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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 hate to come across as a "heartless" bastard, but jumping off a bridge (or the equivalent) due to some perceived online relationship failure just doesn't seem right.
Then again, maybe kids today are far too sensitive.
Really I do not think theres anything scary about what will happen in this case. An adult should be semi responsible for there actions.
How can an adult feel like toying with a young girl with an over self conscious image of herself when they live near them?
I can understand that there could be other circumestances when this could be scary but in this case i thought it was just HORRID what the person did.
Mod me a troll if you want. But i think most people when they read this case realize that what that person did was wrong. And i believe that in most circumstances driving someone to suicide is a crime. I don't care if you say that the person was to emotional, thats a reason that you should be semi understanding and not go out of your way to mess with them.
She was 13... what 13 year old girl (or boy for that matter) doesn't have emotional issues?
Thats a very unstable and impressionable stage, where shit like the pencil you use in school seems important.
If the case was another 13 year old, I would be rather dissapointed that the charges stuck... however she was/is 49 years old, preying on a 13 year old... thats, just flatout fucking bullshit.
For once, an accurate first post. "Inflicting emotional distress" should not be a crime, because that means "insulting someone on Usenet" is a crime. Not only would we lose half the world's geeks within a year, but we'd have disgraced our legal system forever.
If you really feel "emotional distress", you can take the traditional response - a duel, either with swords a la D'argtanan or with pistols a la Jefferson or with words a la Usenet. It's entered into by mutual agreement, which means no one gets anything they weren't willing to get. You can walk away from an insult or even a duel - you can't walk away from a lawsuit. My two cents (that's all I have, I'm not allowed to vote, those under 18 being clear idiots by definition) says that taking this into the courts is an insult to both parties. It's a private matter, and it should be settled privately.
Sure, the girl committed suicide, so there's an emotional investment here on the part of the people hearing about the case, but people should be able to realize just what kind of precedent they're setting here. It's not a good one.
If the perp had have been a man, he would have been arrested. More importantly, we're not talking about a 13 year old harassing another 13 year old, we're talking about a 40-odd year old woman who knew the victim deliberately crafting a fake persona and instigating it into her life. Knowing that the target - a child - had mental issues, this deranged pathetic excuse for a human being nevertheless persisted in her campaign to deceive the child, involving as many of her own daughter's friends as possible.
This is one of the most twisted things I have heard, and your logic echoes that of the sociopathic, fat, middle aged woman who felt the need to do this "I don't feel bad about this because she had issues with depression".
The woman deserves what is coming, and I will laugh happily every time I hear her family has suffered misfortune - losing their business, pulling their daughter from school and hopefully soon being forced from the community. She acted without remorse and deserves to suffer consequences.
What, so if I register for an email account with "Anonymous Anon" given as my name, I've broken the law? We really do live in a police state.
Of course it's all "alleged". Until such time as the person is convicted, any reasonable news outlet will use the word "alleged" as a CYA measure against libel charges.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
So, it's ok to assume she's guilty?
What's the point in indicting her then? Why not just do an old-fashioned lynching?
Max.
OK. Fair enough. I apologise.
I read 'into' your post stuff you didn't write - ie that the *only reason* for putting 'alleged' is for the paper to avoid libel charges.
Of course this isn't the case. The term 'alleged' actually means something, and that is that she hasn't been found guilty yet. It seems that the majority (all? apart from mine) of posts here have assumed she's guilty already.
She does actually deny the charges, if I read it correctly. People don't seem to consider that she's telling the truth.
Max.
Would the situation be any different if it weren't a hoax?
What if Josh Evans really existed, and was true to what was spoken? Because then it would be a freedom of speech issue.
You make a fine point and I agree with you. I'm pretty sure that the possibility of libel charges is a big reason why news organizations use "alleged", but sometimes the result of CYA actions is something that's actually good, and I think this is one of those cases. Noble results from selfish actions.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Well, I don't know what 'indicted' means - it's one of those many words that I only encounter in the US.
..and why all the pussy footing around in the article, if they have been found guilty already? Surely this isn't still 'alleged' if she's been found guilty already.
I should look it up, I suppose....ah, here we go :
" 1. To accuse of wrongdoing; charge: a book that indicts modern values.
2. Law. To make a formal accusation or indictment against (a party) by the findings of a jury, especially a grand jury."
I am now assuming we're not talking about (1), but about (2) - ie the jury has already been involved and has found her guilty. What's the difference between 'indicted' and 'guilty' then, I wonder?
Clearly, I know very little about US law (or any law, I guess).
Max.
Except half of slashdot didn't create the profiles to terrorize a little girl and cause her to kill herself. In this specific case, a life was lost because of the actions of this woman.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I think people here might be missing the logic behind this.
The "victim" for the computer trespass crime is MySpace, not the girl or her family.
MySpace suffered no financial losses because of this, so this is a highly dubious criminal charge. The family, on the other hand, has a legitimate case which they should take to the civil courts.
(Obviously the base instinct is "get 'em!", but Slashdot should be more perspective about computer crimes.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
"Get her (woman) any way you can" There is no legal means for prosecuting someone for what she did to the girl, so they found another way to bring charges, i.e. being arrested for resisting arrest or the way Gotti caused the deaths of dozens, but he went away for tax evasion. What she did was not acceptable socially, so the criminal justice system is trying to find a way to squeeze her in. I don't like it, but right now I think its better than having US Code specifying the legality of things like this on the Internet more than it already does. Considering the 80% of congress is technically inept (optimistic) and a different 80% could care less about passing ambigous legislation that can be misused.
The issue here is that prosecutors are using the typical shotgun approach, and firing a bunch of charges at her to see what will stick.
Technology has nothing to do with this crime, and there could be negative ramifications if she is indeed found guilty of federal communication charges for a local crime.
Let's pretend this occurred 30 years ago, and instead of using the internet as the backdrop, the woman and girl simply exchanged letters as local pen-pals. The woman would photocopy the girl's letters, and circulate them around the community, demeaning and belittling the girl. The girl finally finds out, and commits suicide over the humiliation and emotional distress.
So what's the difference here? Society at large demands punishment for this woman, as she acted intentionally to harm the girl emotionally and humiliate her publicly. Whether she did so using sign language, morse code, hand written letters or the internet is irrelevant.
Better known as 318230.
Why not put all that hate-filled energy into positive steps, like helping out a suicide hotline or pushing for legislation they feel would prevent this in the future?
The people who attack her family are doing evil, plain and simple. I hope they get sent to jail for it.
Causality does not imply responsibility. Maybe hundred thousands died in Burma because I yawned a month ago. That doesn't make me responsible.
Alternatively I could ask the cab tomorrow : "make a right after all". And bam, he'll hit someone. My opening my mouth to give direction belongs in a causal chain leading to this death. It doesn't make me responsible.
Responsibility comes when the action you did was intrinsically a crime (regardless of the consequences).
\u262D = \u5350
A big difference here is that the efforts of the women (Drew and Grills) were targeted at one person, and were designed to hurt and deceive. Whether that's criminal or not may be debatable. Girls in the 11-to-15 age range go through hell emotionally, hormonally, socially, etc, and each of these factors magnifies the others. What may appear to be drama and hyperbole to adults is often very real in the mind of a young teenager. I never really realized that until I had a teenage daughter, and I can say that when she was at that age, I did notice that the online world (AIM, mostly)seemed to be a trigger that brought out the worst in her. The argument that Megan and her mother had is very similar to ones my wife and I had with our daughter. I am convinced that the same issues crop up with most teenage girls and their parents.
... ]
... ]
Drew and Grills should have known better. They were once adolescent girls, (at 19, Grills might arguably still be one) who now as adults are morally required to take the high road. Solution? Dunno.
[Starting rant; invoking wishful_thinking()
Revoke their adulthood. Driver's license? Gone. Checking account? Get a legal guardian to approve your expenditures. Car loan? Get a cosigner. Set a curfew. Make them ride a schoolbus every day. At work, make them raise their hand and get a hall pass before they go to the bathroom. Voting? Drinking? Smoking? Forget it. Not mature enough. Make them write 10,000-word essays about being nice to others. Make them fill a blackboard with "I will not torment vulnerable teens online" hundreds of times. Daily. After they spend sufficient time slogging through 'childhood', maybe they'll someday be worthy of adult status.
[End rant; invoking return_to_reality()
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The charges brought against her are for a Terms of Service violation, which is being claimed falls under anti-hacking laws.
It doesn't matter to me what the back story is, what matters is the binding precedent that could be set, making it a criminal offense to sign up to a web service with anonymous or false credentials.
Which raises the question - if we can take care of ourselves and our families with some help from our community, why does the State wish to stop that?
Because, like it or not, the woman in your example was no better beating her husband than he was beating her. It may have worked, but more often than not, it doesn't. I know people who've been hospitalized for shit like that. I know of (second hand) multiple people who've been killed for shit like that. Either the husband died or the wife died because she tried to "fight" back.
Giving bad advice that works out okay isn't acceptable. What the pastor should have told her was "get out of the house--take the children (if applicable) and call the cops." Anything else was negligence on his part.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Alternatively I could ask the cab tomorrow : "make a right after all". And bam, he'll hit someone. My opening my mouth to give direction belongs in a causal chain leading to this death. It doesn't make me responsible.
Responsibility comes when the action you did was intrinsically a crime (regardless of the consequences). This woman, under a fake screen persona, "allegedly" told this little girl that the world would be a better place without her. In other words, "Kill yourself", which is exactly what the girl did. I think that makes her at least somewhat responsible.
As for the rest of, unfortunately, there no law against being a C**T! However, there may be something they can do about her being a C**T to a 13-yr-old girl.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I also think you are sounding an aweful lot like my mum. It seems to me that people just want the courts to decide if she is guilty. Perhaps you're right. I'll see if I can read them more in that light. however she was/is 49 years old, preying on a 13 year old... thats, just flatout fucking bullshit. we're talking about a 40-odd year old woman who knew the victim deliberately crafting a fake persona and instigating it into her life. Knowing that the target - a child - had mental issues, this deranged pathetic excuse for a human being nevertheless persisted in her campaign to deceive the child, involving as many of her own daughter's friends as possible....The woman deserves what is coming, and I will laugh happily every time I hear her family has suffered misfortune If the 40 year old woman hadn't pushed her over the edge by deliberately tormenting Nope...I don't want to bother reading any more since I've read them already. It seems clear to me that the vast majority of posters are assuming her guilt already.
Max.
No, I think you were dead on earlier. I'm not sure if you're from the US, but 'round these parts, basically when a case like this happens- the news and media outlets report these things as if the defendant is already guilty, and put in catch phrases like "alleged" and "possible," but the insinuations they make stick. Public opinion usually mirrors the desired projected opinion of the media outlets.
Ask any american if they thought OJ Simpson was guilty. Everybody I know thinks he is, despite the fact that the court found him not guilty.
This is not an issue of "let's wait and see." Typically, the general populous sees news headlines such as "Person X being investigated for crime Y against Z" and interperate is to mean "Person X committed Y against Z, but we have to wait for the court to sentence him/her."
So while a majority of the logical people here at slashdot may believe "indicted" means just that- It's safe to assume that the general populous will make the guilty connection even when the media outlets do cover their asses with terms like "allegedly."
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
This women is basically a online troll, as much as we may not like her or think she is evil she is no different then any other online troll.
/. or others due to there violation of a civil agreement between the site operator and the user, that is clearly a civil matter between the two.
This case is scary because next people will be arrested for trolling
Also it is important to note that the girl who killed herself approached her parents in a state of emotional breakdown after the "breakup" and her mother couldn't care less, thats why she went up stairs and hung herself in her bedroom. To get back at her MOTHER for not caring about her horrible life as hanging yourself in the home in a place readily to be found (such as bedroom or garage) by a family member is about punishing them, its a calculated decision to show them what they have done.
If anyone should be charged it should be the MOTHER because she actually had a DUTY to care for the girl unlike the troll....
I'm looking over the postings and I see the usual "throw the book at the defendant!" or "the girl needs to grow some skin." These types of stories bring out the worst in this crowd and sight a severe flaw in thinking... we aren't thinking about the middle ground.
This woman Drew needs to be punished. She started this thing up as a joke. A very stupid and sick joke. However I don't think she should do 80 years for the crime. She should do time as an example to people who think they can just find a random person online, take advantage of them, and cause severe harm. Then they should be let out after some time and allowed to move on. The intent was not to kill the girl but they were very reckless.
At the same time, the other side has a great point. This girl needed to grow some skin, and where were the parents? This wasn't murder, and shouldn't be treated as such. The parents deserve some satisfaction, but they need to own some blame too.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
trolling is like taking a paper bag of crap and throwing it into a crowd and revelling in the screams if disgust
1. its anonymous, not personal
2. its temporary and short
3. its done amongst a group of equally aged and emotionally mature people
4. the target is a crowd of people, a community, not a single person
what this evil woman did is more like stalking: purposefully targetting and manipulating one person over an extended period of time
furthermore, most disgusting, this was the actions of an adult against a child. there is no understanding of trolling that assumes that an adult is picking on children
and to go even further into disgust, the adult KNEW the child had emotional and suicidal issues when she set about this plan of decpetion and emotional manipulation
so this case cannot set a precedent against trolling
it can only set a precedent for:
1. prolonged one-on-one stalking
2. manipulating the emotions of a minor
3. manipulating the emotions of someone you know to be suicidal or otherwise emotionally fragile
all of which, in fact, deserve to made criminal
this is not just trolling, what this evil woman did
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What Lori Drew did was awful. But, her prosecution is scary. Based on the posts I've seen, it's obvious slashdotters are not RTFA'ing but arguing the points in the article anyway. In a nutshell, Ms. Drew faces jail time for violating myspace's TOS.
The prosecutions argument boils down to:
1. Ms. Drew provided false identifying information to myspace.
2. Therefore, she violated their TOS.
3. Since she violated the TOS she did not have authorized access to their computers.
4. By accessing their computers without authorization, she violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
I seriously doubt there is anyone on slashdot who has never violated a TOS.
Does your ISP prohibit running servers, but you setup an FTP, HTTP, or vent server anyway? That could mean prison time. Have you ever given false identifying information to a web site so you could avoid SPAM? If so, go to jail. Do you even read TOS? If not, you might be a criminal but don't know it.
People are righly outraged by what Ms. Drew did. But, making it a crime to violate a TOS to satisfy that outrage is a mistake.
Really? Because if, say, the person was a 40-year-old who had created the fake MySpace profile with the purpose of soliciting sex from the 13-year-old, I'm sure many people would have no problem with the criminal charges. Realistically, the problem here isn't that she created the fake profile (and that they keep focusing on that aspect is, IMO, stupid) but the problem is that a 40-something-year-old woman got on the internet, told a 13-year-old girl that the woman was a 13-year-old boy and engaged in a relationship with her so that she could serve her own twisted ends of torturing and tormenting the girl. It is as simple and as complex as that to me - that someone (allegedly this woman who is on trial) was preying on a 13-year-old on the internet via lies about their age/gender/etc. What if, instead of using the account to torture the girl, the woman had instead suggested they "meet" and then raped her? Would everyone be saying that doing this wasn't a crime?
Just a level of perspective.
"Does bouncing count?" - Silk, Magician's Gambit by David Eddings
I'm not defending the woman's actions, because the entire thing does sound messed up. However, she didn't kill that girl. Even if she had come right out and said "You should go kill yourself!", it still wouldn't be her fault that the girl did it. I have a hard time believing the conspiracy charge as well, but whatever.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Everybody thinks OJ is guilty because he is. He got off because Fuhrman said "nigger" and so the defense managed to get the jury to believe the cops planted evidence.
The latest fiasco with OJ in Vegas just backs up the assumption that he's sort of a loose cannon.
Nobody in this thread denied that someone doing this should "share a good bit of responsibility". But it is not murder, which is a pretty precisely defined crime.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The final outcome makes a difference as well. Driving drunk & crossing the center line is one thing. If there just happens to be another car on the road at the same time &place and you hit it & kill someone, it's a very different deal even though in truth, it could very well be the only difference was blind luck.
In this case, doing what she did to a grown up would most likely be seen as a practical joke. Doing it to a young girl who was emotionally vulnerable and suicidal to begin with is a very different situation. And we know that she knew the girl had problems because she said so in her own words, early on using the age old blame-the-victim strategy. In terms of the case of her defense, probably more than anything else, making public statements that the teen was suicidal may be what results in her conviction.
Without getting into the in's & out's of the particular charges and approach used against this woman (which is a separate issue) as far as justice goes, there's definitely a smell-test issue. It's quite clear that what this woman did was creepy, vicious and just plain wrong morally. Here actions resulted in something terrible - and any reasonable person would see that it tormenting the girl in this manner would very likely lead to this outcome.
Vote Quimby.
Thank god we no longer believe in personal responsibility of the individual anymore! If we don't like something, just make it a felony and it'll magically go away!
Get some backbone already... relationships end badly all the time, regardless of whether or not they're fictitious in nature. If I killed myself every time a relationship resulted in being stabbed in the back by someone I trusted, I'd have at least ten corpses to my name.
And don't give me the sob-story about how this person wasn't "able to make friends in school" or some such non-sense like that. You can't quantify stuff which requires personal effort to make happen.
Was it ethical for this other person to initiate this fake relationship? No. Should they go to prison for it? No. At best, this is a civil issue, not a criminal one. (Well, unless you really stretch the definition of "fraud" into relationships. But be ready for a lashing the next time you have a bad break-up with someone "clingy"...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
This is an ADULT manipulating a CHILD (a child whom the adult knew was depressed and suicidal) to commit SUICIDE. This is not a case of peers trading insults, or homophobes telling people "don't be gay."
She may or may not have intended the suicide itself, but she clearly intended to inflict great psychological harm on an already mentally unstable child.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If some MySpace data from a stranger was enough to cause a Denial-Of-Service against this girl's life, then there were some serious deficiencies in her mental firewall.
Has anyone asked what her network administrators' role was in all this? They really ought to have been keeping their daughter running more stably to begin with.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
"Tortured"? You say it like she tied the girl up to the computer and forced her to communicate.
Her parents failed her. Her friends failed her. This woman was a horrible bitch, but that's all she's guilty of. That girl decided to take her own life because she was very, very unstable, and no one around her apparently cared enough to step in until it was too late. And now we cry foul?
Besides, did you even look at what she was charged with? Basically, violating the terms of service of MySpace is being conflated as the same thing as "unauthorized use of a computer system" or "hacking". A fucking felony. Do you follow the TOS of every single site you visit? And would you agree that anyone who doesn't follow the TOS is guilty of a felony?
The woman who did this was a horrible bitch, no question. But people need to take some fucking personal responsibility. There are mean people out there. Fact of life. Most of us learn to deal with it. Apparently, no one taught this girl how to. That's not the fault of the Internet "boyfriend".
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Actually, it can be.
Charles Manson didn't kill anyone, only told other people to do it.
She didn't say something cruel, she manipulated someone into killing herself.
That's a lot different then angerly shouting at someone to drop dead.
"It's a far greater concern to me, anyway, that parents dump their kids, unattended, on the internet. "
you don't know that. she could ahve easily be allowed a set amount of time. At 13 you should be getting a little less controlling over your children.
They may have been happy she was communicating with a peer that made her happy. She was depressed and then she starts talking to someone that makes her happy, they where probably thrilled.
I don't think there was much time between the end and her killing herself.
The issue is more complex then you want to believe.
Your amazing anecdote aside, not all kids online are just 'dumped' there.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, manipulating children makes you responsible.
The fact that there were more then one person in on this makes it a conspiracy.
So if I convinced by daughter to climb onto our roof when a hurricane is coming I won't be liable for her death? I mean I didn't blow here off the roof.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As I stated previously, the fact that the focus is all on her violating MySpace's TOS is, IMO, stupid. What they should be focused on is the fact that she purposefully sought out and preyed on a child.
So, if instead of the extreme example of attempting to solicit actual sex is substituted for merely engaging in sexual discussion with a minor, would you agree to the similarities? A person who uses the internet to specifically seek out children with the purposes of engaging in sexual discussions with them is considered a sexual predator and is charged with criminal acts. True, those children could merely stop chatting at any time (and one wonders where the girl's parents were during this entire episode that it was allowed to escalate so terribly out of control), just as this girl could have, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the woman (if it was her) specifically sought out a minor and, using lies and false representation, attempted (and succeeded!) to torture and manipulate her into a state of emotional distress.
To use another slightly extreme example of why I think what you say has less validity, if a 40-year-old ran around in a trench coat flashing a junior high school, should that person not be served criminal charges merely because the kids could have "looked away"? The fact that the victim could have severed the contact (assuming that they were able to be aware of what was happening, which did not seem to be the case with the girl in question - as the perpetrator purposefully lied and manipulated her to keep her from realizing the tactics being used to torture and torment her and thereby allow said perpetrator to continue said acts) does not make them any less of a victim - or the person who committed the acts any less accountable.
Another extreme example - a woman who is beaten by her husband. It is true that she could leave the relationship at any time - she could reach out, get help, etc. However, due usually to the emotional and mental manipulation (similar to the case), the woman is made to feel as if she should not or could not receive the help she needs. Her husband uses these tactics so that he may continue his abuse of her, just like the perpetrator in the case used the fake "relationship" to keep the girl in communication and to continue the tormenting. Is the husband not to be held accountable because the wife could have left? Should we excuse this behavior because the victim "brought it on themselves" by not seeking aid?
Obviously, neither of my examples are exactly like the case - and they are a bit on the extreme side - but they illustrate why this woman should be facing criminal charges for her treatment of the girl. As stated previously and again at the beginning of this reply, the fact that they are focusing on the supposed "hacking" is just stupid. They should be focusing on the willful and deliberate preying on a 13-year-old by a 40-something-year-old which then led to not only the tormenting and torturing of said girl, but ultimately to her death. And in that, the authorities were perfectly right, IMO, to arrest the person they had evidence had done the crime.
"Does bouncing count?" - Silk, Magician's Gambit by David Eddings