Professor Jenny Carroll is quoted in NorthJersey.com about a state appeals court’s decision to overturn a series of hate crime convictions for Dharun Ravi, a former Rutgers University student who used a webcam to record his roommate.
In State v. Pomianek, the New Jersey Supreme Court invalidated a key section of the state’s bias intimidation law because of how the legislature had drafted it.
The Supreme Court said it would be unreasonable to convict someone “not based on what he was thinking but rather on his failure to appreciate what the victim was thinking.”
“That’s a classic problem that’s confronted in criminal law,” Carroll said. “Criminal law tends to focus on, ‘What exactly was the defendant’s intent and was it malicious?’ ”
For more, read “Convictions in Rutgers Bias Case Overturned.”