Mom found not guilty of felony charges in the MySpace suicide trial. Unfortunately, its not considered a crime for a mom to act like a child on the internet. My heart breaks for the family of the 13 year old who hung herself after finding out her MySpace boyfriend was made up by a former friend and her mom. I was honestly hoping for a different outcome.
Lori Drew, the 49-year-old woman charged in the first federal
cyberbullying case, was cleared of felony computer-hacking charges by a
jury Wednesday morning, but convicted of three misdemeanors. The jury
deadlocked on a remaining felony charge of conspiracy.
After just over a day of deliberation, the six-man, six-woman jury
acquitted Drew of three felony charges of violating the federal
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in an emotionally charged case that
stemmed from a 2006 MySpace hoax targeting a 13-year-old girl, who
later committed suicide.
Tina Meier, the mother of the girl, shook her head silently from the gallery as the verdict was read.
Prosecutors claimed Drew and others obtained unauthorized access to
MySpace by creating a fake profile for a nonexistent 16-year-old boy
named "Josh Evans." The account was used to flirt with, and then
reject, 13-year-old old Megan Meier. The case hinged on the
government's novel argument that violating MySpace's terms of service
for the purpose of harming another was the legal equivalent of computer
hacking, and Drew faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison for
each charge.
But on Wednesday, jurors found Drew guilty only of three counts of
gaining unauthorized access to MySpace for the purpose of obtaining
information on Megan Meier — misdemeanors that potentially carry up to
a year in prison, but most likely will result in no time in custody.
The jury unanimously rejected the three felony computer hacking charges
that alleged the unauthorized access was part of a scheme to
intentionally inflict emotional distress on Megan.
U.S. District Judge George Wu has not yet ruled on a defense motion
that, if granted, would overturn even the misdemeanors for lack of
evidence, and result in a judgment of acquittal. It's also unclear
whether the government will seek a new trial on the deadlocked
conspiracy charge.
The slap-on-the-wrist verdict is a partial rebuke to federal
prosecutors, who chose to charge Drew federally even after authorities
in Missouri — where the hoax unfolded — found that Drew's behavior did
not violate any state laws at the time. Some legal experts and civil
libertarians decried the prosecution as an abuse of computer-crime laws.
Underscoring the importance of the high-profile case to the
government, Thomas O'Brien, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of
California, personally oversaw the prosecution and handled some of the
witness testimony himself. O'Brien was appointed by President George W.
Bush in 2007 to oversee the 266 federal prosecutors in the
second-largest U.S. Attorney's office in the country.
The verdict followed three days of testimony by 15 witnesses.
The indictment charged that in September 2006 Drew conspired to
create the Josh Evans account with her then 13-year-old daughter,
Sarah, and a then-18-year-old employee and family friend named Ashley
Grills, for the purpose of inflicting psychological harm on Meier.
Prosecutors alleged that Drew and the two others used the profile to
lure Megan into an online relationship with "Josh" to find out what
Megan was saying about Drew's daughter online. Midway through the ruse,
prosecutors said Drew changed the plan and wanted to print out the
correspondence between Megan and the fake boy in order to confront her
with the pages in public and humiliate her.
That confrontation never occurred. But after "Josh" turned on Megan
and told her he wanted to sever their relationship, Megan hanged
herself in her bedroom in October 2006.
Neighbors in O'Fallon, Missouri, the small town where the Drews and
Meiers lived four houses away from each other, turned on Drew when her
supposed complicity in the hoax emerged. They called her a murderer,
Lori Drew's father testified Monday.
A year after Megan's death, her great-aunt Vicki Dunn contacted a
local newspaper columnist who wrote about the case but didn't identify
Drew in the article, since she hadn't been charged with any crime. The
piece was picked up by numerous publications, sparking a frenzy among bloggers and others. who outed Drew's name and published her address and phone number online.
The Drews and their business associates received harassing calls and
death threats. Sarah Drew testified that her school asked her to leave
after officials concluded they could not control the bullying she
was receiving from other students. A former business associate of Drew
testified that a parent at her child's school asked her why she did
business with a "murderer."
Publicity over the suicide prompted county prosecutors to review the case
to determine if charges could be filed against Drew, but they were
stymied by the fact that there was no criminal law addressing the
cyberbullying that Drew was alleged to have committed.
That's when prosecutors in Los Angeles sought to indict Drew, charging her
with unauthorized access to MySpace's computers, using a federal
anti-hacking statute known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Prosecutors charged that Drew was guilty of the crime by violating
MySpace's terms-of-service agreement when she and her co-conspirators
allegedly provided false information to open the account and pose
online as the 16-year-old boy.
MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things,
to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from
soliciting personal information from minors or using information
obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By
allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the
same crime as any hacker, prosecutors claimed.
The novel use of the statute was criticized by numerous legal experts
who said the case set a "scary" precedent and potentially made a felon
out of anyone who violates the terms-of-service of any website.
But testimony in the case offered by prosecution witness Ashley
Grills under a grant of immunity showed that nobody involved in the
hoax actually read the terms of service. Grills also said that the hoax
was her idea, not Drew's, and that it was Grills who created the Josh
Evans profile, and later sent the cruel message that tipped the
emotionally vulnerable 13-year-old girl into her final, tragic act.
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