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Woman Indicted In MySpace Suicide Case
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."
I would expect that she knew about the girl's problems. Her daughter and Megan had been close friends until they got in a fight; the reason Lori Drew alleges she started the hoax was to find out what, if anything, Megan was saying about her daughter. Megan confided in the persona for a long time, until she discovered a sudden onslaught of bulletins revealing all the secrets she shared, personal attacks, and comments about her body and mental health.
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.
Fnord.
She might not be guilty of murder, but causing the death of another human being is a crime regardless of whether it was her intention to do so. There are circumstances that might exculpate someone, such as self-defense (in some cases), but none of them apply here.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
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.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
an indictment means that a Grand Jury has weighed all the evidence and decided that there is enough of it to cause any reasonable person to believe that a crime has in fact been committed. Rules of evidence are much more lax and guilt or non-guilt is not the issue -- only whether a crime has been committed.
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.
As the indictment is handed down, the issue being legally resolved is the question of whether or not a crime has been committed. Most of us think a rather heinous crime was committed and, as Lori Drew is the only accused, she's getting the benefit of people's wrath. We all know that she is innocent in the eyes of the law, but we also know that "Josh Evans" did not invent himself.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
"I can sue you because it's Friday. All I have to do is show why it being Friday hurts me, and why I think it's your fault, and it becomes an actionable 'offense'."
You could certainly try.
Such a case would lack "standing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) (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. 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?
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
That's not true. A law which states "do not murder" protects exactly no one and nothing. The purpose of a specifc law is to deter people from taking a specific action.
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.
You can't take the sky from me...