Was Dharun Ravi made a scapegoat of Tyler Clementi death?

Minutes earlier, Ravi’s own lawyer, Steve Altman, asked that his client get only probation, using a pitch that made Ravi’s sheet-peeking sound suspiciously as if it were motivated not by anti-gay bias, but his own failure to own up to same-sex urges.

Altman repeated, twice, as if quoting a porn flick, that Ravi was not “desiring or wanting to see sexual penetration or sexual contact’’ when he flipped on his cam. “Sexual penetration or sexual contact.’’

So who is responsible for Tyler’s death?

Ravi was never charged in the death. But the hearing hit a low point when Tyler’s mother, Jane, said, disingenuously, “I do not know what Tyler was thinking or what he felt in his final days.’’

She probably has a pretty good idea.

Shortly before he died, a heartbroken Tyler confided in an e-mail to a friend that his own mother had “rejected’’ him when he came out to her as gay.

Yet, sobbing from pain — or was it guilt? — the best Jane Clementi could do was complain, at length, that Ravi barely looked up from his computer while she visited his dorm room.

And what about the dude Ravi caught Tyler making out with?

“M.B.,’’ the predatory now-33-year-old Romeo, had a thing for sex in a freshman dorm room, but wouldn’t buy Tyler a lousy cup of coffee. He failed to reveal his face or his name yesterday. But in a statement read to the court, he, too, gave vast hints of guilt.

He just wants Ravi to “admit he was wrong.’’

If Mr. Ravi was a blond, blue-eyed male, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that he would never have been convicted or even charged.