The jurors Dharun Ravi case, who came out with a guilty verdict that may jail him for 10 years and even lead to his deportation, say his acts convinced them that he committed hate crime.
The jurors in India-born student Dharun Ravi's case, who came out with a guilty verdict that may jail him for 10 years and even lead to his deportation, say his repeated attempts to watch and gossip about his gay roommate's sexual encounter convinced them that he committed hate crime.
The jurors - seven women and five men - had spent over two days deliberating on the 15 charges that Ravi faced, including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence and hindering apprehension.
The jury eventually found 20-year-old Ravi, a former Rutgers University student, guilty on all 15 counts, raising his chances of even being deported to India.
His attorney Steven Altman said Ravi is not a citizen but has a green card and his parents are not US citizens either.
Experts said legal permanent residents can face possible deportation if convicted either of a crime that immigration authorities consider an "aggravated felony," or those considered "crimes of moral turpitude."
Defining hate crime charges against Ravi was initially so difficult for the jury that it had taken the judge more than an hour simply to answer its questions on the bias intimidation charges.
One of the jurors Bruno Ferreira said the jury had deliberated the longest on the bias intimidation charge, which were the most difficult to agree upon.
Talking to reporters as he stepped out of the court, Ferreira said he ultimately agreed that Ravi was guilty of bias intimidation because he had sent multiple messages on Twitter and texts to his friends about his roommate Tyler Clementi's sexual encounter.
"They were being done twice, not just one day," he said.
The jury concluded that while Ravi had not purposely intimidated Clementi the first time he had spied on him on September 19, 2010, when he made a second attempt and invited others to watch, it was clear Ravi had targeted Clementi because he was gay.
The jurors felt that after Ravi had first seen Clementi kiss his partner, he should have kept quiet about it and left the matter there.
But what went against him was the fact that Ravi repeatedly discussed spying on Clementi with his friends, whom he even invited to watch the second time Clementi and the other man were together.
Jurors said Clementi, who later committed suicide, had left ample evidence that he felt bullied when he complained to his resident assistant about Ravi, went online to request a room change, saved screen shots of Ravi's offensive online posts and viewed his Twitter feed 38 times in the two days before he killed himself.
Lynn Audet, a 45 year old school teacher who was a jury member, said the second attempt by Ravi to spy on Clementi elevated the case from being one of a silly college prank to a crime.
"To attempt a second time, is what changed my mind," she said. "A reasonable person would have closed it and ended it there, not tweeted about it."
Ravi's lawyers had said the webcam had not worked for the second encounter and that Ravi had turned it off.
Audet said evidence suggested that he was lying.
"He was at ultimate Frisbee practice," she said. "We came to the conclusion that it was Tyler who turned off the computer to make sure he wasn't filmed a second time...."
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