In San Francisco, the refuge of so many gay men and women who fled the bullying and torment of their youth, the case of Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi has been particularly poignant.

In September 2010, Ravi and Clementi were beginning their lives as Rutgers University students, sharing a dormitory room together. Clementi was a shy, mostly closeted gay teenager. Ravi was a cocky frat boy in training. When he used a webcam to secretly film Clementi having sex with another man in their room, and then invited others to watch a later planned live stream, Clementi did nothing for 24 hours. Then he jumped off the George Washington Bridge and died in the Hudson River.

Last week, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman sentenced Ravi to 30 days in jail, along with three years of probation and a $10,000 fine.

This came as something of a shock since Ravi had been convicted of 15 crimes that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, plus a recommendation that he be deported back to India.

But the justice system is adversarial by nature, and the hate crime laws under which Ravi was convicted were not drafted to address the complex stew of pettiness, immaturity and evasion that Ravi demonstrated. Ravi didn’t set out to beat or systematically humiliate Clementi. It seems clear that while he was cruel, he was casually cruel — not the sort of raging, abusive homophobe that such laws were designed to address.