Hate-Crimes Charges in Tyler Clementi Case? Legal Debate Swirls Over Student's Suicide

An update on developments in the Tyler Clementi case, at NYT:

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.

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.

More at the link.

I've been especially interested in how those on different sides of the spectrum have spun this for their own purposes. Charli Carpenter has a lengthy post in which she moves from a general explication of "bullying" as it applies to her kid's schools to the broader phenomenon of right-wingers attempting to "punk" journalists, e.g., James O'Keefe's recent botched escapade, and how this indicates a pattern of pervasive and reckless disregard for individual privacy and safety among those on the right. (Additional "cases" at the link above.) This might be an interesting discussion, but Charli cites SEK as making an authoritative case on some related concerns, and since SEK's a hate-blogger (cyber-bully) who trolls and stalks around the blogosphere to sow pain and humility (which in the extreme obviously fuels the same kind of insecurities that drove Tyler Clementi to his death), I'm finding all this kinda amusing:

In the wake of those events, the Massachusetts school system has implemented new anti-bullying measures. But as the school year kicks into gear, it’s hard to know precisely how they are going to be enforced. Already stories are trickling home to me from my daughter about racist and sexist speech going unchallenged in the company of teachers and administrators. But one of the biggest sources of angst and psychological torment I hear about from my daughter is not name-calling or slurs but rather the acquisition and exposure of one’s secrets by others, especially those you trusted as friends. Whether it’s betrayal by an annoyed confidant, passing along of private emails or text messages to others, or the construction of nasty rumors about one’s private life by rivals, efforts to sully others’ reputations by acquiring and sharing private information seems to be endemic.

And it’s not just among kids. We have entire industries now that specialize in mining individuals’ digital footprints for “incriminating” information about completely legal acts that hurt no one in individuals’ private lives that might nonetheless prove useful ammunition in public venues. I’ve never been sure quite why we find this acceptable even for our public officials, but now such information is routinely – and legally – gathered on ordinary citizens by other private individuals (like spouses and the private investigators they employ) as well. Apparently, there’s no law against it: in fact precedent is beginning to move in the opposite direction.

David Denby, in Snark, argued that those who habitually attack others with ridicule intend their words to be strong enough to "make their victims disappear - go away, give up, even kill themselves." I wonder if Charli Carpenter might think a little more broadly about all of this then, as she's a participant on a hate blog essentially designed to kill.