The Judge, George Wu, presiding over the sentencing of Lori Drew declared that she had to be exonerated of bullying a 13 year old girl to death. Drew, 50 years old, allegedly in revenge for the bullying of her own daughter by the victim, created a fake 16 year old male identity to seduce Megan Meier. Having struck up a relationship the girl was eventually told by the ‘boy’ that the world would be better off if she was dead. She committed suicide.
Ghastly, ghastly, wicked behaviour. Even if Drew never intended Meier to commit suicide she deserves the strongest social opprobrium. But does she deserve jail? Most people, including Geeklawyer, would say ‘yes’. Unfortunately neither Missouri nor California had (have?) cyber bullying legislation and the only way to throw meat to the media was to engage in some creative criminal law theorizing. This is where the law of unintended consequences starts to kick in.
California prosecutors hit on the idea that by breaking the terms and conditions of the MySpace website she had, apart from any breach of civil law, committed a felony computer misuse offence. Drew was convicted by a jury.
At this point alarm bells started to ring: did everyone who provided inaccurate details to MySpace, or Twitter/Facebook etc etc, thereby commit an imprisonable offence? If so then many of us who use the Internet will have committed such an offence and Judge Wu, one imagines reluctantly, felt compelled to throw the case out.
Hard cases make bad law. And sometimes the ‘guilty’ do need to go free for justice to survive.
It would never do to jail Geeklawyer just because he described himself as “loving and compassionate” on a dating website.
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