Teen Commits Suicide: Was It a Hate Crime?
SodaHead Living
2010/09/30 14:00:00
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This is the saddest story we've heard in a long time. A New Jersey college student jumped off a bridge to his death after his roommate allegedly videotaped him making out with another guy and streamed it live on the Internet.
Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and a talented violinist, jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide, The New York Times reports.
Three days earlier, his roommate posted a Twitter message: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
According to authorities, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., were each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Clementi.
After the video was streamed, the hook-up became the talk of the dormitory, according to the Times. We can only imagine how that made Clementi -- who may or may not have been out of the closet -- feel.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of five years -- but some gay rights advocate are calling the incident a hate crime.
We think this has less to do with whether Tyler was gay -- and more to do with the despicable act of taping and broadcasting another person's private moment.
Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and a talented violinist, jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide, The New York Times reports.
Three days earlier, his roommate posted a Twitter message: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
According to authorities, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., were each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Clementi.
After the video was streamed, the hook-up became the talk of the dormitory, according to the Times. We can only imagine how that made Clementi -- who may or may not have been out of the closet -- feel.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of five years -- but some gay rights advocate are calling the incident a hate crime.
We think this has less to do with whether Tyler was gay -- and more to do with the despicable act of taping and broadcasting another person's private moment.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suici...
Sure, I believe crimes do happen because of hate. I still do not think that those cases should get more time than for one that is not considered a 'hate crime'. The whole 'hate crime' prosecution thing is just a fallacy and slightly unconstitutional. You cannot guess at someones state of mind and sentence them for something you cannot prove.
BAHAHAAAAHAHAHAAAAA!
;-)
NO ONE deserves preferential treatment under our law. equal period.
However, as I said elsewhere in this thread, while white-on-black crimes are far less common than black-on-white, black-on-white are far less likely to be pegged with a "hate crime" specification, than white-on-black.
If it's only going to be applied in one direction, no matter what the law may state, it's not fair, and pretty much useless.
Edited for wording.
Nice dodge there. I may use it myself.
http://www.racismeantiblanc.b...
If you'll observe these fluffy statistics, even black on black crime vastly outnumbers white on black. But yet, we must simply accept that blacks are eternally the victims.
Of course, these statistics are 8 years old; I'm sure we've had a complete societal shift in the last 8 years.
Edited for wording.
It's just a cruel and thoughtless invasion of privacy. And, one which I doubt Ravi himself would have appreciated, if the tables had been turned. He's a serious jagoff, and I do hope he feels terrible
Let's say you kill a Christian. That's just ordinary murder, right? Let's say you kill a Christian _because_ he's a Christian and for no other reason. Still just ordinary murder?
What if a Muslim kills a Christian because he believes Christians are infidels? A hate crime?
What if two redneck bubbas drag a black man tied by a chain to their pickup truck until he dies of being skinned alive, which happened not that many years ago in Texas. Is that a hate crime? Would they have dragged a white guy behind the truck under any circumstances? Did they have anything else against the black man other than the color of his skin? They didn't even know the guy personally before killing him. So what's your opinion here?
Just trying to clarify your view--
That happened a few years back, too. They, the perps, were charged with murder and sex crimes, not a hate crime.
Around the same time,, a young white boy was kidnapped by two gay black men, who used him as a sex toy for about a week until they killed him, cut him up and dumped the pieces in a garbage can. One admitted to eating a sandwich and masturbating, while watching the other anally rape the kid, and force him to give him oral sex. After anally rapng him. Murder and sex crime charges, but oddly, no hate crime.
If it doesn't go both ways, it doesn't count.
Edited for wording and punctuation.
And by the way, I didn't say I was happy about the whole hate crimes thing. I think it's a pretty tangled mess. But one has to admit that there may be qualitative differences between crimes that are superficially similar, and those qualitative differences may have pertinence in a court and trial setting. The two crimes you mentioned may be good examples, if the victims were chosen specifically for their race.
I was basically simply questioning your assertion that, "there's no such thing as a 'hate crime'; that's just something else liberals have made up to try to control individual thought and behavior."
That sounds rather ridiculous to me, that's all.
If I hate you, for whatever stupid reason, maybe I catch you boning my wife, race/religion/color notwithstanding, and I kill you, is that a hate crime, too? It should be; I hated you when I did it.
Why further muddy the waters, and provide yet another sleazy technicality for the lawyers to manipulate? "Hate crime" laws are an outgrowth of Political Correctness; and are just as ridicuolous.
"The Devil is in the details." Motive always has and will continue to be pertinent and important to consider in any trial as a crime is examined in context.
So no, it's not as simple as "murder is murder, rape is rape." There are real qualitative differences between crimes that must be considered. If that were not so, then we might make no distinction between manslaughter and murder and killing someone in self defense.
Life is very often not as clearcut and simple as one might wish it were, and sometimes we just have to do the best we can with the mess.
The problem with hate crimes is, they're too often only applied in one direction. White-on-black crime is far less common than black-on-white, yet, black-on-white crime is rarely pegged as a hate crime.
This is patently unfair, and really does nothing to make anything better; it doesn't cahnge anything. it just puts yet more unnecessary laws on the already-overcrowded books.
I also think that you have made some good points, and am satisfied with the discussion.