Eventually, the jury agreed with the defense on Ravi’s intentions, though they convicted him anyway. Annemarie McAvoy, an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, described the verdict to The Philadelphia Inquirer as “murky and confusing…The jury appeared to find that Ravi’s intentions were not out of hatred or bias. But the jurors believed Tyler Clementi perceived them as such…It’s an outrageous standard.”
To determine just how outrageous, imagine that Clementi’s intimate encounters had involved a 32-year-old non-student who was female. If Clementi had brought a woman he had just met on the Internet to his dorm room, and his embarrassed roommate had found her “creepy,” while worrying about theft and the invasion of his privacy, isn’t it conceivable Ravi could have set up a webcam to monitor the exchange of affection? And even if he made subsequent Internet comments about the gross nature of the incident, and attempted to broadcast a subsequent tryst some two days later, would anyone claim the commission of a heinous hate crime meriting 10 years or more in prison?…
The Ravi case suggests that if the target of alleged abuse can claim membership in a specially protected group, then his emotional reactions to that abuse matter more than the intentions of the perpetrator, or even the specifics of the actions in question. The testimony at the trial and even comments by the jurors indicate that Ravi never knowingly committed a hate crime targeting homosexuality in general, nor ever understood that he had done so. Without doubt, he behaved cruelly, even despicably, to his roommate, but had that roommate been straight, no one would have claimed that the pattern of behavior constituted a major offense.
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