Gawker today ran an article about the Tyler Clementi suicide again regarding the charges being levied against his alleged tormentor Dharun Ravi. My local newspaper indicated that he could be facing up to 10 years in prison for various counts including but not necessarily limited to invasion of privacy, bias crimes, and witness tampering [alleged to have attempted to dissuade witnesses from testifying]. I don't know how much of that will stick. I hope Mr. Ravi has a good lawyer because, aside from the invasion of privacy charge, this list of charges seems excessive as does the maximum punishment. That's a long time to spend in prison for an outcome that could not have been reasonably expected. Would he be facing all these charges had Mr. Clementi not committed suicide, but instead sued his roommate?
Anyways, again a commenter on that site left a thought-provoking response that I would like to share here courtesy of dukes_up:
Honest question (if anyone knows): is there a reasonable expectation of privacy in a shared dorm room owned by the university? Let's put the web cam thing aside - if Tyler was in bed with a guy, Ravi walked in, and instead of leaving to give them some space he sat on his bed and stared at them - would that be considered an invasion of privacy? What if he called his friend Molly and said "OMG Tyler is in here having sex with a guy, I'm just trying to do my homework, this is so annoying and gross."
I'm just wondering as I can imagine a number of scenarios that are not necessarily illegal but could have nonetheless led poor Tyler to committing suicide - or could lead another student in a similar mental state to a similar end at another school. I wonder if this will set a legal precedent as to what can and cannot be done when sharing a dorm room.
What are your opinions?
ADDENDUM: While getting the link for dukes_up's profile on Gawker, I noticed this comment as well that I may as well share. A two-fer!
My mother is very Christian (she wrote me a four page letter explaining why my choice to live with my boyfriend instead of getting married was hurting God) - and even she thinks gay marriage should be legal. A homophobic uncle of mine was ranting about how evil gay people are last week (hilarious because he's "Catholic" but cheats on his wife as often as possible) - my mom replied "I think homosexuality is wrong, but every citizen deserves equal rights and it's wrong for the country to deny them the same rights as everyone else."
Didn't Jesus say "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's?" If that isn't the ultimate say-so on how Christians should view their relationship with the state as completely separate to their relationship with the church, then I don't know what is.
2 comments:
Soapbox_aria posted this deep in the comment section. More food for thought:
I disagree with you a lot. but I cannot find the words to describe it, so I'm going to make some statements.
In todays society I would argue that it actually is the equivalent of TPing someone's house (In fact the sheer amount of effort it takes to actually TP someone's house, in someways, makes TPing worse than this). I'm currently 21. I had my first AIM account at 9, my first myspace account at 13, and my first facebook account at 17. Still, I sometimes feel like I did not grow up during the age of internet because there was a point in my existence when these things did not exist and when I was trying these forms of social media out they were still fairly new and exciting. For someone like Ravi who is 18 these things were commonplace at a very early age. More and more studies come out talking about how people consider their facebook/twitters/cellphones as extensions of themselves and how many people live out secondary social lives (that are often more fulfilling on then their primary lives) on various web base platforms (whether this be WOW or twitter). People, especially young people, don't know better about the internet or else we wouldn't need sexting PSAs.
For Ravi it could very well be the case that he thought what he was doing wasn't that terrible because for him it is essentially the equivalent of going to the common room and verbally telling people that his roommate is hooking up with someone and having those people try and stare through the peephole or window to see if it was true. The internet only made it more convenient to tell everyone and the webcam only made it easier to see through the window. In the same way that nanny cams made it easier to tell if your child was being abused or your house robbed, webcams have made snooping a lot easier.
In fact this easiness is why I feel that a house TPing is actually worse. It probably took Ravi all of 5 minutes (if that, probably more like 30 seconds) to set up his computer and camera so that he could spy on Clementi, by the time he went to his friends room he was probably so high on adrenaline that he didn't have time to thing, "hey, maybe this is a bad idea." By the time that it was over he probably had such favorable responses that the various sized leaps in bad judgment (for us they seem huge but I can understand why, for him, they seem small) no longer mattered and why he did them again. Somebody who TPs a house has ample opportunity to decide that this is a bad idea and takes on the financial burden of buying all that toilet paper as well as the much more obvious legal risk if they get caught.
And this is all coming from a girl who was did suffer from long-term depression and PTSD and who continues to suffer from a related social anxiety disorders and trust issues. I even had to switch schools because I had absolutely NO friends and I was suicidal. I've worked through a lot of the anger that I have towards all the people I went to school with and have gotten over 95% of it, but the stuff I cannot get over was not the invasion of privacy stuff (which did happen) but the stuff that was so blatantly premeditated that I wonder how humanity manages to survive when people can stew on an idea for such a long time and still think it was something they should do. So yes, people do stupid things and sometimes it is really sucky but this probably actually a case of kids are stupid and don't understand the consequences of their actions, because ultimately this was a fairly easy form of bullying.
An additional comment from soapbox_aria responding to someone else:
What I'm arguing is that, for a teenager growing up in this decade, what Ravi did is the equivalent of going to the common room and announcing that his roommate is getting some. And before you immediately reingfute me by say things like "teens don't think that is ok" then explain away the amount of likes to this video, or the fact that this [www.youtube.com] is necessary. People know that it is wrong in the way that we know that gossiping is wrong, but the level of "wrongness" is different among generations You make it seem like he actively plotted out the procuring of a camera for the explicit use of spying on his roommate, and then he had to install all of this really sophisticated software, and then actively searched out the vantage point for getting the best view of the bed by testing out different scenarios. It takes about 10 seconds to turn on a camera and another 10 seconds to adjust my laptop screen (which has the camera pre-installed) so that you can see a specific part of my room. It will take me another 10 seconds to send the tweet out.
Because it was Ravi's room as well, I am sure that Ravi was not considering the legal ramifications because he probably didn't consider it an invasion of privacy. He may not even have realized it was illegal.
I'm really responding to the idea that people think he is a sociopath or has sociopathic tendencies. I'm just having a hard time viewing this as standard bullying in a digital age, I think this is something that has been happening for a while but was not addressed until Clementi's death because it was a slightly more extreme case. I don't think that it was unreasonably extreme when you look at what is already going on in cyberbullying (that is to say that while the invasion of privacy was extreme, the jump from what was going on in cyberbullying to what Ravi did).
I don't know, maybe I'm just an unsympathetic former bullied kid. I just wouldn't want what is happening to Ravi and Wei to happen to my former bullies. I would rather them just do community service and stop being such assholes but maybe I'm just less bloodthirsty.
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