Friday, March 16, 2012
The dope didn't take the deal
Ravi guilty on all counts in webcam spying trial
NEW BRUNSWICK — The deal was on the table months ago.
Plead guilty, prosecutors told Dharun Ravi, and you likely won’t go to prison.
Ravi, charged in a first-of-its-kind prosecution linking invasion of privacy to a hate crime, rebuffed the offer, opting to take his chances with a jury.
Today, in a New Brunswick courtroom filled to overflow, the 20-year-old Plainsboro man learned the consequence of his choice as a jury forewoman spoke his fate.
Guilty.
Guilty of invading the privacy of his Rutgers University roommate, Tyler Clementi, by using a webcam to remotely spy on an intimate tryst between Clementi and an older man. Three days after that encounter in September 2010, the distraught teen leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, catapulting the case into the national spotlight.
Guilty of witness tampering, hindering apprehension and tampering with evidence.
Most significant, guilty of bias intimidation, a second-degree felony indicating Ravi targeted Clementi because he was gay and knew his actions would hurt him.
In a precedent-setting verdict that legal experts and advocates say draws a firm line against bullying and harassment in a wired world, the jury convicted Ravi of 15 counts that could land him in prison for a decade. He also faces the possibility of deportation to his native India, from which he legally emigrated as a child.
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In December, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office offered him a plea bargain including probation, 600 hours of community service and an offer to help avoid deportation, but Ravi, rejected it. His attorney said he rejected it because he is innocent.
He either received bad legal advice or, my guess, he got good legal advice & didn't take it. He should have taken the plea bargain. I would have said, "Kid, you don't seem to understand, but they're going to try to make you the LAST teenager in Jersey who pulls a nasty stunt like this. You alone are Tyler Clementi's justice. He'll have buildings named after him, concert halls. Your own justice, whatever you imagine that to be, doesn't figure into this at all. You are the message. You can be that message working in a homeless shelter or hospice & become a nobody, or be that message in a packed courtroom, Dharun Somebody, & go to jail, where saying you're heterosexual is an old joke, & from jail you'll be transferred to the I.C.E. detainment center next to the airport."
Labels: culture, in the news, New Jersey, Rutgers
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Therein lies the conundrum of a plea bargain - the innocent pleading guilty to a lesser charge, which in many ways, like the one Ravi was offered, provides you with "freedom" that you would otherwise loose if you threw the dice and took the gamble. That is exactly how it went down for my daughter in her dependency court matter - plead to the finally watered down charges (that started out as abuse perpetrated on a minor) of improper discipline by slapping. Had the father's gasbag five attorneys not cut a deal behind my daughter's back, this minor plea deal would have resulted in her doing certain things like parenting classes, anger management, etc., but she would have eventually been reunified with her child. Instead, this backfired because the gasbag attorneys for the father got the charges dismissed as to the father. So, since one parent was found guilty of doing some minimal harm to the child, the non guilty parent by law got the child. I find it ridiculous and funny that the father's gasbag attorneys are still fighting us over the issue of my daughter's "guilty" plea, and ignoring the fact it was a plea BARGAIN as opposed to rolling the dice and having a trial in which the main witness would be the minor child!
With Ravi, the plea deal was a mercy. His female "accomplice" took a deal to testify. That he had spied with a cam was not in dispute. But the connection to Tyler's suicide wasn't so crystal clear. Tyler had just come out to his family. So that left the bias intimidation charges, a "new" law, & I think the prosecution would have preferred trying that law out on a Nazi skinhead or a Mosque arsonist, some high profile hater. That's why I would have counseled, "Don't be a symbol kid, & in five years no one will remember you. "
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