Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
More to the point...I saw your earlier post and recognize the situation here, and I don't disagree that this woman has violated the law. Just trying to point out that "infliction of emotional distress" sure as hell shouldn't be the crime here. Find something that should actually be illegal to prosecute her under. But as a minor, I don't want it to be illegal to offend me on the Internet - otherwise, I could sue you (and lose, hopefully) based on your disagreement with me there. I'm an emotionally vulnerable child, and he damaged my psyche! I have no self-respect!
Some people in my generation just need to get the fuck over themselves. I'm not trying to dismiss the pain she felt or say that this woman has done nothing wrong - just please, everyone-who-actually-has-a-voice-in-this-government, prosecute her for something that teenagers can't take advantage of. The law gets abused badly enough without things like "infliction of emotional distress" being illegal.
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.
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.
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.
... ]
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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
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.
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....
Sorry, unless you're Jeebus himself, someone with clinical depression won't "grow some skin" just like a paraplegic won't "get up and walk" or a blind person will "open his eyes and see".
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
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
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.
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!
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