On Friday, May 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Mirage banquet hall on Oak Tree Road in Edison, South Asians and others will gather to discuss issues of equal justice and the media coverage of the Dharun Ravi webcam spying case.
Ravi, a Plainsboro resident and 2010 High School North graduate, was convicted on 15 counts including hate crime, invasion of privacy, and tampering with evidence and a witness to try to cover up. Sentencing in the case, which could carry up to 10 years in prison and lead to deportation to Ravi’s native country, India, is scheduled for Monday, May 21.
On Tuesday, May 1, Ravi’s attorney Steven Altman filed with the Middlesex County Court to overturn the jury’s conviction, which was handed down on March 16. The most hotly contested charge Ravi was convicted of is bias intimidation, as Ravi’s lawyer said the law was misused.
“To criminalize a defendant for a victim’s mistaken belief about the defendant’s motive would turn the bias intimidation statute into a mockery of itself,” wrote Ravi’s lawyers, Steven Altman and Philip Nettl.
Altman and Nettl aren’t the only ones who believe the application of the bias intimidation law is highly controversial. Attorney Poonam Bhuchar of South Brunswick has taken up the cause of educating the community and bringing people together to support Ravi. At Mirage, Bhuchar hopes to shed some light on what she sees as an injustice.
“When the verdict came down I was just shocked that they found [Ravi] guilty of bias intimidation. It made no sense whatsoever. Like a lot of attorneys I don’t think a lot of people thought that would happen, but it did,” she said.
Bhuchar says the state’s bias intimidation law was “not applicable and not enacted for cases such as this.” Bhuchar and others say that at the May 4 event the group will make reference to the 2010 killing of 49-year-old Divendyu Sinha, a computer scientist, who was attacked by five teenage boys in Old Bridge while walking home with his family. The first trial in that case got underway in New Brunswick in April.
“The community is asking a question as to why, in one case where an Indian man was beaten to death in Old Bridge, why that wasn’t considered a hate crime yet we are still facing a hate crime in a case such as this. That involved physical violence and there was no physical violence in this one, and an 18-year-old kid was charged with a hate crime and in the other case the kids were not,” she explained.
The more that Bhuchar found out about the Ravi case, the more she felt frustrated. “Then I just started getting angry with the picture painted in the mass media,” she said.
Bhuchar says that although Ravi’s case was not a South Asian issue, it involved a South Asian student and “the laws that were being applied didn’t quite seem to fit the situation.”
She says whether or not Ravi gets the maximum 10 years in jail at his sentencing, which will take place on Monday, May 21, at Middlesex County Superior Court, is “tough to say because it’s at the judge’s discretion.”
For now her focus is creating community awareness. “If we don’t come out and support Ravi it is very difficult to get other people involved,” she said.
Bhuchar says the May 4 event in Edison is for all members of the public, whether or not they support Ravi, or if they do not have an opinion on the case. She hopes to address new faces, including a substantial showing from outside the South Asian community, who might turn out Friday night.
“If they want to find out what the true facts of this case are and they want to see a different side from what most of the media has portrayed, they should come to the event, because this is about a local college kid who truly characterizes any kid — whether they’re white, black, brown. It’s a much bigger issue than just a South Asian issue,” Bhuchar said.
While the Ravi trial was going on in early March, his supporters from central New Jersey and New York held a gathering to promote awareness among members of the Indian and South Asian-American community. The gathering took place at Jewel of India restaurant on Route 1 in North Brunswick. Bhuchar wasn’t involved in planning that event, but she spoke to the crowd there, which she estimated to be around 125 people.
Her involvement came from attention she gained in the past two months. After Bhuchar went on ABC Radio to do interviews from an attorney’s perspective, a number of people reached out to her saying that they wanted to help Dharun Ravi and support him. She says many of them were residents from West Windsor, Plainsboro, and surrounding towns.
Bhuchar then reached out to Steven Altman, Ravi’s New Brunswick-based lawyers, who put her in touch with Ravi’s inner circle of family friends.
“Literally since then I’ve been working with these guys to spread the word and organize the event to gather as much support as we can for Ravi,” Bhuchar said.
Bhuchar has not only worked side-by-side with Ravi’s closest supporters, she’s met Dharun and his family on several occasions.
When asked whether she saw any legal avenues left unexplored by Ravi’s defense team, Bhuchar called Altman a great attorney and said “it’s very easy to go back and second guess the case.”
Bhuchar says the supporters are not asking those who attend the function for monetary support. People from all backgrounds will be in attendance, and the crowd is expected to exceed 500.
“We’ve got prominent business people, community leaders, a gay activist, an ex-police officer — we’ve got a bunch of people involved who feel that for Dharun Ravi and the way this law has been applied, it’s just wrong,” Bhuchar said.
Bhuchar graduated from Seton Hall Law School in 1999. After growing up in the U.K. she moved to the U.S. in 1995. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of London, with honors, in law with a social anthropology concentration.
Bhuchar’s father worked as an immigration officer while her mother was a nurse.
With offices at 5 Independence Way, Suite 300 in Princeton, Bhuchar has a well-established reputation in both the area’s Indian-American and legal communities. She has more than 10 years of experience in immigration law, serving as counsel for many global IT companies and New York-area law firms.
At Kumar Pathak LLC, she managed the firm’s immigration law practice with an emphasis on corporate immigration. Prior to that Bhuchar worked for Merrill Cohen and Associates, a New York City immigration law firm, where she helped handle corporate immigration cases involving Fortune 500 companies. Bhuchar also volunteers for legal counsel for the women’s organization Manavi.
A petition that was drafted for submission to Governor Christie’s office (WW-P News, March 30) was also part of a collective effort from supporters of Ravi. Former WW-P board member Anjani Gharpure wrote a letter to the editor of the WW-P News that solicited support for the petition. She will attend the gathering in Edison on Friday night along with a contingent of Plainsboro residents.
Mirage banquet hall is the cornerstone of a large retail development along Oak Tree Road in Edison, the hub of Indian stores and eateries in central New Jersey. The Mehtani family owns and operates Mirage as well as Ming and Moghul restaurants, and family patriarch Satish Mehtani was featured in an article that appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger on Sunday, April 29.
