Old Soviet joke:
Two prisoners are talking in the cattle-wagon headed to Siberia.
Prisoner 1: What’s your sentence?
Prisoner 2: Twenty-five years.
Prisoner 1: What did you do to get twenty-five years?
Prisoner 2: Nothing!
Prisoner 1: You’re lying! You expect me to believe that? Everybody knows: For nothing, the sentence is only ten years.
So it is in New Jersey. Dharun Ravi faces ten years’ porridge for having done . . . nothing. Or at worst, if you want to stretch a few points, for having been mildly jerkish. His parents must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars already, and his life has been totally derailed. For nothing.
They’re wrapping up jury selection at New Brunswick. The great engine of the law rumbles on; to what purpose, in this case, I’m damned if I know.
The best explanation I can come up with for this sick farce is that our nation is now so infested with lawyers, the authorities feel they have to find something for them all to do or else they’ll be breaking windows and overturning garbage bins; so every inharmonious incident, at every level, must be litigated to death.
Will the person who ran off with the principle de minimis non curat lex please return it to the front security desk? Thank you.
There are no trifling matters to a Statist. Every tiny aspect of human life must be controlled by the State, down to tooth level surveillance.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI did hear this sad joke told by my fiends from former USSR.
They also taught me that when the relatives were told about the sentence
"10 years without the right to send or recieve letters",
it meant "already executed".
With sadness, F. r.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI know! I mean, his actions resulted in someone's death, but it was just some gay gay who's probably liberal, so who really cares?
There are a lot of people who have been charged with crimes for filming people against their consent--for the most part, they have been people filming police officers in public. They are routinely charged with crimes and threatened with long sentences, even though no one is hurt (though sometimes abusive policemen are embarrassed). It would be nice to see you standing up for people like this, instead of this scumbag, who tormented a person to his death.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou are either unfamiliar with the facts of the case or you are determined to side with a homosexual suicide regardless of the facts.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFirst off, there is no evidence that his actions resulted in the other's death.
Secondly, to be actionable, there has to be obvious to a reasonable person, that said action could result in a death.
Unless of course you aren't really interested in the facts of the case.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAren't facts a matter for the jury to conclude?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOnce it gets to trial, yes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAre you arguing that every dispute should go all the way to trial?
In the real world, it's up to the DA to determine if there are enough facts to warrant a trial.
You could just familiarize yourself with the alleged facts. Ravi isn't even charged in connection with the suicide.
And Clementi's relatives don't seem to hold him responsible for that; one of them wonders whether Clementi had been thinking about suicide for some time. As the New Yorker article states, "there’s little to support the idea that he was mortified by the thought that he’d been outed."
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"There are a lot of people who have been charged with crimes for filming people against their consent"
Agreed, but that is not the charge Derb is posting about. The 10 years is for "bias intimidation." I mean, what the h*ll is that? How do you charge let alone prove something like that? And then where do you get off linking it to a 10 year sentence! Ridiculous.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"To what purpose," Mr. Derbyshire?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo appease simple minds like Mr. Jessup's.
As I read this post, there was a banner to the right that had the face of Nidal Malik Hasan.
The disproportionate outrage among our media is truly depressing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI wouldn't say "nothing." Spying on your roommate's "encounters" via webcam is a rotten thing to do, well beyond "mildly jerkish." On the other hand, kicking your roommate out of his own dorm so you can use it for your hookups is also a rotten thing to do.
I do have some serious doubts about this prosecution, though. Mine are not quite to the extent that Derb's are, but this does feel too much like, "Somebody's got to pay, and if the law doesn't fit, we'll make it fit." Ravi's a...well, something that the NR filters won't let me say, and it's tragic that a young man died, but this just doesn't feel like justice.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusekicking your roommate out of his own dorm so you can use it for your hookups is also a rotten thing to do
Rottener. One amazing thing about this saga is that when Clementi went to his RA to complain about Ravi, the RA took Clementi's part.
I don't mean to say that I wouldn't expect the RA to do so on the campus of what's happening now, and I'm not saying that spying is perfectly OK. But if you step back and consider that a college thinks it is unremarkable for a student to expect his roommate to vacate so that the student can have a homosexual tryst with an older man he met over the Internet, right there in the room -- well that is just amazing.
I wouldn't pay for my children to go anywhere near a campus like that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI did not know these details of the case.
If it were me, and the ex-reality TV producers in the housing office who decided it'd be a cool social experiment to put me in with an openly gay roommate wouldn't agree to give me a new roommate, then I'd probably turn on my webcam too before returning to the room so that I wouldn't have to bear witness to what was happening in the room. If it were me, I'd ask if someone else to tell me what they see on the webcam because I wouldn't want to have to watch it.
Of course, the only reason I'd do all that is because I never want to see two naked guys going at it. I'd hope my case wouldn't be decided by Gov. Christie's judicial pick, Bruce Harris, because to say that I find such a thing unnatural and offensive would give me ten years in jail.
Perhaps the best we can ask for from a state like NJ is that they build some sort of political/religious prison for offenders like me. Is it too much to ask to separate us from the violent common criminals?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThey don't need a prison to serve that 10 years, they can correct Bias Intimidation (the charge carrying the 10 year sentence that protects a certain class of people more than others). They can just re-educate you in state-run camps, there you will learn the joys of "tolerance" as they define it and will lose all your biases against things sanctioned and sanctified by the State.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf I were a student at Rutgers, I think I might follow up on my political/religious prison idea. I'd start a petition asking Gov. Chris Christie to build a more humane religious/political/thought prison to separate such prisoners from more violent common criminals. I'd start the petition right now before the jury has a chance to decide so that we could send it to Gov. Christie while the case is still pending.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDon't give them any ideas. Thought Prisons, America's Future!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'd probably turn on my webcam too before returning to the room so that I wouldn't have to bear witness to what was happening in the room.
I am with you, and it seems Ravi had security concerns as well. This is from Wikipedia, with footnotes to the New Yorker article and one from the WSJ:
Ravi met Clementi's male friend, and Clementi said that the two wanted to be alone for the evening. In later text messages with friends, Ravi expressed concern and distrust about the older stranger that Clementi brought into the room. Ravi has stated that he was worried about theft. Ravi said he had left the computer in a state where he could view the webcam due to concerns about the security of his personal property around the "creepy" older man with Clementi.
Parents, this is the kind of thing you can fully expect in the colleges you go to great lengths to deposit your children in.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSpoiler alert: college students everywhere kick their roommates out so that they can engage in trysts. This happens in every college in the country. Including hyper-religious ones.
So good luck with that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThanks for your good wishes. FYI, some campuses still have only single-sex dorms and a healthy campus culture. They are few, but they do exist.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse