Dharun Ravi | One Hour True Crime Trial

Invasion of Privacy with Tragic Consequences. Dharun Ravi set up a webcam in the dorm room he shared with Tyler Clementi and secretly viewed a private romantic encounter between Clementi and another man, identified as MB.

On the evening of September 19, 2010, Ravi set up his webcam setup angled towards the bed of his roommate. Ravi and Wei viewed Clementi’s liaison, observing Clementi and his guest.

Following the viewing Ravi tweeted about the encounter to his 150 followers. Clementi saw Ravi’s tweets the next day, including one that read “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”.

Clementi died on September 22, 2010. That night, he went to the George Washington Bridge and at 8:42 p.m. posted the status update on Facebook “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

In this 2012 trial, Ravi was convicted on 15 counts of bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and evidence tampering. On May 21, 2012, Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 3 years' probation, 300 hours of community service, a $10,000 fine, and counseling on cyberbullying and alternate lifestyles.

In September 2016, A three-judge panel overturned the convictions because of a change in state law made after Ravi was convicted. The change concerned the bias intimidation law, which the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.

Although the appeals court overturned Ravi’s conviction, the judges were critical of what he’d done. The judges wrote that: The social environment that transformed a private act of sexual intimacy into a grotesque voyeuristic spectacle must be unequivocally condemned in the strongest possible way. The fact that this occurred in a university dormitory, housing first-year college students, only exacerbates our collective sense of disbelief and disorientation. All of the young men and women who had any association with this tragedy must pause to reflect and assess whether this experience has cast an indelible moral shadow on their character.