Rutgers' student accused of "invasion of privacy allegedly causing suicide" gets a 30 day sentence...

...and a $10,000 fine...

...which seems trivial given the media attention to the story.

According to this article:

A former Rutgers University student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate was sentenced Monday to just 30 days in jail — a punishment that disappointed some activists but came as a relief to others who feared he would be made a scapegoat for his fellow freshman's suicide.

Dharun Ravi, 20, could have gotten 10 years behind bars for his part in a case that burst onto front pages when Tyler Clementi threw himself to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

Instead, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman gave Ravi a month in jail, placed him on three years' probation and ordered him to get counseling and pay $10,000 toward a program to help victims of hate crimes.

"Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance," Berman said.

Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said he will appeal the sentence, calling it insufficient.

Several points.

First, it sounds like the original media narrative was jammed into the homophobe narrative from the beginning and, in a word, was largely B.S. The "revisionist" position - there was no broadcast, the gay student wasn't "outed"; he was already "out" - seems to have been vindicated.

Chalk this up as a reason to take anything the media tells you with a grain of salt.

Second, there really is a problem with privacy protection. It's too easy to have one's conduct observed, permanently recorded and broadly disseminated. I'm not sure what the defendant really did in that regard, or the extent of his culpability, but that is a problem and deserves legal sanction, whether a person is a politically favored minority or not.

Third, what's with the judge's comment that ""Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance"?

What happened to "the right of one man to his own opinion"? Or the right to swing one's arm ends at another person's nose?

Does our society really have a right to expect that every member will entertain no "intolerant" thoughts? Or is it that our society has a right to expect that no one will engage in actions that injure another person for malicious reasons, whether the motive is intolerance, personal gain or sheer immature meanness?

I thought it was always the latter. If Dahrun Ravi injured Clementi out of malice, then 30 days would seem not to be enough, given the fact that Clementi killed himself. On the other hand, if Ravi is being punished for his thoughts or attitudes, then 30 days is way too much.

Finally, what struck me most about the story was the ugliness of all involved. Clementi kicked Ravi out of his room for his gay trysts. How is that respectful of Ravi's right to use his room. Ravi intercepts Clementi's sexual activities and then broadcasts the fact about what was going on like a fishwife gossip. How does that respect Clementi's privacy? There seems to be a whole lot of selfishness and narcissism defining these privileged students at a top-ranked university.

A window into Dante's Hell.

The Jersey Conservative mines the narrative of the gay bullying case, where a Rutgers student committed suicide shortly after his roommate broadcast his dorm room trysts to the world, for some interesting insights into the complexity of being a "millenial."

Update:

Well, except that apparently there was no broadcasting:

Ravi and Clementi agreed to become roommates their freshman year after finding one another online. Ravi quickly discovered that Clementi was gay, since his prospective roommate was posting on a gay website. (Clementi came out to his parents shortly before leaving for school.) Ravi and a friend engaged in juvenile banter, making fun of Clementi for being gay, “poor,” and uncool. It’s painful to read, but no different than what high-school students say about one another all the time.

Clementi and Ravi barely talked when they lived together. One night, Clementi asked Ravi to leave him alone with a nonstudent in his mid-20s for what turned out to be an assignation. From a friend’s room across the hall, Ravi briefly turned on his webcam and saw the two in an embrace. He derisively tweeted that he saw his roommate “making out with a dude.”

Clementi later saw Ravi’s tweet and agonized about what to do. In the meantime, he asked for the room again for another tryst, and this time Ravi tweeted that people should tap into his webcam for a show. But Clementi turned off Ravi’s computer, and the viewing never happened. Clementi requested a change of roommates. With that, and disciplinary action against Ravi, it should have ended.

Well, that's not the version of the story I heard two years ago.

Further update:

Then, there's this:

What did Dharun Ravi do? Well, he was a freshman roommate at Rutgers University with a chap named Tyler Clementi. Clementi was homosexual, and not a closeted one — he didn’t make much of a secret of it. Why would he? Our young people are taught from kindergarten on that “gay is just as good as straight,” that Heather has two mommies, that homosexuals should be “proud,” and so on. My local high school has a club for homosexual students. Anyone who’s embarrassed or ashamed about being homosexual hasn’t been paying attention for about thirty years. And in fact, Clementi wasn’t ashamed: in those first three weeks of his freshman year, he attended at least one meeting of the Rutgers students Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance.

Well, a year last September, Dharun Ravi and another freshman, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi kissing a young man Clementi had picked up. After watching the video, Ravi gossiped about it on Twitter, quote: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Three days after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Whether this had any connection at all to the webcam incident, is not known. That Dharun Ravi thought his prank might drive Clementi to suicide is preposterous; that he intended that result is preposterosity squared.

So, he wasn't even "outed"?

What the...hey?!?!??!?