Woman Indicted In MySpace Suicide Case 654
longacre writes "The Associated Press is reporting an indictment has been handed down in the sad case of Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide after receiving upsetting MySpace messages from someone she perceived to be her boyfriend. It was later determined the boy, Josh Evans, was a fictitious identity created by a neighbor of Meier's family. Lori Drew, of a St. Louis suburb, has been charged with 'one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.' Interestingly, despite the alleged crime having occurred strictly in Missouri, the case was investigated by the FBI's St. Louis and Los Angeles field offices, and the trial will be held in Los Angeles, home of MySpace's servers. Wired is running a related story about the potentially 'scary' precedent this case could set."
Re:Scary (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't this "alleged"? (Score:3, Informative)
Everyone's talking about it like she's been found guilty already. Has the case been judged on already and I missed it?
Re:Scary (Score:5, Informative)
When Megan questioned "Josh" about his intentions, "he" responded "You should just kill yourself."
She did. She hung herself with a belt in her closet; it wasn't enough of a height to break her neck, but she crushed her throat and slowly suffocated over the next hour. Her mom found her upstairs, dead, a few days before her fifteenth birthday. She never lived long enough to find out that the cruelty was perpetuated by a grown woman living a few houses down, her daughter, and another neighbor girl.
I've been following this one for a while.
Re:Isn't this "alleged"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Back To Reality (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should go look up the legal definition of murder. Last time I checked murder was "any willful act, knowingly undertaken, which causes the death of another person." You don't have to mean to kill someone with your actions. If you do something when you can reasonably infer that doing so would cause grievous bodily harm or death, and you do so anyway because you don't care, it's called depraved indifference. This woman deserves to go to jail for her actions. IN our society is is generally considered unacceptable to prey upon those weaker than us, be it mentally or physically. This woman may not have beaten the girl to death with a hammer, but her actions are just as criminally culpable as if she had. She killed this girl, and her weapon was MySpace.
You may not like it, but you can be charged with murder for driving someone to commit suicide if it's determined you did what you did on purpose. You need not have meant to kill them. Just as you can be charged with murder if you shoot someone and they die, even if you didn't mean to kill them. You intended to cause grievous bodily harm which then lead to death. This woman intended to cause grievous psychological harm which led to suicide.
Re:Look at the free speech issue (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mod you a troll? Are you crazy?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Another aspect to the logic behind this is... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Isn't this "alleged"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's as simple as this (Score:5, Informative)
The Grand Jury then issues an indictment, which are the formal charges which will be presented to the criminal court, in which arguments will be weighed by a Petite Jury who decides if the individual in question did the shit that the Grand Jury said happened.
My knowledge of the British legal system comes from watching Poirot and a few episodes of Murphy's Law, but I think its roughly analogous to a Coroner's Inquest in the UK, where they decided if in fact a it was a murder before they decide who actually gets charged with the crime.
Re:It's as simple as this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's as simple as this (Score:2, Informative)
In this case, we can see a US Atty was as indignant as most decent people and has gone pretty far out of his way to do something about it.
Perhaps DREW can Facebook from the big house.
Re:It's as simple as this (Score:5, Informative)
You could certainly try.
Such a case would lack "standing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) [wikipedia.org] (since I didn't "make" the day: "Friday") and other tort requirements. The case would be thrown out or summarily dismissed and you'd be left vulnerable to a counter suit for frivolous litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation [wikipedia.org]. By me.
You'd probably lose, too.
Yes, Yes, I understand your point about there being too many lawsuits. Do you think Ms. Meier's family would be frivolous to sue here?
Re:i'm glad the meier family forgived (Score:2, Informative)
Because she isn't being charged for what happened, she is being charged for unauthorized access to a computer. They are trying to criminalize not following a site's TOS. Furthermore, they are selectively prosecuting on the grounds that people like you will take an alarmist view of what happened and convict on emotion rather than facts.
My logic is like this:
1) Someone signed up a fake myspace account
2) Someone sent fake messages pretending to be a boy interested in a girl
3) Someone started to be mean, supposedly because that Someone wanted the girl to forget the boy and end the charade
4) As a final comment, Someone told the girl that the world would be better without her
5) No criminal law on the books was violated as a result of this
6) To molify the "protect the children OMG" crowd, a very wrong interpretation of existing law is being used to make an, at best, civil action criminal
7) To make matter worse, the indicted person is NOT the Someone mentioned above
8) The general populace, you included, has been blinded by rage and is losing sight of the fact that actions which have for years been done to avoid spam or other unnecessary identification online are being criminalized all because a girl whose parents wouldn't get her help and who willfully ignored her mother's order to stay off the internet offed herself because she thought a boy dumped her
Is that clear enough for you? I'm not defending the,as you call them, evil actions. They suck. But using a hacking statute to prosecute because there exists no other law rather than fixing the legislation that does exist is reactionary and scary and most of all wrong. You are the one trying to justify it by bring "corrupting minors" into it, then changing the focus when I point out that no living minors were corrupted as it was adults involved. My point revolves solely around the prosecution of, at most, an accessory while the actual participant is forgiven and not charged.
If Ashley Grills had also been charged, I would be railing SOLELY on the law used. That isn't happening, though. So let's go back to your original question regarding a school shooting (great use of more reactionary crap to use your point).
No, you are not less guilty. What you are neglecting in your analogy is this question: Should you be charged and your son NOT charged? since we all know that answer is no, it is not an apples to apples comparison and you are just using inflammatory, emotional arguments to try to make me look like an asshole.I've probably done a great job of looking like an asshole on my own, just not for the reasons you've cited. And I've managed to do it without invoking school shootings and emotional "think of the children" pleas. Think you can work terrorism into your next response for the trifecta?
Re:Another aspect to the logic behind this is... (Score:4, Informative)
A law which states "commit murder and face jail time" presumes to deter people from committing murder. Such laws have not prevented any murder committed in the past, nor will it prevent all murder from this day forward.
The punishment is an integral part of the law. It is the deterrence. If the punishment is not seen as a consequence worse than the perceived benefits of the action, the action is not prevented.
By necessity, the punishment must be worse than the crime in order to be a deterrence. Why do you think corporations flout laws all the time? Because the fines imposed are dwarfed by the profits made.
Re:It's as simple as this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A few thoughts... (Score:3, Informative)
That would be similar to the difference of the girl being pushed down the stairs and her falling down the stairs by accident. Or someone intentionally hit by a car or being accidentally hit.
Re:"Emotional Distress" (Score:3, Informative)
"Child abuse is the physical, psychological or sexual maltreatment of children."
Re:"Emotional Distress" (Score:3, Informative)
I believe child abuse statutes come into play when the child is in the care of the alleged abuser, for example, a parent, teacher, babysitter, etc. I don't think that kind of relationship existed between the victim and the defendant.