Suicide is a choice.  Someone else might well have been angry, humiliated, or hurt, but might not have turned that destructive horror in on himself.  To ignore that his suicide was a choice is to deprive Tyler of the dignity of selfhood. Ravi may have made his life hellish, but he did not kill him: Clementi did that on his own.  And while Ravi’s outrageous conduct may have been the last straw, it cannot have been the only straw.  It becomes too easy to fixate on that final, galvanizing incident, and ignore whatever went before.

Judge Berman was right: prison is not the answer here.  Sending Ravi to prison for five years as the prosecution requested would have done nothing but make him a martyr of sorts for homophobes everywhere.  Prison needs to be reserved for the worst offenders, those whose crime cannot be adequately punished any other way. That we so often fail to do so — witness the number of people in prison for nonviolent drug-related offenses — doesn’t mean we should throw just anyone in a prison cell because we abhor what they did. It is too easy to rename our desire for retribution as a demand for justice.

The system worked well here.  I hope Darhun Ravi understands how fortunate he is that it did.