The Freedom Bulletin

There are some stories that make me think, “Why on earth would someone do that?”

This is one of them:

“The New Jersey attorney general’s office is reviewing the case of a Rutgers University freshman who jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week after images of him having sex with another man were broadcast on the Internet, and will decide whether to prosecute the incident as a bias crime, a spokesman said Thursday.”

“A body pulled from the Hudson River was identified Thursday as that of Tyler Clementi, 18, of Ridgewood, N.J. His death was ruled a suicide. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, and a friend of Ravi’s, Molly Wei, have each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using a webcam to film and transmit footage of Clementi having sex in his dorm room.”

I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend why someone would decide to tape their roommate having sex and put it on the Internet.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that this (alleged) crime was homophobic or a hate crime. The accused students may not have been motivated by hatred for gay people, and even if they were, I don’t think that would be any worse than if they were just motivated by hatred for Tyler as an individual.

Taping someone having sex and putting it on the Internet is cruel, wrong, and violates their rights regardless of whether they are gay or straight. It’s a shame that the maximum penalty for this is five years in prison (10 if it is a hate crime), considering that people can get more than that for victimless crimes like gun possession and drug use. If they are indeed guilty, the two suspects’ actions directly caused the victim’s death, so I certainly don’t think it would be inappropriate to charge them with homicide.

Some of the comments that people have posted about this case (here for example) are horrific. While most commenters actually have brains and hearts, some have posted that being gay is vile and despicable, that Tyler committed suicide because he knew that what he did was wrong, that anyone who commits suicide must have something wrong with them, that Ravi was the real victim because he had a gay roommate, and that he had a constitutional right to secretly tape Tyler having sex and put it on the Internet.

Although it must be annoying when your roommate has sex in your room, Ravi and Wei seem to have done the taping not out of frustration but because they thought it would be funny to humiliate a fellow student. Ravi did not seem at all threatened, upset, or even inconvenienced, happily tweeting things like “”I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” and “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.” Tyler did not commit suicide because he had “issues;” he committed suicide because two people decided to violate his rights and humiliate him, something that no one should have to deal with. As for the claim that Ravi had a right to do what he allegedly did, ask yourself this question: What is more important, the right to secretly tape people and put it on the Internet, or the right not to have people secretly tape you and put it on the Internet? I think the latter.

The bottom line is that the two suspects in this case, if guilty, are bullies. Tyler’s sexual orientation is irrelevant; the case would be just as tragic, and the alleged crime just as evil, had he been straight. Humiliating another person – whether gay, straight, bi, or asexual - is not funny, and in this case it cost a young man his life.

…is November 3. There was a hearing today, but it was very, very short. Thomas Mortimer’s two defense lawyers and the two prosecutors had a conference with the judge at sidebar (so I didn’t hear any of what they said) and the clerk announced that the next hearing is scheduled for November 3. Mortimer was not present.

A few random observations:

• As I mentioned above, Mortimer now has two lawyers. His new lawyer, in addition to Denise Regan, is a young lady named Eva Vekos.
• Debra Stone Sochat, the sister of Mortimer’s deceased wife, Laura, was at this hearing with several family members and/or friends, as she has been at all of the court dates so far.
• This case keeps moving from courtroom to courtroom. The last hearing was in courtroom 530 (although it was going to be in 630), the hearing before that was in 440, and today’s hearing was in room 540, in the magistrate’s session, even though everyone thought it was going to be in 630. Even Attorney Regan had to peek into in a few courtrooms before finding the right one. The next one is supposed to be in courtroom 630…but we’ll see about that.

More from the Winchester Patch.

Last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that police can secretly put GPS devices on your car without a warrant. Between the goings-on with Markoff and Mortimer, I never got the time to blog about this. But I do have an opinion about it. I agree with Adam Cohen of Time, who wrote…

“Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.”

“That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.”

This is not a good ruling for freedom or privacy.

It makes no sense that police are allowed to trespass on your property and place a device on your car. A former Justice Department lawyer who supports the ruling said that in order to have a right to privacy in your own yard, “you have to take measures — to build a fence, to put the car in the garage.” A driveway, others claim, is not private because it is open to “delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.” These people seem to be arguing that anyone has a right to trespass on your property, unless you make it physically impossible for them to trespass.

I disagree. The point of owning property is that you control who is allowed on it. Technically, it violates your rights for people to wander across or cut through your property, and delivery people have a right to be on your property only because you consented to having something delivered. It definitely violates your rights for someone to trespass on your property and also stick something onto your car.

Supporters of this ruling claim that it is no different from police following someone in person, which does not require a warrant. But first of all, following someone does not involve trespassing on and altering their property, and secondly, tracking someone with GPS is more deceptive and dishonest. Police have the right to move around on public roads and public property, which I suppose includes following people if they want to, but the victim of the tracking also has the right to look around, try to see if they’re being followed, and take evasive action. You can’t do this with a GPS.

The full, un-redacted statement of the case was released today in the quadruple murder case of Thomas J. Mortimer IV. The controversial four lines that Mortimer and his defense attorney wanted to keep under seal reveal that allegedly, his 4-year old son Finn saw him commit some of the other slayings. In the letter that he left at the scene of the alleged murders, Mortimer wrote:

“I expecially (sic) sorry to Finn that he had to witness these horrid acts. It was not supposed to be this way. I disgust myself.”

Mortimer’s lawyer, Denise Regan, initially fought the release of this particular detail on the grounds that it was excessively inflammatory and could cost her client the opportunity for a fair trial, but it seems that she eventually decided not to object.

Source: Boston Globe

A statement of the case (the version with four mysterious lines left out) was released in the Thomas J. Mortimer case today. It sheds a lot of light on what exactly happened in this quadruple murder case, or at least what prosecutors say happened. The judge in the case is planning to release the full statement, but Mortimer’s defense team has until Thursday to appeal this.

A rundown of the new facts (some of them gruesome) that were revealed in the statement of the case:

• On June 14, the day of the deaths of Mortimer’s wife (Laura, 41), children (Thomas “Finn,” 4 and Charlotte, 2), and mother-in-law (Ellen Stone, 64), Mortimer and his wife had a fight about a $2,499 check that he wrote to the IRS, which bounced. Laura saw the returned check in the mail when she returned home from work and questioned Tom about it on the phone and after he got home. He suggested that they wait until after dinner to discuss it.
• Mortimer’s parents, who live in Connecticut, were there to babysit the children, and they left at 7:45.
• Ellen talked to three friends on the phone that night, and one friend heard Charlotte kiss her goodnight between 8:43 and 9:00.
• Someone called the Brookline Bank, which had issued the bounced check, from the home phone at 10:46 and 10:47.
• At 12:01 a.m. it appears that Mortimer accidentally called the home phone with his cell phone.
• In addition to calling his employer and his son’s school to say that they would not be in, Mortimer also called a Simon gift card customer service number at 7:22 a.m. on June 15. Mortimer had two gift cards on him when he was arrested, both with $0 balances.
• At 7:44 Mortimer used Laura’s credit card to purchase gas and food at a Hess station in Winchester.
• At 7:54 he went to Panera Bread in Burlington.
• Laura’s sister, Debra Stone Sochat, called Laura’s cell phone at 8:47, and Mortimer answered and said that she wouldn’t be available for a long time. Debra called him repeatedly after that but he didn’t answer.
• The last person to speak with Mortimer by phone was his supervisor at M&R Consulting. At 10:31 Mortimer told him that he would be at work the next day.
• At some point Mortimer threw away his and Laura’s cell phones, as well as a blue blanket, in a Panera bag at a Mobil station in Andover.
• On June 16, Debra became concerned because Ellen had missed a scheduled dinner the night before, she could not reach anyone, and when she stopped by the house she noticed empty trash barrels in the driveway and mail in the mailbox. Police and firefighter medics performed a well-being check.
• Finn and Laura were lying in pools of blood in the family room. Ellen was in the living room under a rolled up Oriental rug, but it appeared that she had been killed near the front door as she tried to escape. A trail of blood led to Charlotte, who was upstairs in her crib. According to autopsy reports, Laura and Ellen died of sharp force wounds to the neck and torso, and Finn and Charlotte died of sharp force wounds to the neck.
• Mortimer apparently wrote a typed note and left one copy in the family room and one in the kitchen. Discarded drafts were found in trash baskets in the basement near the printer and in the kitchen. In the note, he allegedly confessed to the killings, saying that he was “ashamed, frightened, relieved, surprised,” and that he hated himself but could think of no better solution. He wrote of his dislike for Laura and her family and wrote that he should have written a book about his ordeal “instead of bottling up my anger, frustration, resentment and hatred and letting it fester until one murderous night.”
• A knife sharpener was on a table in the family room and a bloody knife with a bent handle was in the trash in the kitchen.
• A Lexus in the garage had two hoses connected to the tailpipe and the other ends taped inside the car with all the windows closed. On the front passenger seat were a knife, a hammer, and a bottle of vodka.
• After he was arrested in Bernardston, MA, Mortimer called his parents and apparently admitted to the killings. He said he was “sorry for wrecking everyone else’s lives,” that money was part of the problem, that he “just lost it,” and that he had tried to commit suicide. His mother said that she wished she hadn’t left that night, and he agreed.  
• Mortimer had cuts on his left wrist and inner thigh, but he declined medical attention except for a bandage on his wrist.

Some sad but interesting words from Mortimer himself via the letter he left in the house:

Ultimately, I did these horrible things because I could not cope with the responsibilities I took upon myself. I was too cavalier with life, especially others lives. What I have done is extremely selfish and cowardly. I took the easy way out. I do have remorse with what I have done. I wonder what life would be like if I did not chicken out. But when I try to imagine what life could have been all I envision is sadness, regret of chances missed and despair. I think of the future and think of Finn or Charlotte being teased or bullied and my heart breaks. I can not think, of a more positive situation.

What have I done? I hate myself more than ever. I now wish I accepted responsibilities for my actions, dealt with Laura maturally (sic), divorced her, and was a good role model for Finn and Charlotte…

I can’t think of much else…actually, I can think of a lot. I am ashamed, frightened, relieved, surprised that I murdered my family, disgusted with myself. Looking forward to peace but already missing terribly Finn and Charlotte. That will be my “hell”. I know that they are in a much better place than they could ever be living with Laura and living with me.

News coverage:

• Associated Press
• Winchester Star (and full statement of the case)
• Boston Globe (and James Alan Fox’s blog)
• NECN
• WHDH
• Salon
• Winchester Patch
• Calls for Justice