Legal Debate Swirls Over
Charges in a Student’s Suicide
By WINNIE HU
Published: October 1, 2010
Dozens of Rutgers University students wore black on Friday to remember Tyler Clementi, a freshman who killed himself after his roommate, according to prosecutors, secretly streamed over the Internet his intimate encounter with another man.
Laura Pedrick for The New York Times
A memorial to Tyler Clementi was set up by members of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
But even as students conducted quiet rituals of mourning, a vehement legal debate swirled over whether prosecutors, who have charged the roommate and another freshman with invasion of privacy, should — or would — raise the stakes by also pressing hate-crime charges.
Though bias charges are generally hard to prove, lawyers and civil rights experts said, New Jersey has one of the toughest state laws on hate crimes. Its so-called bias intimidation law allows prosecutors to lodge separate charges and seek greater penalties against anyone who commits a crime against someone because of the victim’s sexual orientation. The law does not specify that the crime be violent.
The Middlesex County prosecutor, Bruce J. Kaplan, said Thursday that his office was considering whether to press hate-crime charges against Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro, N.J., and Molly Wei of West Windsor, N.J. As of Friday, no additional charges had been filed and a court hearing date had not been set.
But on talk shows and blogs, people outraged by the suicide of Mr. Clementi, an accomplished violinist from Ridgewood, N.J., demanded that the defendants face stiff penalties.
In a statement released through a lawyer, Mr. Clementi’s parents, Jane and Joe Clementi, said: “We understand that our family’s personal tragedy presents important legal issues for the country as well as for us. Regardless of our legal outcomes, our hope is that our family’s personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity.”
On Sept. 19, Mr. Ravi messaged his Twitter followers that he had gone to Ms. Wei’s dormitory room and activated a webcam in his own room, showing Mr. Clementi as he was “making out with a dude.” Prosecutors said the images were streamed live on the Internet.
On Sept. 21, the authorities said, Mr. Ravi tried to stream more video and invited friends to watch. But Mr. Clementi apparently discovered the camera and complained to school officials. The next day, he jumped from the George Washington Bridge.
“It is crystal clear that the motive was to intimidate and harass that young man based on his sexual orientation, whether actual or perceived,” said Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a gay rights group.
Malcolm Lazin, a former federal prosecutor who is executive director of Equality Forum, a national gay rights advocacy group, called on prosecutors to charge the two students with reckless manslaughter. “Clearly, what they did was premeditated,” Mr. Lazin said. “This was not a visceral response. This was something that was well thought out, executed and then put on the worldwide Internet.”
But several lawyers said it was hard to imagine that prosecutors could make a case for manslaughter, which would require them to show that Mr. Ravi and Ms. Wei foresaw that their actions would lead to a death.
“I think it would be hard to show that their conduct reached a level of recklessness that caused Tyler Clementi to commit suicide,” said Jay V. Surgent, a criminal defense lawyer in Lyndhurst, N.J.
Instead, these lawyers said, it was more likely that prosecutors would pursue bias charges.
Robert A. Mintz, a criminal defense lawyer in Newark and a former federal prosecutor, said, “What prosecutors will be looking at is whether this is a prank that had gone horribly wrong, or whether this was an orchestrated scheme to intimidate the victim based on his sexual orientation.”
Mr. Mintz said that prosecutors would likely review the students’ e-mail and Twitter messages, read any essays or blog entries, and interview friends about what they might have said. “If there’s an accumulation of circumstantial evidence, that can be very powerful,” he said.
If the students are charged and convicted of a hate crime, they could face up to 10 years in prison, instead of 5 years for the privacy charge alone. State Senator Shirley K. Turner has proposed legislation to raise the top sentence for invasion of privacy to 10 years.
Student vigils are planned over the weekend for Mr. Clementi.
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