Texas Teen Arrested Under New Online Harassment Law

SpaceGhost sends in a story from San Antonio, TX: "Police have arrested a 16-year-old girl on charges of harassment under a new Texas law that took effect September 1, 2009. H.B. 2003 says a person commits a third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person. Police say the harassment went on for a few months and involved a dispute over a boy. ... Some people expect legal challenges to the constitutionality of the new Internet law.' The law is evidently a response to the Lori Drew case.

List of Texas' Third Degree Felonies

[eldavojohn]

Sorry to reply to myself but I found a list of felonies in the third degree for the state of Texas [grinterlaw.com] if you want to compare this new law to older laws resulting in the same degree of punishment. Apparently a third degree felony punishment (as noted in my parent post) can be meted out for anything ranging from arson to assault to conducting a game of bingo without a license [bingointexas.com].

Re:LOL

[bertoelcon]

Don't mess with Texas!*

*And by "mess" we mean to consider a democratically and validly elected official office legitimate, and especially if you know, he ain't your kind of bigot.

Actually the "Don't mess with Texas!" line is about littering.

Re:About time

[mcgrew]

So is Missouri [news-leader.com]. The Texas case isn't the first by any means; the Lori Drew case was in Missouri, and they passed such a law posthaste. I submitted a story about the first arrest for online stalking under the new Missouri Lori Drew law several months ago, I guess there were different people looking at the firehose then.

Texas ain't the first.

Missouri legislators passed a cyberbullying law after the 2006 suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier of St. Charles County. Megan killed herself after an Internet hoax that drew international attention.

Binder said that law would not apply in this case because both the suspect and the victim are juveniles. He did not know the suspect's specific age. The new law prohibits adults from cyber harassment of children.

Under the harassment law that took effect in August 2008, a cyberbullying offense can be charged as a felony if a victim is 17 or younger and the suspect 21 or older.

The first person charged under the new law was 40-year-old Elizabeth Thrasher, also of St. Charles County. She was accused in August of posting photos and personal information about a 17-year-old girl on the "Casual Encounters" Section of Craigslist after an Internet argument. The posting included the teen's picture, e-mail address and cell phone number and suggested the girl was seeking a sexual encounter.

An "Anti-Bullying Week" is planned for Troy's ninth graders later this month. Huddleston said the week was planned before the allegations in the case surfaced.

Evidence for an opinion---wtf?

[jonaskoelker]

Why does this need to be a felony? Support your claim with evidence.

I believe your parent was making a statement of opinion.

You want them to prove their opinion is correct? What does it even mean for an opinion to be correct?

One can reasonably ask for reasons why people hold the opinions they hold, or whether they have any evidence for what the consequence of enacting a particular law might be (that is a factual claim), but I think you're using dirty debating tactics if you ask people to prove their opinions.

(you might ask people to prove that they actually hold the opinions they claim to hold, but that's a different thing---basically lie detection.)

Your parent is asserting his opinion very strongly, though, as if it's an absolute truth. Questioning anything claimed to be an absolute truth, backed up only by the strength of the assertion, is a good thing. But ask the right question---they make for a better debate and you tend to learn more* about the people you're conversing with ;-)

(*no, I don't have any evidence for that, and yes, it's a factual claim. I, like fate, am not without a sense of irony.)

Re:Two to Ten Years and Up To Ten Grand

[rwv]

But they didn't have proper laws [wired.com] to charge Drew with behavior that arguably resulted in the death of a teenager. She was guilty of that bad behavior, but the got acquitted because the judge didn't want to establish "breaking a website's terms of service" as precedence for violating the law. For whatever reason, there were not any "harassment" charges to levy against Drew.

Re:socialnetdef

[Anonymous Coward]

From the text of the law:
1) "Commercial social networking site" means any
      business, organization, or other similar entity operating a website
      that permits persons to become registered users for the purpose of
      establishing personal relationships with other users through
      direct or real-time communication with other users or the creation
      of web pages or profiles available to the public or to other users.
      The term does not include an electronic mail program or a message
      board program.