Slippery Slope Watch

I find myself somewhat conflicted by the guilty verdict in the hate-crime trial of Dharun Ravi.  For those of you unfamiliar with the case, the (largely undisputed) facts are as follows:

In September 2010, Ravi used a webcam to surreptitiously film his Rutgers University roommate, Tyler Clementi, having sex with another man.  Subsequently, Ravi posted the videos on Twitter and encouraged people to watch his roommate "kissing a dude."  Tyler found out about the Twitter posts and became, understandably, upset.  Three days after the incident, Tyler committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

Now, cause and effect are not at issue here: Ravi was not charged with Tyler's death.  While it is reasonable to assume that the video was an aggravating factor in whatever mental anguish Tyler felt, there is no legal case to be made that Ravi caused his roommate's death.  Still, the guilty verdict in the trial raises some interesting questions:

Is Dharun Ravi a jerk?  Yes.

Is what he did wrong?  Yes.

Is what he did illegal?  Yes--to an extent.

The jury correctly found Ravi guilty of such crimes as invasion of privacy and evidence tampering (for trying to delete the offending videos from his account).  I am not convinced, though, that what Ravi did rises to the level of a "hate crime."

In fairness, I am certainly not familiar with all the facts of the case.  Maybe Ravi constantly used anti-gay slurs around Clementi.  Maybe some of the twit's tweets encourage people to taunt, tease, or torment Tyler.  But none of that was made apparent in today's article about the verdict.  Indeed, Ravi's use of the phrase "kissing a dude" hardly qualifies as hate speech.  Now, of course, if Ravi used stronger language in other tweets, or if more direct and overt threats or verbal abuse was directed at Tyler because of the videos, then, yes, the verdict was correct--but I'm only going on what I've seen here.

A thought experiment: What if Ravi had filmed a heterosexual roommate having sex with a woman and posted those videos online for everyone to see?  Certainly not an unreasonable scenario.  In that case, we would probably attribute Ravi's actions to immaturity or titillation.  The posting of the videos would not be done BECAUSE the man in the videos was heterosexual--the heterosexuality would have caused the sex, but not the publicizing thereof.  One could argue--and I'm sure Ravi's lawyers did argue--much the same thing: that Ravi didn't post the videos because Tyler was gay, but rather because Tyler was having sex, and he, Ravi, thought it would be a hoot to post these videos online.

I am in no way defending Ravi's actions.  But we need to tread very carefully when we criminalize behavior and even more when we criminalize thought.  And even if we agree that crimes motivated by antipathy towards a group merit special punishment, I'm not sure this motivation has been proven in THIS case.  If you are going to penalize--imprison--someone based on his underlying state of mind, then you had better be damn sure that state of mind exists.