New Haven

LAST week, a New Jersey jury convicted Dharun Ravi of invasion of privacy, and for good reason. Mr. Ravi activated the webcam in his room at Rutgers so he could watch his roommate, Tyler Clementi, meet up with a male date. Worse, he broadcast his plans to do it again over Twitter, inviting his friends to watch. That kind of spying should be out of bounds on a college campus.

What’s out of whack about Mr. Ravi’s case is the harsh punishment he now faces: as much as 10 years in prison, for a 20-year-old who’d never been in legal trouble before.

Mr. Ravi could go away for years because, on top of spying, he was convicted of a hate crime: bias intimidation, a conviction probably influenced by Mr. Clementi’s subsequent suicide. According to New Jersey’s civil rights law, you are subject to a much higher penalty if the jury finds that you committed one of a broad range of underlying offenses for the purpose of targeting someone because of his race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The idea of shielding vulnerable groups is well intentioned. But with the nation on high alert over bullying — especially when it intersects with computer technology and the Internet — these civil rights statutes are being stretched to go after teenagers who acted meanly, but not violently. This isn’t what civil rights laws should be for.