The death of Tyler Clementi in 2010 stocked the country as it added another example of bullying of LGBT teenagers ending in suicide. Last Friday, Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, was found guilty of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, evidence tampering and witness tampering. One of the major reasons for the guilty verdict, according to the jurors, was the long stream of digital evidence.
Twitter, Facebook, text messaging and IMs have all become a staple of the day-to-day lives of American youth. Now, they are also becoming a staple of prosecutorial evidence. In this case, online activity even went so far as to depict the state of mind of the victim, Clementi, even though he could not speak for himself at the trial, something that was critical to a conviction for bias intimidation. New York Times reporters David Halbfinger and Beth Kormanik stated in their article, Jurors Say Digital Evidence Was Crucial, “An important component of the bias intimidation chargers was whether Mr. Clementi felt bullied. Jurors said he left ample evidence that he did: he complained to his resident assistant, he went online to request a room change, he saved screen shots of Mr. Ravi’s more offensive online posts, and he viewed his roommate’s Twitter feed 38 times in the two days before he killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.”
According to Halbfinger and Kormanik’s article, Ms. Audit, one of the jurors, hoped that her own teenage children would take the verdict as a strong warning of the consequences of online statements: “I hope they use their heads and think before they do this,” she said. “Text messages, tweets, e-mails, iChats are never gone. Be careful. I’ve already told my kids, be careful. If you’re going to put something in writing, be able to back it up.”
Ms. Audit’s warnings should be taken seriously by everyone using online communications. Though online comments may seem harmless and fleeting, this case demonstrates that they “are never gone.” Though criminal law is making slow progress toward adapting to new technologies, smart prosecutorial teams are using these new tools of communication to track the movements and state of minds of victims and defendants alike.