Lori Drew Cyber-Bullying Trial Begins

An anonymous reader writes "The cyber-bullying trial of Lori Drew opened yesterday. She was indicted for conspiring to access and accessing MySpace illegally in order to 'further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress' (PDF of the indictment). The BBC has background on the case, the NYTimes covers the opening statements, and Wired has today's testimony."

Comments

Re:Overreaching

[Just Some Guy]

You may not have noticed, but the only involvement ever mentioned in connection with Lori Drew is that she may have been aware the account was created. She did not herself create the account. She did not herself send messages to Megan Meier. She did not tell Meier to kill herself.

From Wired:

Grills was in the kitchen with Drew and Sarah, Lori Drew's then-13-year-old daughter, when she proposed creating a fake MySpace account to get information on Megan. Drew applauded the plan, and thought it was funny, but did not herself conceive it, Grills said.
The three of them crowded around Drew's computer as Grills set up the account. None of the three read MySpace's terms-of-service first, said Grills. As Grills began, Lori and Sarah Drew left for soccer practice, urging Grills to finish up in their absence.

That's a little different than saying "she may have been aware the account was created". Also,

Over the course of the 28 days the Josh Evans account was active, Lori Drew helped craft messages sent to Meier, Grills said, and assumed the Evans identity directly for at least one short exchange, when Grills messaged Meier and wound up talking with her mother instead. Tina Meier testified previously that she wrote "Josh" that she thought he should focus on kids his own age. Josh replied, "I understand."

I'd be willing to downgrade her from "primary actor" to "willing participant", but I don't think you can say she was only partially involved.

Pills' secondary effect

[DrYak]

The health professional who allowed the girl's condition to deteriorate so while under his/her care is another story altogether, and is at least most likely guilty of malpractice.

Well, I can't manage to find precise information about the drug the girl was treated with, but fact is, some anti-depressant, specially old one which work on the dopamine & adrenaline pathways (less the more recent which work on the serotonin pathways) have quite some secondary effect.
Normally depression is associated with a strong lack of will and lack of energy, the patient just sits around and doesn't want to do anything (aboulia in latin, sorry don't know the proper english word).
The old antidepressant have a much quicker effect on the the lack of will, than on the sadness and morbid thoughts of depression. This leaves a window during which the patient has already more energy to act, but still has lots of dark/sad ideas. During this period, the patient has a higher risk to enact the dark thoughs and thus the risk of suicide is elevated.

This risks require proper monitoring of the patient and perhaps, if that's the case, the poor girl was left too much unattended.

I don't think it's a real malpractice coming from the doctor (I don't thing the doctor really fucked up somewhere). But on the other hand insisting a little bit more about the dangers when speaking with the parents would perhaps attracted their attention that girl was going to be quite fragile during the first phase of the therapy.

Other things strike as rather odd :
- She wasn't completely isolated socially, according to wikipedia the girl participated in outdoor activities, etc. For someone not living completely isolated to reach a point where enacting suicide is a sign of very deep problems, the things that could be easily triggered by seemingly mundane situation.

- She commited suicide by hanging according to wikipedia. This is a method with a certain success rates. This isn't the typical girl's suicide (most girls statistically are more likely to resort to less "definitive" ways, like sleep pill overdoses). Often the suicide attempts look a lot like a "call to help".
The hanging show quite some determination to kill herself.