Jury Indicts Rutgers Bullying Roommate on 15 counts Including Hate Charges
This revolves around the suicide of a gay student who was snooped upon and involuntarily outed on the internet by roommates.
Dharun Ravi was indicted on 15 counts today after evidence from a criminal investigation was presented to a 23-person grand jury last week, according to the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office.
Ravi, 19, of Plainsboro, N.J., faces two counts of invasion of privacy and two counts of attempted invasion of privacy for using a webcam to view his roommate Tyler Clementi’s intimate encounter with another man.
Both are third- and fourth-degree offenses that could carry a sentence of up to five years in prison, Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said in a statement.
He was also charged with two counts of second-degree bias and two counts of third-degree bias. A second-degree offense could carry about five to 10 years in prison, Kaplan said.
The grand jury also found that Ravi attempted to mislead investigators and witnesses by deleting a Twitter post that alerted others to view his roommate’s second encounter and replacing it with a false post.