Does Dharun Ravi Feel Remorse? Sorry seems to be the hardest word. As Judge Glenn Berman noted before handing down Dharun Ravi's sentence yesterday, Ravi never said it clearly enough, to enough of the people affected by what the judge rightly labeled his "colossal insensitivity," and with what felt like a genuine enough sense of regret. You could tell Berman didn't like Ravi much. And yet the judge nonetheless handed down the sentence he thought appropriate, a light one. Just 30 days in jail, along with a fine and many, many hours of community service. Although emotionally unsatisfying and even legally debatable - as the judge noted, Ravi indisputably obstructed justice in numerous ways - that decision did a measure of honor to the way our justice system is supposed to work. It was driven, clearly, not by how Berman felt about Ravi, but by what he deemed appropriate, given the nature of the charges against the young man, the likelihood that he would re-offend and other matters of the head, not the heart. It reflected the fact that nothing about the provable facts of the case attributes any legal culpability for Tyler Clementi's death to Ravi. We can't know precisely what led Clementi to that bridge. It was no doubt a tangle of triggers. How and where Ravi's invasion of Clementi's privacy factors into it is impossible to determine. And the law is about what can be proven. Not about what can be guessed. But as I watched the events in the courtroom yesterday, I couldn't help feeling powerfully frustrated and wondering if Ravi really carries as heavy a heart as he should, and is as inclined toward atonement and as capable of redemption as many of us would wish him to be. There was so much talk around him - from his lawyer, from his parents - about the hell that Ravi himself had been through. The indignities he had suffered. Is that where his own thoughts dwell? On the (admittedly) profound ways in which his own life has been stalled and complicated rather than his unacceptably callous treatment of a roommate who didn't warrant it? I'm haunted by Ravi's father's last-minute plea to the judge. To my ears it didn't emphasize the wrong that Ravi had done. It emphasized Ravi as victim: of a rush to judgment, of a presumptuous news media, and of a degree of derision from society that, in this man's eyes, went beyond anything his son deserved. It was an odd tack to take. Perhaps a telling one, too. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Finally, yesterday, we saw Ravi cry - for his mother, whose pain at the thought of her son's compromised future was writ in her convulsive sobs as she delivered her own last-minute plea to the judge. His tears in that instance seemed to be for his own family, not for Clementi's. And not for Clementi, whose manner of death suggests a magnitude of emotional turmoil that's heartbreaking to contemplate, whether you are or aren't a component of it, whether you do or don't see yourself as an agent of it. Here's what James Clementi told the judge about the brother he lost: "I cannot imagine the level of rejection, isolation and disdain he must have felt from his peers. My family has never heard an apology, an acknowledgement of any wrongdoing. Did that reflect some sort of legal strategy on Ravi's part? Well, the verdict has been handed down. The sentence has been decreed. The strategizing can end. And a sorry of proper amplitude can be said. If, indeed, Ravi has it in him.