Breaking: Dharun Ravi sentenced to 30 days jail time in Tyler Clementi’s death for bias crime, other charges

By Scottie Thomaston

Dharun Ravi was convicted of bias intimidation and invasion of privacy and his sentencing was held today. The judge sentenced him to 30 days in jail:

Judge Berman was not moved. He says that he’s never heard Ravi say that he was sorry. He said that while Ravi might expunge the record from the trial, “you cannot expunge the conduct and the pain you caused.”

Berman says that he will recommend that Ravi is not deported. He said that was because of M.B.’s request in his letter to the judge.

When weighing up aggravating factors, “This individual was not convicted of a hate crime, he was convicted of a bias crime, and there’s a difference.”

And then he gave his sentence: a 30 day jail term. Ravi’s been sentenced to 30 days in jail. “Allowing you to simply return home with no custodial sentence… would deprecate the integrity of the verdict.”

He had been at risk of deportation:

A sentence of more than a year would also increase the likelihood that federal immigration authorities will try to deport Ravi to India, where he was born and remains a citizen, though he has lived most of his life in New Jersey.

Some gay advocates had asked for a more lenient sentence:

As a result, some gay advocates are calling on the court to give Ravi probation instead of prison time.

Ravi could have faced up to ten years in prison.
Among them is Aaron Hicklin, editor of Out magazine, who said in an article that Ravi was being made a scapegoat for Clementi’s suicide.

Another, E.J. Graff, who writes about gay and lesbian issues, said in her column in The American Prospect, “I fear that Ravi is an easy scapegoat for a complicated problem.”

There will be an appeal.

UPDATE 1: Garden State Equality weighs in:

Those who have oppose giving Dharun Ravi jail time have asked, hasn’t he suffered enough? But we believe there’s another question: Has Dharun Ravi done enough? Has he done enough to use his place in history to speak out against student bullying and to make a positive impact on millions of lives across our state and nation?

Thus far, no.

Full statement here.

UPDATE 2: Here is a full list of the charges Ravi was convicted of.

UPDATE 3: Joe My God has more:

The probation period is three years and includes 300 hours of community service. Ravi has also been fined $11,950 which is to be paid in monthly installments. Ravi will not be deported.

21 Comments May 21, 2012

A fascinating, detailed look at how North Carolina voted on Amendment One

By Jacob Combs

The conventional wisdom on African-American voters and marriage equality goes something like this: because of deeply held religious beliefs, a commanding majority of black voters oppose marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and when such rights are put up to a vote of the people, African-Americans consistently turn out to vote against them.  That narrative was frequently put forward in the analysis that followed the passage of Amendment One in North Carolina, including coverage by NPR and the Charlotte Observer.

But as Barry Yeoman pointed out last week in an article for The American Prospect called “Town and Country,” the real divide in North Carolina wasn’t along racial lines, it was urban vs. rural.  As Yeoman points out, it’s impossible to know exactly how how black voters in the state voted on the amendment, since no exit polls were conducted and precincts are almost never single-race.  But when you take a closer look at the data, what becomes clear is that urban voters broke against the amendment and rural voters broke for it, and those breakdowns, it turns out, cut across racial lines:

In each of North Carolina’s five largest cities, voters in majority-black precincts rejected the measure: Charlotte (52 percent), Raleigh (51 percent), Greensboro (54 percent), Winston-Salem (55 percent), and Durham (65 percent). Durham’s results were dramatic: Not a single majority-black precinct supported the amendment. Several crushed it by margins of 3-to-1 and even 4-to-1.

Once you move out of the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and North Carolina’s other major cities, like Charlotte, the state’s electoral geography is very different, comprised primarily of small, rural towns which voted overwhelmingly for the amendment.  Many of these towns are isolated and have low levels of education but, as Yeoman describes, they differ dramatically when it comes to race.  Eighty-nine percent of Graham County, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains and containing exactly one black voter, voted yes on Amendment One.  Bertie County, with a 60 percent black population, voted 73 percent yes.

But even in rural North Carolina, Yeoman writes, there were “islands of resistance”:

The amendment failed 2-to-1 on the African-American side of Scotland Neck, a village that has witnessed forty years of civil-rights struggles stretching from a landmark school-desegregation case in the 1970s to the recent stun-gun death of a black bicyclist. The result, says former Mayor James Mills, is an “organized and sophisticated” black electorate. “We were able to communicate was that this really had nothing to do with same-sex marriage,” he says. “What this has to do with is hate.” The measure also failed, albeit narrowly, in a black precinct of nearby Warren County, where in the 1980s hundreds were arrested during protests against a PCB landfill that sparked some of the earliest discussions about environmental racism.

When Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, exit polls showed that a full 70 percent of black voters in the state voted yes on the ballot measure, even while supporting Barack Obama’s bid for presidency.  The only problem was that those exit polls greatly over-exaggerated the numbers.  An analysis of precinct level voting in Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco counties (which collectively account for almost two-thirds of the state’s African-American voters) showed that black support for Prop 8 was more likely somewhere around 58 percent.  That was still higher than the average 52 percent support for the measure amongst all voters, but it’s a far cry from 70 percent.

What this demonstrates is that there is an opportunity for marriage equality gains to be made through outreach with urban black communities and perhaps even the religious leaders of these communities.  Yeoman’s analysis muddies the pat logical conclusions that argue that African-Americans are predominantly opposed to marriage equality, and reveals that the true divide for these type of ballot questions is one of geography and not race.  That could make a difference going forward, especially in states like Maryland, where the African-American community is likely to have a great impact on the success of marriage equality later this year.

3 Comments May 21, 2012

Recapping the week of May 14-18 at Prop8TrialTracker.com

By Jacob Combs

What you may have missed over the past week at Prop8TrialTracker.com…

On Monday, May 14th, I started out the week’s coverage with a reading of Andrew Sullivan’s powerful Newsweek article proclaiming Barack Obama the first gay president by linking his experience growing up black in a white family to that of gays and lesbians growing up in straight families.  Scottie wrote about Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins, one of the justices who decided the state’s marriage equality case Varnum v. Brien, who told an Iowa newspaper this week that if anti-gay right-wingers move to oust him as they did three other judges who joined that decision, he will fight back.

Scottie also compiled a round-up of the week’s equality news, highlighted by the executive order Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee signed ordering the state’s agencies to recognize out-of-state marriages between gay and lesbian couples.  Also, Matt Baume of AFER posted his weekly video update, examining the effect of President Obama’s marriage announcement on the national equality fight.  Finally, later in the evening, I reported that a conservative House committee in Colorado had killed the state’s civil unions bill, despite the fact that the bill enjoyed majority support in the full House and that Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper had called a special session in part to combat Republican efforts to kill the bill.

On Tuesday, I wrote about a piece in The Week by Democratic advisor Robert Shrum predicting that the electoral backlash for President Obama over marriage equality will be limited.  Scottie looked at the day’s equality news, especially NOM President Brian Brown’s response to Obama’s support for marriage equality.

I started out Wednesday‘s coverage with an analysis of recent court briefs filed in three DOMA cases, McLaughlin, Sevcik and Blesch.  Scottie covered President Obama’s veto threat of two House bills, the Violence Against Women Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, that contain anti-gay elements. He also posted another equality news round-up, which looked at a new campaign between the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Freedom to Marry to highlight same-sex military families.

On Thursday, I wrote about the semantic significance of President Obama being the first president to use the phrase “marriage equality” in a public venue, and what that means for the framing of the debate going forward.  Scottie looked at the day’s equality news, including a poll out from North Carolina showing that support for marriage equality among black residents of the state is growing.

On Friday, I started the day out with an examination of Equality Matters researcher Carlos Maza’s deconstruction of the common right-wing talking point that voters have approved marriage bans at the ballot in 31 out of 31 states, and why that statistic is misleading and outdated.  Scottie analyzed a motion to dismiss filed by Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval in the marriage equality case Sevcik v. Sandoval, and also wrote about a Maryland Supreme Court ruling that the state must recognize out-of-state marriages between gay and lesbian couples for the purposes of divorce proceedings.  Finally, Scottie posted a news round-up that included a promise made by the French prime minister to implement marriage equality and adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples, a position held that new French President Francois Hollande.

And finally, on Saturday, I wrote a quick post about the NAACP’s decision to fully endorse marriage equality.

As always, remember that Quick Hits can always be found to the right of the main blog posts (and if someone’s interested in rounding up Quick Hits for the week like this, drop us a line!). And don’t forget to follow Equality on Trial on Facebook and on Twitter for more coverage and updates! All P8TT posts are published on Twitter immediately after they go up, so you can get word that way too. We’re tweaking the e-mail subscriptions tool, so that’ll be in better shape this week as well. And of course, if you like the coverage we do here and the work we’re doing to bring you all this news, it ain’t free. Please consider tossing a few bucks in the hat to help us do it — or better yet, become a small monthly donor like the 60+ people you see at top right who have since Amendment 1 passed on Tuesday night. We’re working hard to cover these issues and we appreciate your support so we can keep doing so.

Thanks for reading Prop8TrialTracker.com!

3 Comments May 20, 2012

NAACP passes resolution in support of marriage equality

By Jacob Combs

In a statement released today, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced its support for marriage equality.  The NAACP has previously spoken out against Propsition 8 in California and Amendment One in North Carolina, as well as the Defense of Marriage Act.  In a press release, Benjamin Todd Jealous, the NAACP’s President and CEO, said, “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”  The resolution in full reads:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, educational, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.  Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

10 Comments May 19, 2012

Equality news round-up: French Prime minister, Malawi president back marriage equality, and more

By Scottie Thomaston

- The Washington Blade has been covering a story about the the stabbing death of a Marine by a fellow Marine. The victim was called an anti-gay slur at the time of the stabbing. There were charges filed in the case and now the government considers the stabbing an anti-gay hate crime.

- The French Prime Minister has promised to implement marriage equality and adoption rights for same-sex couples, advancements that were promised by the newly elected president of France.

- Marriage equality is fast becoming a big issue even in South Dakota, as the two Democratic Congressional candidates running for South Dakota’s one at-large seat have opposing viewpoints on the issue. One opposes marriage and the other supports it:

Barth said he is more concerned about Social Security, Medicare and national security, but he feels gay marriage is an issue worth supporting.

He said Varilek’s opposition to it has done two things: It struck a chord with voters who wondered where he stood on issues important to them, and it raised the question if Varilek was acting out of political interests, not speaking from his heart.

“I call it as I see it,” Barth said. “I don’t base my answer on who’s in the audience.”

- Activists and politicians in battleground states feel emboldened by the president’s support of marriage equality.

- Malawi’s president wants to repeal their gay ban.

- Prospect has an article combating attempts to blame black voters for Amendment 1 in North Carolina, and The Washington Blade has an op ed asking society to stop blaming AAs for anti-LGBT setbacks.

- A gay election board nominee in Oklahoma was denied a vote in committee. This just a day after Virginia’s Assembly did the same to a qualified gay judge.

- A legislator in Mississippi says gay people spread disease and should be put to death.

- The pioneer of “gay cure” research has apologized and repudiated his research, and the New York Times takes an in-depth look.

19 Comments May 18, 2012

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