the crime he actually committed rather than for Clementi’s suicide. And Xiggi is correct, in that, if it had been a heterosexaul situation, even with a suicide the charges would have been approached differently. Not the least of which is that the bias charge, if any, would have had to have been racial rather than sexual preference.</p>
<p>I don’t get how you can’t understand the tremendous amount of pain this caused Tyler. I think I’m misunderstanding your meaning, because it sounds almost like you’re dismissing Tyler’s pain.</p>
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There’s no context to that privacy violation that lessens it in any way. It was horrible.</p>
<p>Tyler Clementi committed suicide. He was obviously in tremendous pain. Who here is dismissing that?</p>
<p>I have no idea what was going on in Tyler’s head or how he felt, but he saw the light on the laptap, said he knew he was being filmed, and yet proceeded with his sexual encounter with a stranger in the room that was partly Ravi’s. Why didn’t he turn the laptop away, or cover it? Did he want people to watch his intimate moments? Seems to me the blame for the filming has to be shouldered equally.</p>
<p>Sad situation, but I completely agree with Garland and Xiggi. Appropriate sentence.</p>
<p>garland, should Ravi been acquitted? If not, what crimes did he commit?</p>
<p>I simply have no idea what are the true facts of this case. There is so much misinformation published in news articles, I give up trying to reach any rational conclusion.</p>
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<p>That is irrelevant under that New Jersey state law dealing with violation of privacy rights using electronic surveillance tools. </p>
<p>Moreover, there’s a few points to be accounted for:</p>
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<li><p>Many dorms allow for authorized guests privileges. Hence, Clementi was well-within his rights to have guests over so long as he didn’t violate Rutgers housing regulations. Age of guests are irrelevant so long as there’s no age limitations on guests. Good thing, too…or else I would be able to have my parents come visit/stay in my dorm for a few days or have a 50+ year old off-campus college classmate over in my room for a hangout/study sessions which sometimes lasted for several hours. By the same token, my roommates couldn’t have had older relatives, friends, and classmates over as guests for the same period. </p></li>
<li><p>Ravi could have complained about Clementi’s “sexiling” him to the Rutgers’ housing authorities if he didn’t like it and handled it like a reasonably mature young adult of 18. Don’t have much sympathy here considering I started undergrad nearly a year younger than him and wasn’t this lacking in common sense or moral/ethical compass. </p></li>
<li><p>Ravi’s use of the webcam was still a direct violation of that New Jersey state law…and IMHO…serious enough that he should be made an example of on that basis alone. </p></li>
<li><p>Colleges have been assigning roommates who have brought in sexual partners to their dormrooms for decades. What’s so different about that now??</p></li>
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<p>Kids have been spying on their room mates having sex forever. They hid in closets, slid mirrors under the door. Heck they even busted open the door. The young mans suicide was the only reason the case went to trial.</p>
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<p>So long as they didn’t use electronic means to do…none of those would trigger that law I mentioned above. That’s the key thing…and IMHO…goes well beyond what you described above. </p>
<p>Granted, they could have been busted under peeping-tom ordinances in some jurisdictions.</p>
<p>And there were probably Peeping Toms back in the Middle Ages. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat Peeping Tom violations severely now. </p>
<p>Anyone think that Ravi would have gotten away with a 30 day sentence had he used a videocam to spy on female students while they were getting undressed or engaging in intimacies? How about tweeting about it? Encouraging others to check-it-out? </p>
<p>Just for the peeping tom aspects, around here he’d be brought up on charges, and if convicted, had to file as a sexual offender once he was let out of jail. Nobody would seriously suggest that he not be prosecuted. And it would have nothing to do with what the woman did or didn’t do afterwards. </p>
<p>Why is peeping – or attempting to – a gay roommate somehow less despicable? And that’s before you get to all the tampering charges. Forget what Tyler Clementi did in response, and just imagine that Ravi had done these exact same things to a freshman female. He got off way too easily.</p>
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<p>So true…or at least asked his parents (or the wonderful people on CC) for advice on how to handle the situation correctly. If he had been more mature about the whole situation, he’d have saved a lot of people (including himself) a lot of grief.</p>
<p>Ravi wouldn’t have been sharing a room with a female roommate. The computer was his own computer in his own room. Can you peep on your own room? That doesn’t feel cut and dry to me.</p>
<p>There are so many schools that charge 50 grand plus and attract a fair share of full-pays and fund all sorts of facilities for the students. Why are most schools so reluctant to go with more single rooms? </p>
<p>I know many students who lived in in their own rooms at home, and the moment they headed out of the dorms to off-campus housing, they got their own rooms, and yet schools often don’t make this an option even at a price when they join as freshmen. Most of us who find it quite enjoyable to interact with others during the day have no desire to share our bedrooms with some arbitrary stranger - don’t understand why universities are reluctant to give this option.</p>
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<p>No, but that’s irrelevant considering people have been bringing sex partners back to their dorm rooms and sexiling their roommates for decades. </p>
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<li><p>Completely irrelevant as it’s the act of using electronic tools to conduct unauthorized surveillance that’s the issue. If anything…using the computers/electronic surveillance tools of others would compound the issue…either as misuse of others’ electronic tools or worse…making them accessories to the crime as Molly Wei found out the hard way as her computer was used at some points. </p></li>
<li><p>If you share your room with a roommate, yes. Your roommate has just the same rights to expectation of privacy in that room as yourself, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. Also, google some cases about how even spouses can be arrested and face hard time for spying/peeping on their spouses’ email accounts without their knowledge. Whether the computer is the possession of the one doing the spying and the fact it took place in their homes were considered irrelevant…the spying spouse was still arrested and face serious time.</p></li>
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<li><p>Economics/logistics as most dorms were constructed when it was more common/expected for children/young adults to share rooms at home, boarding school, and college. Much easier to maintain the multi-student accommodations as they are than to turn them all into singles.</p></li>
<li><p>Expectations that everyone has a single seems to be an extremely recent phenomenon. 2 decades ago when I was an undergrad…sharing rooms was touted as a big positive in preparing young adults in learning how to negotiate living space conditions with apartment mates, spouses, etc with widely varying expectations/experiences. </p></li>
<li><p>More upper/upper-middle class families feel a greater entitlement for a single-room for their undergrad than even 10-20 years ago. And college costs were already quite high back then.</p></li>
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<p>D1 went to a single in her second year</p>