Seriously? Rape is now an acceptable punishment? It's not a slipperly slope but a direct downhill drive from that to "she deserved it."

You're right, and I was out of line.

I did see statistics recently, and I'm not going to pretend that I remember the numbers, but of young people going to the prison, an overwhelming account will be raped within the first two days. This held true for men and women. So, sentencing someone to "just" several months or a year isn't doing anyone any favors.

I still cannot state strongly enough that this roommate was supposedly a friend to Clementi, and ended up betraying him to the point of suicide. I cannot think of any type of work where that type of behavior would make him a stand-out candidate for any job.

We discussed this today in class. It's such a tragic thing that Tyler felt he had to take his own life to escape this & it's just disgusting that his roommate would do something like this! I believe that the two involved with the taping should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Doing an action that pushes another person so far that makes them take their own life should receive more than just an "invasion of privacy" charge. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but we were discussing in class that this should also fall under the charge of a hate crime & that's what the debate currently is. It is so alarming & just devastating the number of homosexual students (college, high school, & middle school) that felt this was their only solution in recent weeks.

Can "hate crime" be attached to a non-violent* crime?

*I realize that the outcome was tragic, but the act itself wasn't violent.

That's actually what we were talking about in class.

I just copied this from the FBI website:

A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

It doesn't specify that the crime must be a violent act, just that perpetrator targets a victim because of (in this case) sexual orientation. From what our professor said, (again- I'm not sure if this is true so please correct me if you know otherwise) the roommate did in fact know that Tyler was homosexual. Do you think that the roommate would have still made the video & streamed it live if he had been having sex with a girl instead?

Interesting.

From the reports I've read, the roommate did know he was a homosexual. Of course, we'll never know what he would have done if his roommate was heterosexual, but I have heard of other cases in which people (mostly young women) have committed suicide after "sexting" pictures and videos surfaced.

IIRC, the perpetrators were charged with having child pornography, but I don't recall whether or not "hate crime" was attached.

Only the roommate will know that for sure but, honestly, if he's sick enough to do this then I think the answer is yes. Roommate may have just been an @$$ bordering on pathological and he could very well be twisted enough to destroy someone's life regardless of orientation. The fact that the guy was gay could have just been another thing to pick at, not the sole motivator for the crime.

My problem is not with calling the video streaming a hate crime, it may have been. My problem is with this:
Several articles have listed the boy's suicide itself as the hate crime. I disagree. The roommate and the girl did something absolutely vile, twisted, and WRONG and they should be punished harshly for what they did. It's totally heartbreaking and I hope they get the book thrown at them. But only for what THEY did. Even if he felt like he had no other choice, the boy chose suicide as a way to deal with his humiliation and no one else is responsible for his choice. Just the same as whatever may have happened between those two (whether the boy pissed his roommate off or ever did anything to him), the boy could never be responsible for "provoking" his roommate to do something so heinous. I believe I said the same thing about the Irish teen who hung herself after being bullied at school.

ETA: From the last reports I've heard, the boy found in the water hadn't even been identified as Clementi's and he is still considered "missing." Has that changed?

This is a very general desdription. Whether an offense actually qualifies as a hate crime will depend on the specific laws of the state where the offense occurred.

Thank you, Mystic Cat for the clarification. The Chief Justice has spoken! I guess this is why the Feds are waiting for NJ to decide how to classify this case to proceed. Sad, any way you look at this. Clementi chose to end his life, but as we've seen in a plethora of cases over this year, not everyone is psychologically capable of withstanding bullying. In every case, it never ceases to amaze me how these people forget to live by the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I'm not even religious, but this is an amazingly useful tenet.

I should have clarified that there is also a federal hate crime law that might apply in this case -- the Matthew Shepard Act. The FBI's description seems to be a description of that law.

Still, always worth remembering that there is no one definition of hate crime. The relevant definitions here will be the federal definition and New Jersey's.

Surely you all didn't need Chief Justice MysticCat to tell you that. His work is never done.

Going to do my devil's advocate thing here...

Whether the hate crimes laws fit this bill remains to be seen. Most are looking at the outcome here, which was horrible, but probably not really a foreseeable consequence of what was allegedly done. I'm hoping the prosecutors charge these two with something that is appropriate--not just something to respond to the masses wanting blood.

ETA: My understanding of most hate crimes statutes is that they are predicated on the defendant being motivated in whole or in part by the fact that the victim falls into a protected class of persons. So before we'd know whether the hate crime fit, we'd have to know what actually motivated this activity.

College kids do some pretty stupid impulsive things. This could very well just be a case of semi-ordinary college hijinks gone horribly wrong. There are a lot of calls for condemnation prior to all of the facts coming in.

Thanks for the clarification. This is what I was getting at in my earlier post.

I hope the other person who was videotaped is doing okay.

I'd be interested in seeing those statistics.