Why Dharun Ravi got 30 days in jail in Rutgers webcam spying case (+video)

"We opposed throwing the book at Dharun Ravi," Steven Goldstein of Garden State Equality said in a statement Monday. "But we have similarly rejected the other extreme that Ravi should have gotten no jail time at all, and today’s sentencing is closer to that extreme than the other. This was not merely a childhood prank gone awry. This was not a crime without bias."

Berman allowed statements by family members before he pronounced the sentence. Family members on both sides of the case poured out some of the emotions that have weighed on them during the past two years as the legal case has proceeded.

M.B., in a statement read in court by an attorney, said Ravi had caused him "a great deal of pain" and used him, during the trial, as a scapegoat for his invasion of privacy. (Ravi's defense said Ravi set up remote access to his webcam in part to guard against the risk of theft by a stranger.) M.B. said he believed Ravi should serve a time in confinement as part of his penalty.

Clementi's father talked about the humiliation his son must have felt when reading Ravi's public Twitter posts. (In one tweet, Ravi said “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”) Clementi's father said the family is seeking "justice and accountability," not revenge.
 
Clementi's mother described how her son went to a resident adviser to request a change of rooms and reported Ravi's use of the webcam. She questioned why the matter was not immediately reported to police, and whether the fate of her son might have been different had the matter been handled differently at that time. One of Clementi's brothers also spoke.

On the defense side, Ravi wept as his mother, sitting next to him, told the court about the toll the case had taken on her son. She described him losing weight, eating just one meal a day, and withdrawing from social contacts amid the high-profile case. She said he has a burden to face "for the rest of his life," and asked for a sentence that gave him a chance to live a normal life.

Ravi's mother hugged him after finishing her statement.

The legal case revolved largely around two nights in September 2010, when Clementi asked for privacy in the room that he and Ravi shared. 

On Sept. 19, the first occasion, Ravi went to a friend's room where he turned on his webcam remotely. He and the friend saw Clementi and M.B. kissing. On the second night, Sept. 21, Ravi posted an message daring friends to log in to his webcam remotely.

Ravi himself was at a Frisbee practice when M.B. visited Clementi that night, and no web video was broadcast. But the prosecution argued that Ravi intended to invade Clementi's privacy that night, and was thwarted only because Clementi turned Ravi's computer off.

Steven Altman, the lead defense attorney, quoted a pre-sentencing probation report about Ravi, which described him as lacking in forethought about how his actions might affect Clementi. The report said "this case speaks loudly to the desensitization the youth of this country are experiencing," as they socialize about their lives in the digital age. 

Berman's sentence included a call for Ravi to attend counseling on alternative lifestyles and on cyberbullying.

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