That was the defense his lawyer made for Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on his gay freshman roommate before the roommate killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.  But the jerky-kid defense failed miserably on Friday with the conviction of Mr. Ravi in a New Jersey court on bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and other charges. Lawyers said the conviction gave new potential to hate-crime prosecutions for cyberbullying and digital spying largely because it seemed to repudiate the notion that youth was a defense.  “The debate in this case was, Was this a stupid college prank or criminal intimidation? And the jury gave a clear answer,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a gender law expert at Columbia Law School.  Lawyers said the verdict would encourage other hate-crime prosecutions involving young defendants. Reluctance by some prosecutors in the past had suggested that there were few legal consequences to online prying or to social-media irreverence that became abusive.  The failure of the jerky-kid defense is likely to change the legal landscape by showing that jurors can conclude that young people who are sophisticated enough to spy on, insult and embarrass one another electronically are sophisticated enough to be held accountable.  The verdict showed that the notion of innocent youth as a shield to culpability might not hold as much sway as it once did in court, Marcellus A. McRae, a former federal prosecutor, said. “Jurors will say their kid or kids they know are more sophisticated than that,” Mr. McRae said. “For jurors, it doesn’t pass the common-sense test.”  Mr. Ravi had seemed so confident that his defense would work that he turned down a plea offer that would have required community service. He now faces a possible prison term and could be deported to India, where he was born.  Lawyers said the trial in New Brunswick had drawn such intense attention that it would shape future cases because youthful indiscretion had always been an appealing defense. “It had a shot of having enough jurors say, ‘This is a jerky kid, and, look, they’ve thrown the book at him,’ ” said Marc R. Poirier, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark. “It was a roll of the dice, and it didn’t work.”  The facts of the case, which began in a Rutgers University dorm room in 2010, were never in much dispute. It was just the interpretation that each side saw differently.  Mr. Ravi spied by computer on his roommate, Tyler Clementi, and gossiped about him on Twitter, the jury heard. Mr. Clementi, an awkward violinist, had been “making out with a dude,” Mr. Ravi wrote on Twitter. Later, Mr. Ravi, an ultimate Frisbee player who seemed to thrive on attention, invited people to watch when Mr. Clementi again had a male visitor.  The prosecutor, Julia McClure, saw Mr. Ravi’s actions as far more than mischievous. She said they were “mean-spirited, they were malicious, they were criminal.”  But Steven Altman, Mr. Ravi’s lawyer, called him “an 18-year-old boy, a kid,” a college freshman who was not biased against his gay roommate but “didn’t know how to deal with it.”  Ms. Goldberg, the Columbia law professor, said the prosecution had posed an important challenge to the sense in many schools and colleges that youthfulness provided a kind of immunity for activities and speech in the online world. She said many students seemed to believe the ideas put forth by Mr. Ravi’s defense, that being a kid meant there were few limits to how offensive they might be when using digital devices.  “This reinforces that social media can cause great harm and that its misuse can be criminal,” Ms. Goldberg said. She said she expected that the lessons of the courtroom conviction would probably be studied broadly, including in discussions at college orientations across the country.  Defense lawyers said that once Mr. Ravi had decided to take his chances at a trial rather than pleading guilty, there were few options for the defense. The 15-count indictment and Mr. Ravi’s own videotaped acknowledgment of many of the facts gave the prosecutors a powerful arsenal.  The charges took note of the damaging fact that Mr. Ravi had tried to change electronic messages he had sent and seemed to encourage a witness to change her account.  A live witness in the courtroom, Mr. Clementi’s sexual partner, a 30-year-old man identified only as M. B., described the eerie feeling of being watched by the camera on Mr. Ravi’s computer.  And though Mr. Ravi was not charged with the death, there was the ever-present fact of Mr. Clementi’s suicide. The jury heard that a day before Mr. Clementi killed himself, Mr. Ravi sent a message to a friend: “Keep the gays away.”  Faced with that kind of case, it was logical to argue that there was a thin line between a bias crime and an immature college prank, Joseph Tacopina, a New York defense lawyer, said. “What other defense could it have been?” he said.  But after Friday’s conviction, some lawyers said, the risks of rejecting a plea bargain and arguing the jerky-kid defense were obvious. In a similar case in the future, said Ronald L. Kuby, a New York defense lawyer, he would remember what happened to Mr. Ravi.  His advice to a client, he said, would be: “ ‘Remember what happened to Ravi. Take the plea.’ ”
Lawyers said the verdict in the case against Dharun Ravi was a sign that a âjerky kidâ defense may no longer hold as much sway.