A former Rutgers student who was convicted in March of hate crimes and invasion of privacy was sentenced to 30 days in jail on Monday. That was well short of the maximum penalty of 10 years in prison that he faced for using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate just days before the roommate took his own life.
Dharun Ravi, 20, was also given three years' probation, ordered to get counseling, and must give $10,000 to a program that helps hate crime victims, Boston.com reported.
"Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance," Judge Glenn Berman was quoted as saying in handing down the sentence.
But Judge Berman said he would not recommend that Ravi, a citizen of India, be deported to his home country for spying and attempting to spy on his roommate Tyler Clementi's intimate encounter with another man in 2010.
Clementi's death garnered national attention and is credited with kickstarting the then-nascent "It Gets Better" anti-bullying video campaign launched in the fall of 2010 by syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage and his husband.
With the case seen as a touchstone for increased awareness of bullying, various advocacy groups pushed for Ravi to be punished for his deeds. As details emerged about what had occurred, however, few were calling for him to receive the maximum penalty.
Still, the minimal amount of time Ravi will have to spend behind bars is apparently not sitting well with some. Garden State Equality, a New Jersey-based gay rights organization, said the 30-day sentence was not enough given Ravi's crimes, according to Boston.com.
"This was not merely a childhood prank gone awry. This was not a crime without bias," Garden State Equality chairman Steven Goldstein said in a statement.
Ravi reportedly turned down a plea agreement ahead of his trial that would have resulted in no jail time.
On Sept. 19, 2010, Ravi used a webcam in his and fellow Rutgers freshman Clementi's dorm room to stream Apple iChat video to a computer in fellow student Molly Wei's room down the hall. Ravi captured just a few seconds of the tryst, but described what he'd seen on Twitter. Two days later, Ravi tried to use the webcam to broadcast another encounter between Clementi and his partner over the Internet, but Clementi was able to stop it.
Clementi, a talented violin player who had only recently revealed to his parents that he was gay, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, 2010.
Ravi and Wei were initially charged on Sept. 28, 2010, but the charges against Wei were later dropped in exchange for her agreement to testify against Ravi. A full grand jury indictment of Ravi that included charges of committing hate crimes was delivered in April 2011 and his trial began in March of this year.
On March 16, a New Jersey jury convicted Ravi on 15 counts, the most serious of which was bias intimidation, classified as a hate crime, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. He was also found guilty of attempted invasion of privacy, tampering with physical evidence, hindering apprehension or prosecution, and witness tampering, the latter charges relating to Ravi's deletion of text message and tweets that referred to the webcam spying incidents, and an attempt to influence a witness.
Prior to the sentencing, Ravi's mother Sabitha Ravi told Judge Berman that her son "doesn't have any hatred in his heart towards anybody," while Clementi's father, Joe Clementi, told the judge that he believed the defendant had "no remorse" for his actions, Boston.com reported.
