Slashdot Mirror
Groklaw Summarizes the Lori Drew Verdict
Bootsy Collins writes "Last Wednesday, the Lori Drew 'cyberbullying' case ended in three misdemeanor convictions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 US Federal law intended to address illegally accessing computer systems. The interpretation of the act by the Court to cover violations of website terms of service, a circumstance obviously not considered in the law's formulation and passage, may have profound effects on the intersection of the Internet and US law. Referring to an amicus curiae brief filed by online rights organizations and law professors, PJ at Groklaw breaks down the implications of the decision to support her assertion that 'unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer.'"
I agree. Get off the Internet. It's too dangerous. Everyone from AOL on - get the hell off.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
She's an asshole, but this is a bullshit conviction and as the article describes....it hurts everybody.
America is a country of Laws, until butthurt turds scream for revenge. Then fuck the law and rational application of said law...we's gonna get some revenge!
Bye bye free speech...
Blar.
I'm all for the rule of law making it so the weak and the strong have equal standing in society.. but crying to the courts because someone called your daughter a name and she killed herself is just bullshit. It's just like all this sensitivity shit in the workplace and the restrictions on speech at colleges now. Grow a spine.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I agree, but there was no need for this.
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A 49yo woman subjects a 13yo neighbor to humiliation and emotional torment. Why wasn't this prosecuted as a case of felony child abuse?
I value PJs contributions to the open source movement, in terms of her legal coverage, but she does have a tendency to go off the deep end sometimes, and I think this is one of those occasions.
The internet has no privacy whatsoever, everything you do can be tracked. This has been true since day one when they turned on ArpaNet, and it will continue to be true. Even if you encrypt your traffic, it can't hide heavy usage, and you cannot hide from your ISP when you are online any more then you can hide making a phonecall from your telecom provider.
People need to realise this and move on. I realise it, and I can cope, but then I never was inclined to tinhattery.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
First off; you know damned well and good that this will be overturned on appeal. It can't be allowed to stand because the interpretation is skewed to begin with. Secondly; This article reads as a scare tactic to shut down the Internet. Come on; get real.
This lady is bad. But there are way to many others of like kind out there and to tie this all together like that is just crappy thinking and reasoning. The kid did have emotional issues that were an underlying complicit part of this formula. Now lets all come back to earth.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
WTF? She pretended to be an "internet boyfriend" and then told the girl she didn't want to talk to her anymore. She didn't put rat poison in her coffee. No-one is responsible for the death of a person who commits suicide, except the person who commits suicide. Oh, no, life is too hard. A boy I've never met (and didn't even really exist) doesn't like me anymore, where's the sleeping pills?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I really have to wonder how Lori's defense attorney completely botched this case. It should have been an absolute walk in the park for him to sink the case. If this doesn't get overturned I can already see the next big lawsuit after this: "The Church of Scientology VS 4chan."
Orin Kerr, one of Lori Drew's attorneys, is a regular blogger at the libertarian legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
http://volokh.com/
He has a summary here:
"What does the Lori Drew Verdict Mean?"
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_23-2008_11_29.shtml#1227728513
and has updated the blog's terms of use:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_23-2008_11_29.shtml#1227896387
As for serverco retroactively ruling conduct "unauthorized", there's a panoply of affirmative defenses such as invitation, habitual tolerence, failure to notify, discriminatory enforcement. Cyberbullying wouldn't have those available.
Make a new law, call it the Lori Drew law, and have that law make what she did specifically illegal.
The prosecution twisted the existing laws, which I cannot abide. This conviction should be over-turned.
That's how our system of law works.
Blar.
Of course, had this been a man talking to a 13-year old girl and pretending to be her boyfriend......
"Have a seat over here"
That has been true for Windows users for as long as I can recall, albeit for different reasons :-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
and dangerous to all, I closed with "Lovely, whats next. If crap like this succeeds it opens everyone up to any fishing expedition law enforcement cares to make"
That is exactly what we have. A new way for GOVERNMENT to punish someone who a GOVERNMENT employee doesn't like or thinks something was wrong even if nothing is legally wrong.
Basically it lets them write the laws to prosecute on demand. The problem is that with every organization there are a lot of spiteful people around and this gives them too much power to correct the world as they see fit or take a back door approach to nailing someone they don't like.
Guess I better be careful who I cut in front of while driving now.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
without question.
Unfortunately, the thing she's guilty of wasn't actually illegal when she did it. It was immoral, indefensible, and even if she gets off on these charges(which she probably will) she's going to be punished for the rest of her life and she deserves it.
She, as an adult who should have known better, created a false identity to harrass a minor, and that minor commited suicide, at least partially as a result. She set out to hurt that little girl, and the fact that this kid was mentally ill does not excuse that.
As in all cases like this, the government had to show both the victim's family and society at large that they'd go after this sort of thing. The case will probably be overturned because the case they could put together was pretty tenuous(because there wasn't a crime for what she did), but they've shown people that they're serious about this shit.
The crime they've charged her with may not be the one she's guilty of, but she's still guilty, and she deserves everything that's coming to her and more. She's an adult, she should have known better.
When I was young I occasionally suffered actual bullying--as in, with fists. Cyberbullying is a head-scratcher for me: how is it that saying mean things to someone is worse when done on the internet than when it is done face-to-face? Children say mean things to one another all the time and it seems to me that the adults don't do much about it until a fight comes to blows. Or to suicide. That an adult would engage in cyberbullying is bizarre, and wrong, and I maybe there should be a law against it (how would you word this law?). But it's inappropriate to hold her responsible for the child's response, which no one would have predicted. If there is no law that properly applies to her behavior then the judge shouldn't instate a new legal theory just to provide a punishment in one case--not if the precedent could have serious chilling effects on many other people.
The woman told the girl that nobody liked her and that she was a terrible person who should commit suicide.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
And just think , if the parents had done their job and protected their little girl from a situation that was extremely harmful to her mental state (whether or not the 'boyfriend' was real or Lori drew means nothing when a high school boy could be just as bad x10000, on top of the fact that her parents, or at the very least her mother, knew exactly what was being said in the messages the two were exchanging and even had fights with her about that as well as her daughter's refusal to get off teh computer when she was told) then none of this woul dhave happened. Everyone cries THINK OF THE CHILDREN OMFG!, but no one is ever there saying 'Where the fuck were the parents?'
I don't know what to say. She's a teacher, thus she is SUPPOSED to know more than the kids she's teaching.
Which is why most teachers are Pokemasters.
I tell slashtards to get fucked on a daily basis but so few of them manage to do it.
What's your point?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dementia?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So? A normal, well adjusted person will immediately disregard such a statement to be false. The fact that the suicide victim was not a normal well adjusted person is not the fault of Lori Drew.
Depression is a disease. It is not the "fault" of any one person or circumstance. Blaming Lori Drew for the victim's depression would be like blaming McDonald's for heart attacks caused by fatty foods. Sure, McDonald's bears some responsibility for serving such fare, and likewise, Lori Drew bears some responsibility for her words. But does the level of responsibility rise to a criminal level? I don't think so. Just like one has the ability to choose what one eats, one also has the ability to choose what words one listens to. The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
How the hell does McDonald's bear responsibility for what a private citizen chooses to purchase and consume willingly knowing full well that greasy fatty foods are bad for your arteries/heart? That's just as ridiculous as all the people who cried that McDonald's made them fat.
Check out the Wikipedia Page for the whole case.
last message sent by Evans read: "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you." Investigators did not find a record of this message.
It was NOT Lori who sent this message. It was Evans. In fact, if you do some quick Googling, you can find that it was in fact Evans who sent most of the messages! Sure Lori knew about all the messages and laughed, but she was not the one who sent them. It's because the stupid knob gobs who gave Evans immunity for testifying that Lori is getting prosecuted right now. They have to prosecute SOMEONE - the easiest and closest person to get anything to stick to was Lori.
Also, everyone is forgetting that Megan killed herself DIRECTLY after having a argument with her mother about profane language used on MySpace messages to "Josh". The mother scolded her emotionally unstable daughter and sent her to her room, where she proceeded to hang herself. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page:
Other troubling messages were sent; some of Megan's messages were shared with others; and bulletins were posted about her.[4] After telling her mother, Christina "Tina" Meier, about the increasing number of hurtful messages, the two got into an argument over the vulgar language Megan used in response to the messages and the fact that she did not log off when her mother told her to.[4] After the argument, Meier ran upstairs to her room. She was found twenty minutes later, hanging by the neck in a closet.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
She should not have had criminal charges. However, she should have been sued into oblivion from the civil suit.
Our rights saved. Asshattery punished.
Simple.
Uhh... wrong story. That's Julie Amero.
This story is about some chick who was a reverse trap, and fucked with some teenage girl's head online, and said teenage girl killed herself.
The difference between murder and manslaughter is intention, not action. Are you telling me that suddenly we should ignore this woman's intention to cause the death of another person? That's what her intention was, correct?
If I buy a vial of poison from someone but they give me harmless water yet I still try to carry out a plan to murder someone with the "poison", that is still attempted murder. Intentions have just as much to do with the law as actions.
You just hit the nail on the head. What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better? Would he be on trial? Lets think this through. This girl thought she was talking to a boy (mistake #1) and believed what this internet person said (mistake #2) then acted on that information (mistake #3) to her own detriment. Three strikes and you're out as they say. I have sympathy for her family, I'm not cruel, but I am realistic. If you want to believe everything you hear, your life won't last long... whether you are a teen girl or anyone else. This girl did some incredibly stupid things. Why should we blame others for that? Sure, they did aide her along, but if they had not someone else would have sooner or later.
One of the things that the law is pretty firm about is that you take responsibility for your own actions, or inaction in some cases. Why would someone else be responsible for something that this girl did all on her own? At any point she was free to not log on, to not talk to this person, and to seek help or second opinions. She fucked up. That's life. If this girl got a bad ride, as you say, her parents should have been more careful, more loving, more concerned, more involved. It's sad, and a shame, but the rest of the world should not have to pay for their mistakes. period. Yes, that all leads to school bullies and other such things. Grow a spine please. The rest of us did, or survived somehow. You can get pads on kids when they are on the playground, but how far do you go? How much protection is too much?
Should we stop building tall buildings? Should we stop building bridges? Should we stop making razor blades? If you go down that path, where does it end?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ok, smart guy - quit it with the common sense talk, this is /.
Actually I'm surprised that there isn't a simpler way to prosecute this, along the lines of "causing distress to a minor". I for one would welcome such a development. Unfortunately, a more likely outcome is that there will be a new law along the lines of "Being rude to a tearful, innocent woman. No proof required."
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
I completely agree with you, but it's so hard to get people to hold themselves accountable for their own actions, especially the dead.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
The only thing LD is guilty of is of being a jerk. The fact that you believe it just proves that you are a gullible moron.
No, that's not what she said, not at all...And even if she had it STILL wouldn't have made a difference. She is in no way responsible for the poor girls death.
The woman is a harpy no doubt, but this fucking case needs to be overturned post hast.
1) People are not blaming Lori Drew for the depression in the young girl.
2) Inflicting this sort of mental anguish to someone who is clinically depressed is like feeding sugary treats by the bucket to someone with diabetes or lighting up cigarettes for someone with lung cancer.
Drew should have been put before a judge - I totally agree with that. Doing it for computer fraud is the wrong charges. If they didn't stick, she would be off scott free. If they do stick they open up the nasties can of worms on the rest of us just to punish this woman.
The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
Again, my view is that the entire thing is a tragedy, one that wouldn't have happened had people not been so mean/stupid/whatever but charging them with computer fraud is not the right way to go about righting the wrongs that they did.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
ignorance of law leads to the interpretation that the lori drew case has far reaching implications. hysteria leads to the rest
and frankly, slashhordes, if this case is your waterloo, then you don't deserve any online rights, because this case, in its proper context that anyone with the faintest understanding of law understands, has absolutely nothing to do with your online rights
you defend your rights from genuine threats to it. only ignorance, stupidity, and hysteria considers the lori drew case a threat to their rights
slashhordes are constantly tut tutting society overreacing with hysteria. now you are doing it
calm the fuck down and grow some fucking brains
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's totally ignore the facts of the case and go with our fictional story here, cause I care more about the fiction than I do about the facts.
I should be free to instruct anyone to do anything, at all, so long as it isn't a crime. Suicide is not a crime, and should not be a crime. Therefore I should be free to instruct someone to commit suicide. Why? Cause you're a free person. You can decide whether or not you want to commit suicide and my instruction to do so is irrelevant to your decision to do so.
I can instruct you to sell all your shit and buy a boat. If you do so, don't come back to me complaining that you don't like sailing.
It may fill me with joy to instruct you to go seek the sexual gratification of a grizzly bear, whether or not you do it is entirely your problem, not mine.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually I'm surprised that there isn't a simpler way to prosecute this, along the lines of "causing distress to a minor".
But where would one draw the line between "causing distress" and "physically reprimanding"? A simple spanking, while not looked down upon by the court, causes a child quite a bit of distress, hence the crying et al involved.
Suppose I purposefully throw a baseball at your head, hard enough to sting a normal person, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.
You happen to have an unusually thin skull, and die. It's not my fault you have a thin skull, so would you say I'm not responsible for your death?
What if I know you have a thin skull? Does that change anything?
Drew is not being blamed for the victim's depression. She is being blamed for taking actions that used that depression to kill the victim. Just like the hypothetical with my baseball and your thin skull, I would not be blamed for your thin skull--I would be blamed for throwing the baseball that killed you.
If you go around chucking baseballs at people's heads, you run the risk of running into someone with a thin skull, and then you have to pay the price. I don't see why tormenting teenage girls online should be any different. Drew wanted to harm the girl, and she happened to cause more harm then she may have intended. Too bad for Drew--that's the gamble she took, and she lost.
(The law will take into account the likelihood of a thin skull in the baseball example, so if thin skulls are so rare that a reasonable person would not consider them a possibility when deciding whether to go around chucking baseballs at people, then you might not face liability for the death. But depressed teenage girls aren't that rare, so that defense won't fly here).
PJ and groklaw have done a lot of good, but somethimes she just doesn't "get it", and goes off the deep end. This is one of those times
FTFA:
Since when doe web sites have the authority to jail anyone?
They can, like anyone else, decide whether you've violated their TOS. If they decide you have, then they either cancel your account or, if you've been doing something blatantly illegal, they can bring it to the attention of the fuzz. Same as YOU are the final authority to decide whether someone has violated YOUR rights - if you believe so, you can't send them to jail - but you CAN make a complaint to the police.
Like the whole "we must move to GPLv3 or we are doomed!" and "Novell is bad today because they made a deal with Microsoft over linux patents" when they didn't. (And don't bring up mono - nobody gives a f*ck about mono).
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
They don't.
Neither do alcohol companies have anything to do with alcohol related deaths.
Neither do car companies have anything to do with driving related deaths.
Neither do skiing companies have anything to do with skiing deaths.
What is so fucking hard to understand here? Everything has risk, if you choose to engage in an activity then it is your choice and you are responsible.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's been a movement over the past 20 years (maybe longer) to regard 'saying mean things' as bullying. I recall one of my contemporaries getting his mother to complain to the school that he was being bullied because some older boys had told him there was a ghost in the school toilets that ate small children. The school investigated, and I was asked to corroborate his story (they'd told me too, but I just thought the story was entertaining). The boys in question got some kind of punishment.
Bullying is quite a broad term these days.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, there is one side to this law that works out well.
Since it basically lets websites define their own criminal law, it will now be illegal for police/riaa/etc to go on a website that says "you agree you are not etc etc etc" meaning basically online piracy was just deemed legal.
So on one hand, this is completely fucked up. On the other though.
Can't those guys being setup by "to catch a predator" get criminal convictions against the network if they are doing the exact same thing. Pretending to be someone they are not over the internet... but no the worst that ever happened to that show was being sued because someone commited suicide over it.
Seriously though... when I was younger I did the same thing, stood some guy up on a blind date because when I was younger I thought it was ridiculus to try to meet people over the internet. You must be desparate if you do so.
define "distress". If I tell a bunch of teenagers they are horribly dressed and Emo's suck, is that distressed? Any time you encourage lawmakers to pass laws that deal with emotional state of someone, you are approaching dangerous territory.
You forgot to put weapons manufacturers on your list. I mean, they take the heat for a lot of shootings, but I don't see many TV ads or billboards showing beautiful women playing with guns in an effort to make gun ownership sexy. It's not like the fast food companies, SUV makers and tobacco companies that spend billions of dollars in marketing, convincing us to fuck ourselves over for their benefit. I mean, yes they sell lethal tools, but it's the customer that pulls the trigger.
... sue. Shoot your wife dead ... sue the gun maker. Get diabetes ... sue a fast food company. Break into your school and end up a paraplegic ... sue the school. All that because obviously they (whoever they might happen to be) should somehow have stopped you. Some lawyers like that, because it means they get to sue the pants off deep-pockets corporations, and people like it because they don't have to own up to anything, and can maybe get society or some corporation to pay for their own poor judgment.
Now, tobacco companies have been held responsible for cancer deaths because they deliberately withheld knowledge that their product caused that disease, and point-blank lied about it (to the courts and to the public.) Might have been different if they'd been open and honest about their products' effects. Now, to my way of thinking smoke inhalation is a bad idea anyway, but whatever. People fell for it, are still falling for it.
But in general, I agree. Look at our recent history: everything has been about shifting responsibility (and blame) for our own actions onto other people or organizations. Hot coffee spills in your lap
Makes me sick. Not the America I grew up in, or thought I grew up in.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
'Simple spankings' have been treated as assault in a lot of places for years. They were 'thinking of the children.'
Because when people are screaming "think of the children" they really mean think of the parents, as most of them are parents who seem to want to force society as a whole to help them raise their children. It is rare to hear the think-of-the-children people mention the parents and their responsibilities; no, it's usually someone else they're pointing their fingers at.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Then in line with what happened to Drew, they should create a new law and charge the parents.
What kind of responsible parents allow their clearly troubled child to go on the internet unmonitored anyway?
The parents need to step up and stop blaming others for their mistakes.
The biggest problem is you cannot be charged with an ex post facto law. If you do something that is legal, and that then becomes legal later, you cannot be charged under the new law unless you do that thing again. The Constitution says "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
You can't make a new law and apply it to an old case, nor can you declare that "What this person did in this case is illegal and we'll punish them for it," (that's a bill of attainder). Both are prohibited by the Constitution. If you cannot charge and convict someone under laws that existed at the time of their crime, you cannot do so at all.
Indeed, what got the cigarette companies in trouble was knowing their product was dangerious, and hiding that fact.
Like a manufacture of kids toys, hiding the fact they use lead based paint. Like a pesticide manufacturer hiding the fact that residue causes birth defects. Like a fire insulation manufacturer hiding the fact that inhalation of the fibres causes lung damage.
If they had come out and said 'Hey, looks like our products might cause lung cancer' as soon so they found out, it would not have been as bad for them.
intentional infliction of emotional distress is already a tort.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I personally like my dad's friends point of view with his son, who is like 4 or 5 years old. "If you're gonna be dumb ya gotta be tough." One instance of this is we were all underneath my car while looking at the exhaust (he had a barn with a 5 foot drop off behind it that he setup 2 tracks for a car to back out over for work under the car) and the kid reaches up and touches the exhaust efore anyone can say anything and he yanks his hand back and says "ow thats hot" to which my dad's friend says "Damn right its hot, bet you wont be doing that again will you?" and the kid shook his head quite hard while saying no way. In my opinion, kids today are too babied and just not ready for the real world.
That's the thing. This ruling says that violating the ToS on a website is in itself a federal crime.
The idea is that there is a law saying that "unauthorized access to a computer" is considered hacking and is federal crime. Because Lori Drew violated the Terms of Service, her access to myspace's servers were unauthorized, therefore, she gets convicted of computer hacking.
That's the only thing she was actually convicted of: Violating Myspace's Terms of Service. As various articles have pointed out, treating a terms of service violation as a federal offense is absurd. If someone under 18 does a google search (google's ToS says you need to be 18), do they deserve to spend a year in jail? According to this ruling, they violated the Terms of Service, and that alone is computer abuse, and they're guilty.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
Reluctantly only because it means that bitch gets to walk. I simply am not willing to sacrifice the integrity of the legal system over one fat subhuman bitch. She's not worth it.
That girl who was toyed with by that c**t and killed herself certainly deserves justice, but, I do not think she would want society to pay such a high price for it.
BINGO. It's called a civil suit. That's how they got OJ when he beat his criminal charges, that's how they can get Lori Drew without messing everything up for the rest of us.
But, Judge QuantumG, that woman was walking down the alleyway in a short skirt! Everything has risk! if she chose to walk down that alleyway at night, then it is her choice, and she is responsible.
Not my client, though. He might have raped her, but she was really responsible for it.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Isn't Evans the fictitious person created by Lori Drew? I would just assume you were joking except for the mod of informative.
Let me guess, you're a lawyer. You quoted almost word for word the 'eggshell-skull' doctrine.
That is, "You must take your victims as you find them". The fact that a regular person would not have been affected in such a way is no excuse.
I agree with you, entirely. An excellent comment.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
First, I think the girl was emotionally/mentally unstable to begin with. Most teenagers have emotional problems they have to work out, some more so than others.
Second, I think the people who's actions resulted in the suicide of the girl need to be punished..which is happening.
Depression is a REAL disease, and it isn't just being sad. Its where your entire worldview is skewed towards the negative. Like if your friend had to cancel some plans you had made, you might think that it was your fault or maybe they just didn't want to be around you. People think that its just being sad, but being sad is more like a number on a -10 to +10 chart of emotion, whereas depression would be like a chart of -20 to +5.
You can bet that if some people asked a retarded person to do something dangerous that resulted in the retarded person being injured or killed, people would be all over that one. They weren't in the mental capacity to see the consequences, just like the girl in this story wasn't in the emotional capacity to deal with the assholes that did this to her.
Had it been a boy really breaking up with her, no charges would have been pressed. But since the motive (revenge/humiliation) was established and intent to harm was also established, its time for them to pay the piper.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
Actually it doesn't work that way, at least in the U.S. Civil suits are generally dischargable in bankruptcy, so that under no circumstances would she be paying "whatever she makes for the rest of her life." In practice, it is often very difficult to collect judgments in civil suits, especially when the defendant is not wealthy.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Oh snap, thanks for the catch. My bad. Replace Evans with "Ashley Grills" in my post. I was mixing the names up! Ashley was Lori's employee that got granted the immunity - who is under psychiatric care right now for sending the messages.
"Josh Evans" was the 'fictitious person' like you stated.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
Per your link, Josh Evans was the alias of Lori Drew and her daughter. So "Josh" couldn't send anything, one of the Drews did that final message.
I don't think they're saying it's any worse, but they seem to be saying that it's no better. Hypothetically speaking, I think you would have seen the same level of outrage from people and zeal to prosecute from the government had this situation played out face-to-face.
The issue, of course, as it pertains to this case is that the Internet offers an anonymity that allowed this to occur while it would have had to take an entirely different form in person. A middle-aged mother isn't very likely to fool a girl into thinking she's a teenage boy in person, after all.
I don't think Lori Drew should go to prison, nor should she have been charged or convicted -- but only because there didn't appear to be any laws intended to punish the behavior. There should be one made now, if they can find some way to word it that isn't overly broad. I also struggle with the responsibilities; it's pretty clear to me that this despicable woman set out to emotionally hurt a teenage girl. Whether she knew that girl was depressed or whether she had any inkling that the girl may ultimately kill herself, I have no idea.
Ultimately, I think I agree with what another poster said: This should have been handled as a civil matter. Sue the woman into the ground. I don't think there's any question they have a rock-solid case for intentional infliction of emotional distress and pain and suffering. I personally would have no question that Lori Drew also shares some portion of liability for the girl's death, so a wrongful death suit would be appropriate as well. (For those who aren't aware, juries are able to aportion liability; Drew wouldn't have to be 100% responsible to be found liable and have to pay.)
As for the decision itself, I mostly dislike it. I don't like the idea that, essentially, website operators are allowed to create law that exists on their site and is backed by the authority of the government, with jail time. On the other hand I know what a PITA it can be to remove people from a website if they break those terms or you otherwise simply no longer want them there, and a little help in that regard could be good. Just doesn't outweigh the cons.
Web sites and their owners can't jail anyone directly. But this ruling provides a way to turn TOS violations into criminal offenses, given nothing else but a police department willing to charge you and a jury willing to convict. Do something unpopular but otherwise legal and you could be targeted.
I'm sure Lori Drew could be charged and convicted with something related to what she actually did wrong. Maybe not -- and if not, then she ought to go free...
There are plenty of loopholes that authorities could use to arrest anyone they want. They all stink. This is one of them.
are you a chick or a fag?
Are you a doctor? Because as far as I know depression is exactly the disease where one is unable to choose to be happy and ignore the bad things that happen to everybody.
The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
Drew's daughter and the victim had been friends. Drew knew the victim was clinically depressed. Drew did this because the victim said something "mean" about her daughter.
An adult knowingly harassed an unstable child.
Is that really okay with you? Do you really think that's acceptable behavior for an adult?
Suicide is a crime. (At least in .au)
Probably with the free healthcare we don't want to be spending money patching up bunches of emo tards that can't do it right the first time :P
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I think there's some merit behind the convictions.
Fraudulently entering a computer system for the express purpose of harassing someone is IMHO no better than breaking into a computer to steal IP or crash the system.
It's pretty much cyber-burglary. "Entering a domain with the intent to commit a crime therein", except in this case the domain is a computer system.
I hope the courts get the precedent right though.
If breaking TOS is a federal offense, then boo for elevating a civil tort to a criminal offense.
...if you lack the imagination to see.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Why is this marked flamebait? The person being prosecuted did contribute to the death of a child. I believe the parent is more stating an opinion then flaming.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Oops, posted to the wrong comment. Sorry, WhatAm, that wasn't aimed at you.
There are already laws which outlaw "assault", which is the threat of force. This pretty much would cover most kinds of bullying (ignoring, say, name calling). Cyberbullying would fall under this, and would be fairly easier to prove, since you have documented evidence of what was written -- it isn't heresay. Proving the person behind what was written was someone in particular, and that someone hadn't hijacked their account, would be the hard part. But "assault" is already illegal. You don't need to write a new "cyberbullying" law.
At first I liked the verdict, because I really think that the conduct involved should be a crime, at least on some level.
But yeah, this has much wider and scarier implications than i first realized. Really obvious too, I normally pick up on things like this. Don't know why I didn't this time.
If this stands as is, it really is a troubling precedent.
That said, I do think what Lori Drew did should be a crime(assuming that the suicide can be tied to her conduct). But it will require a new law with enough specificity to avoid the pitfalls this verdict creates. Maybe extend manslaughter to include harassment that unintentionally leads to suicide of the target?
I'm changing the TOS for my sites to include "You must donaite $5 to view this site." If they don't, BAM, federal crime!
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
straight, so this shouldn't surprise me.
But again:
*Drew did not access myspace, she did not create the account, she did not send nasty messages
*Drew did not direct anyone to do these things
These facts are not in dispute.
Drew was aware of her minor child and (adult) employee creating the account to snoop on the other girl.
Drop your hysteria for a moment and take the time to learn the fact of the case. I know this is asking for a lot from a slashdotter, but I suspect that if you try you'll be able to do it.
Your logic is flawed. She didn't CHOOSE to have and ADULT mislead her and then tell her that no one likes her and she'd be better off dead. Sure, you can argue she chose to read it, but how could the little girl known what the message would contain? I agree, the wrong charges were chosen, but that makes her no less guilty.
Except this was an exceptional case. If I did that to you, it's unlikely indeed that it would be prosecuted, even if you did, for the sake of argument, commit suicide as a result.
What made this a special case of sorts was that these people knew each other offline and that only one of the parties involved was aware of it. Many legal distinctions are based on those sort of differences. Murder and manslaughter, rape versus sexual assault and there are definitely others.
I'm not personally convinced that this is any more troubling of a precedent than manslaughter in general is. This wasn't one of those random flamings that goes on, there was far too much awareness on the part of the guilty to have any particular sympathy. She knew or should have known at the time that what she was doing was wrong, fucking with seriously depressed individuals is hardly the conduct of upstanding individuals.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
They don't.
Neither do alcohol companies have anything to do with alcohol related deaths.
Neither do car companies have anything to do with driving related deaths.
Neither do skiing companies have anything to do with skiing deaths.
What is so fucking hard to understand here? Everything has risk, if you choose to engage in an activity then it is your choice and you are responsible.
The fact that you equate skiing and driving with two activities that serve no function apart from destroying the human body is pretty amazing.
Alcohol and cigarettes have no function apart from bodily harm. People who sell these things are selling bodily harm.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
It was NOT Lori who sent this message. It was Evans. In fact, if you do some quick Googling, you can find that it was in fact Evans who sent most of the messages! Sure Lori knew about all the messages and laughed, but she was not the one who sent them.
There was no "Josh Evans". That was a fake identity created by Lori Drew specifically to gull Megan, allowing for a more intimate attack on her psyche. This kind of subterfuge required time and personal attention far beyond mere insults and trolling.
In every state except Victoria. Maybe the rest of Australia will catch up eventually.
In the UK it is legal, mostly legal in the USA.. only some states claim a "common law" against suicide, but it's not enforced.
It's legal in the Netherlands.
It's illegal in Singapore, and still illegal in India, but it was recently made legal, only to be made illegal again.. and there's work going on to make it legal again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It was NOT Lori who sent this message. It was Evans.
Wrong. Josh Evans doesn't exist. Lori Drew *invented* him.
From the following article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/15/internet.suicide.ap/index.html
"Megan was being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression, her family has said. Meier has said Drew knew Megan was on medication."
If this is in fact true, then I would suggest that this is indeed kin to putting "rat poison in he coffee". If you know some one is clinically depressed and then proceed to lure them into a relationship designed to shatter their self worth you are quite responsible for anything that happens there after.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think it was terrible thing to do, but people have a right to be terrible to each other.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That was his point.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Driving is fun.
Skiing is fun.
Alcohol is a whole hell of a lot of fun.
Cigarettes are also fun, just ask a teenager.
Your problem is that freedom and personal responsibility scares you.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's been several months since I researched things on this, but in the official reports, the girl killed herself after an argument with her mother over her excessive internet use. The media and people crying for Lori Drew's blood ignore this (well, many of the people online probably never knew about it) when it shows that if anyone besides the girl is to blame, it was her PARENTS. Lori Drew may have hurt someone's feelings (not a crime yet), but to claim that she had anything to do with the girl killing herself is bullshit. Lori Drew is a scapegoat that the parents pushed the blame onto.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Oh wait .. now you see the danger of activist judges who like to interpret the the law and try to measure it's "intent" but since it encroaches on your freedom only now are you upset ... hmm ... stupid is as stupid does ... what a predicament ......
You are aware that every kid is America is being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression, right?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Lori Drew's case is about cyberbullying, which is behavior for which society has little tolerance. Cyberbullying is poison for anyone it touches. An institution like Myspace -- or a library or a school, which provides patrons, students or guests access to the Internet -- has plentiful incentive to stamp out cyberbullying within its system and its PCs. --Ben
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
In another example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that terms of service for the popular dating site Match.com require users of either the website or the dating service to be single or separated from their spouses. See, e.g., Match.com Terms of Use Agreement, http://www.match.com/registration/membagr.aspx (âoeYou must be at least eighteen (18) years of age and single or separated from your spouse to register as a member of Match.com or use the Website.â) (last visited July 30, 2008). The brief's author has not been able to visit the site to confirm the report; because she remains happily married, doing so would be a violation of the siteâ(TM)s terms, potentially a criminal act under the interpretation of the CFAA advanced by the Government here.
We hold car manufactures responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that cars meet safety standards.
We hold the operators of fairground rides responsible to a criminal standard for maintaining and ensuring that their rides are safe.
We hold food manufacturers responsible to a criminal level for ensuring that there are no unsafe ingredients in their produce.
We hold alcohol producers responsible to a criminal level to ensure that they produce beverages that are below around 40% alcohol.
We hold cannabis sellers responsible to a criminal level for selling a soft drug.
We hold cigarette manufactures responsible to a criminal level for marketing their product towards children.
We hold a man who orders a hit on another man responsible to a criminal level, even though he was not the killer, and may have been far from the victim at the time of his death.
In each of these cases, it could be argued that the customer of said company is better placed to gauge the level of risk that they are willing to accept than the government. In each of these cases, regulation imposes financial costs for the manufacturer or seller, which it would be financially beneficial to avoid. And yet, in each of these cases, the general public supports regulation.
The case isn't black or white like some people think. What if the fat content of McDonalds fries was shown to increase the likelihood of a heart attack in a regular consumer to 20%? Or 80%? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the car manufacturer, why should they be forced to implement expensive collapsible steering columns, when it is drivers that cause accidents, not steering columns? And why should ordering a hit on someone be illegal, when you are not the person carrying out the murder? Surely when you sub-contract, it is the contractor who should take legal liability?
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter. I have little sympathy for those who are sound of mind and who utilise their intelligence to abuse and mistreat those who suffer from mental illness, just as I have little sympathy for those who are physically strong and yet use that strength to prey on those who are weak.
I'll listen to an UNBIASED analysis on this matter, not a partisan Groklaw writer who doesn't really "grok" what the case was about. Worried about your myspace being hacked? Here's an idea for you: don't use it! Try getting out and socializing in the flesh! If that 13 year old didn't live on myspace so much(where was her mother?), the mother wouldn't have had such an upper hand. Yay to the dumbest generation.
Actually, you're wrong. For a criminal conviction, you need two separate things - the "actus reus" and the "mens rea". - the "guilty act" and the "guilty mind."
The "guilty act" is unathorized acces. However, intent also comes into it. If it can't be shown that you had criminal intent, not wrt the act, but wrt the results as well, you are not guilty of a criminal act.
Replace Evans with "Ashley Grills" in my post. I was mixing the names up! Ashley was Lori's employee that got granted the immunity - who is under psychiatric care right now for sending the messages!
My bad, my bad!
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
But your actions have an effect on society. Who do you think has to pay for those police officers, firemen, and medical emergency responders, who are needed to clean up after all the drug overdoses, car accidents, and fire starters?
We are all connected. You can argue that the heroin dealer has no responsibility for the dead addict, or the crimes that they commit to feed the habit, but I doubt the families of the addict, or the victims of their crimes, will agree with you. Saying that everybody has a choice, whilst technically true, ignores the fact that people are flawed, that even the best of us fail to live our lives as beings of perfect reason, and that certain sensory perceptions like drugs and unprotected sex, whilst obviously risky, suddenly become more attractive when rational reasoning is broken down by desire, alcohol, and other temptations. Sure, everybody has a choice, but there are ways to structure society to change the probability of people making certain choices. And if that were not true, then there would be no point in having laws in the first place.
The doctrine of the thin-skulled plaintiff only applies to damages. It cannot create liability for an act that is not a tort to begin with. So yeah, if you bean someone with a baseball and they die because they had a thin skull, you're liable for wrongful death. But if you accidentally bump into them in the subway and they die because they're especially fragile, you're not liable because your actions didn't constitute a tort to begin with.
Actually it doesn't work that way, at least in the U.S. Civil suits are generally dischargable in bankruptcy, so that under no circumstances would she be paying "whatever she makes for the rest of her life." In practice, it is often very difficult to collect judgments in civil suits, especially when the defendant is not wealthy.
Tell it to OJ.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
Because actions carried out across the internet are physically and socially disconnected from the victim. In the class room there are limits to what one can say, because the speaker fears the consequences of provoking a situation that could turn to violence, and because even in this scenario there is a certain amount of peer pressure to not go too far, and because the victim is likely to have some amount of support from friendly peers or adults. Once bullying shifts on to the internet, the limitations fade away - essentially, the social disconnect makes it more likely that much more extreme things will be said. And because the victim is more more likely to be alone at the time of receiving the messages, whatever support they might have in the real world is less likely to be there.
If the alley itself poses a threat (it's covered in clearly visible acid) then the woman is responsible for any resulting harm. If the acid has been covered up by a third party, that third party may be responsible. If there is nothing inherently dangerous about walking down an alley in a short skirt, then your client is indeed responsible.
Since she didn't choose to engage in non consensual sex, how can she be responsible?
This is all pretty straightforward to me.
A prosecutor brought charges against a citizen for crimes described. A jury of the citizens peers agreed that the prosecution was valid and the citizen guilty. A judge oversaw the proceedings and determined that they were just. The defense attorney was unable to establish innocence.
The fine mechanics and specific small injustices are certainly arguable, as are the future implications.
But justice was served.
In the US, our constitution provides protection against cruel and unusual punishment, such sentences cannot be made.
In colonial times there were punishments like stocks and pillory.
But nowadays it's unconstitutional to lock a prisoner up in the middle of town and allow citizens to abuse criminals by insulting, spitting upon, throwing objects at, etc.
A reasonable person would expect a baseball to seriously injure somebody with an unusually thin skull.
The question is would a reasonable person expect a depressed girl to kill her self because of a fictional breakup?
The problem here is that you cannot answer that question unless you have been depressed or know someone personally who has been depressed.
The interaction here is significantly more complex than the simple baseball example.
That is far, far, too naive and heartless a response.
Impersonation and malice - the desire and intent to injure a child - as severely as it in your reach to do so - would seem to me to more than sufficient grounds to anchor a felony charge.
It is scarcely a defense in other circumstances to argue that you intended to wound and not to kill.
That it wasn't my fault the girl went into a seizure.
But if we find her body duct taped in your closet, that is all we have to know.
I doubt that anyone's defenses against suicide are so secure that they could not be broken through such a systematic campaign of psychological manipulation and abuse.
The geek seems to cherish the illusion that the Internet can remain the Wild West. But the law always comes to Deadwood and Dodge City.
The cowboys retire or lie fallow on Boot Hill.
Alcohol and cigarettes have no function apart from bodily harm. People who sell these things are selling bodily harm.
Don't be silly. Of course they have functions apart from bodily harm. Nobody drinks to hurt themselves, they drink because it feels good, because it releases inhibitions, because it helps them sleep, whatever. People smoke because it makes them feel better, gives them something to fiddle with, etc.
Yes, people who sell those things are selling bodily harm. So are motorcycle manufacturers, fast food joints, and the company that makes B-1 bombers. Only the last of those items is specifically intended to cause bodily harm.
I'm not sure I agree. Firstly, I'm not sure I agree with your statement- the jostling someone in a subway and causing their death is almost certainly the tort of battery (although I suppose it depends on your jurisdiction), which would be wrongful death because, they're, well, dead, and can't bring a tort action.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
However, instead of a time-tested system with checks and balances most /.ers prefer the philosopher king system (i.e. their own personal preferences) where any law that could concievably be used to punish their aberrant behavior is void.
I agree, but there was no need for this.
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
LK
From the article:
The jury agreed that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website, and that Drew directly or indirectly did so, but it acquitted Drew of having violated Terms of Service in furtherance of the tortious act. That is, the jury ruled that Drew is guilty of relatively lower-level crimes for violating MySpacs Terms of Service (for being involved in the setting up of a fake MySpace account). It acquitted Drew for any role in inflicting distress on Meier or for anything related to Meier's suicide. The maximum allowed penalty for the misdemeanor violations are one year in prison for each violation, although the majority of federal misdemeanors result in a sentence of probation.
So any issue of wrongful death, injury etc seems to have been thrown out by the jury. All the morally reprehensible stuff was removed from the table by a jury of her peers.
Even using the account to further the tortuous act was kicked by the jury. Everything she allegedly did which I find wrong was found not guilty by the jury.
Yes, she seems like a bad person from what I know. But the jury apparently did not see enough proof that she was. But people are applauding because she was found guilty of something most people haven't considered a crime as punishment for a crime which she was found not to have committed.
Guilty of what exactly?
You and I are not bound by any particular relationship here. So if I tell you it would be a good idea for you to kill a puppy, and then you go kill a puppy, for what am I to be held accountable? I didn't help you kill the puppy. I didn't make any decision for you. You should know that killing puppies is inherently harmful. That leaves us with the crime of hurting someone else's feelings.
That's the crime that has been committed here. Emotional abuse, not murder.
Because there is a clearly foreseeable danger in walking down an alley in a short skirt if you're female.
Presumably, it goes like this.
If an alcohol company is not responsible for alcohol-related deaths (obviously, the individual in drinking alcohol did not consent to be killed as a result, such consent being invalid even if it was given), then a rapist is not responsible for rape, either; the individual putting themselves in the way of the rapist did not consent to being raped, presumably.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Sure, mob justice solves loads of problems. It's quick and it's easy, too! Why don't we replace our judicial system with mob justice? Just get rid of this 'cruel and unusual' restriction, get rid of judges, lawyers, and replace blind justice with blind rage.
Sounds like a real winner, there.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm not sure that's really relevant. A reasonable person would probably not know sufficiently either way to be able to make a valid judgment call, but it doesn't matter; the fact that it doesn't matter that the damage was vastly out of proportion to what would happen to your average person is the point of the thin-skull doctrine.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
The difference being that they were found to be civilly negligent, not criminally.
"You can't do that! We *have* to pay your medical bills if you break your neck!" Bollocks. People pay for those things out of self interest. You can't then turn that self interest around and claim it as a moral reason to restrict someone's rights. The fact is society doesn't have to pay the medical bills. Society chooses to do so because it benefits society in some way.
The doctrine of the thin-skulled plaintiff only applies to damages. It cannot create liability for an act that is not a tort to begin with.
Yeah yeah... ;-). I'm more interested in the ethics of it than the law. To the extent that the notion of "you take your victim as you find him" makes any sense, Lori Drew can be reasonably held accountable for her actions.
The moral question should not be "if Lori Drew targeted a normal person, would they have died?" The fact is that she targeted an especially vulnerable person who died as a result.
Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person--just because a person with full sight could avoid it doesn't make it OK. You all learned it in Sunday School.
The one who needed to grow a spine was Lori Drew.
Since when did it tske courage to sit at your keyboard playing malacious little psychological games with an emotionally fragile thirteen year old girl?
Perhaps this story hit the geek in you just a little bit too close to home.
I don't, but neither do I think it's a crime. And it certainly doesn't justify twisting laws in this ridiculous fashion just so she can be convicted of _something_.
I don't see many TV ads or billboards showing beautiful women playing with guns in an effort to make gun ownership sexy
They don't have to. Practically every movie and TV show out there is doing the advertising for them.
Good point. Excellent point in fact. What's done is done, there is little benefit in arguing whether there is a law that exists to punish this person.
Let us look into the future. If we could look back at this and say something along the lines of - this was the event that made us wake up and realise that we must look after our loved ones (...whilst online). The government, the institutions, the law won't.
If this case could be made more of an example, we may never or near-never be in this kind of situation. Instead, new laws will be created to handle the irresponsible behaviour of individuals so that the precious children are not taken advantage of in any way.
If we could look back and say, that Lori Drew case was the point when we started caring again, then we wouldn't have to revert to draconian laws.
People just need to look at what's what in the world. There is nothing on-line - just information - some true some false. Get off the Internet. It is a business tool, a study tool.
The next generations are going to be conditioned into living in virtual social networks. I've got xxx friends on facebook. 5% would be through work, 10% I'd see on a monthly basis, 10% I'd see on a bi-monthly basis. 60% I'll never see. Sure I could poke them and leave messages on their wall, but really - what is that? A place to crash at when I'm overseas in that country? No thanks - better ways to do with what you've got in life.
It's been suggested (if not 'found') that emotional/social bullying is far far worse that physical bulling. The effects are felt more keenly and last far longer than if you're punched and kicked.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
How so? If I smoke cigarettes, I can become physically addicted to them. How can I become physically addicted to someone's speech?
Megan Meier could have disregarded Lori Drew's messages without any physical symptoms. She could have reported the hurtful and damaging statements to an adult authority figure. The fact that she did not do so and instead took her own life is at least 51% her own fault.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Shit, they should have just tried here as a witch! It seems so obvious now and it would be easy to prove or disprove. The real question is: "Is Lori Drew heavier than a duck?"
I was trying to make the point that it wasn't Lori Drew's fault that Megan Meier was depressed. The fact that Lori Drew's statements exacerbated Megan Meier's depression means that the case should be in civil court at worst.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
You can decide whether or not you want to commit suicide and my instruction to do so is irrelevant to your decision to do so.
You're half right. If I come up to you out of nowhere and say "kill yourself" and you do it, no, that's not my problem. The reason, as you say, is because it was a free choice. However, if I force you to make that choice under duress, then you're not making a free choice.
Using a person as a murder weapon shouldn't get you off on a technicality just because the target is themselves. If she had instructed the girl to kill a classmate instead of herself she'd get a life sentence. I really don't see why this isn't a murder case. It seems like we're splitting some mighty fine hairs here.
And in the case of a mentally ill person, where do you draw the line? If you mistreat someone every day of their lives, tell them they are worthless, that nobody will ever love them, and then hand them a gun and tell them that the world will be better off without them, then technically you didn't pull the trigger, right? But as a competent adult you should know the likely end result of your actions will be the death of an individual, and if you engage in a series of actions that is likely to end with that scenario then you are guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
Er, no you're not. If you mistreat someone like that, you're guilty of abuse and/or negligence. But, if the person takes their own life as a result of such abuse, its still ruled a suicide, and you're not liable for their death (as a criminal matter - you can still be sued for wrongful death in civil court). I think you're underestimating the extraordinarily high burden of proof that criminal law carries. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was your actions that caused the death. In any suicide, such a threshold is extraordinarily difficult to meet. Even if the victim names you on their suicide note, the defense can undermine it by stating that the fact that the person committed suicide is proof that their mental state was disturbed, and the victim's perceptions were distorted.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Because only the retarded kids that fail math are immune to bullying laws.
See, they need their moment to shine before they become janitors.
That an adult would engage in cyberbullying is bizarre, and wrong, and I maybe there should be a law against it (how would you word this law?).
There shouldn't be a new law for this. Old laws (Harassment? Child abuse?) should be amended to include cases like this.
you are a fetid, pusillanimous gnome of questionable birth, a veritable void. Begone.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
"When I was young I occasionally suffered actual bullying--as in, with fists. Cyberbullying is a head-scratcher for me: how is it that saying mean things to someone is worse when done on the internet than when it is done face-to-face?"
One way is that if you say something to my face, it happens in that instant and then that instant is gone. When you post shit on a message board or send emails, it's there to be relieved perfectly again and again. Of course it's relative... my friends and I routinely put each other down and our moms, in the form of email and on message boards for the straight laughs. But it's understood. WE aren't 13 year old girls, we're 30 something men.
But it's inappropriate to hold her responsible for the child's response, which no one would have predicted.
Hmmm. No one would have predicted that a young girl who had been seeing a psychiatrist since the 3rd grade and was being treated for depression, would try to kill herself if she was made to feel even worse than she clearly already felt about herself? I would disagree with that. In the example of my friends above, when one of them hits hard times or tells us they've been down lately, the insults stop and the build up starts. You don't shit on someone whose down, that's straight wrong.
Lori Drew is reported to have been aware of Megan's psychiatric problems. You don't attempt to mind fuck someone who has psychiatric problems. Doing so is wrong and makes you a predator. When you're an adult doing that to a 13 year old girl who you are aware of having those problems, that makes you a child predator. In my opinion anyway. That's every bit as sick and in some ways sicker, than the grown adults trying to date 13 year old girls over the internet. That's very disturbing behavior and it's the type of behavior that should get someone removed from the general population, because I see that type of person as a threat to public safety.
Though not for the laws this person was convicted of though. That just adds to societies problems.
Nobody is debating the ethics of it.
...people today...
-- there, corrected it for you! :)
The worst part is that there is really some quite deep-rooted mentality in the "ruling classes" that "people" would not know what is better for them; thus, they need to be ruled. Next time you go to the polls, please choose between Big Brother and Big Mother, and no, you do not have any other choices on your ballot. It is by design, silly you, and me... :(
Paul B.
Look, the fact is, if The Man wants to get you, The Man will get you. It doesn't matter what the laws are, exactly - they'll find something to hit you with.
That was true before the Lori Drew trial, and it's true now. The precedents set by this case in no way make being on the internet one bit more "risky". If you don't do anything to bring down the wrath of The Man, you'll be fine. And if you do, you're screwed, online or off.
Cyberbullying is often archived long after the incident(s) have occurred. Were it not for sites like Archive.org and DejaNews/Google Groups, the incidents of cyberbullying would otherwise be gone in a matter or days or weeks after the incident(s) ended, since most other sites do not maintain persistent/indefinite archives.
Therefore, a person actually has MORE to worry about with respect to cyberbullying than any actual words spoken to them, due to not knowing just how long those archived incidents may remain in the archives, and especially if there is no easy way to request permanent removal of those archived incidents. (Also consider: what if any search engine now or in the future decides to index and present content as search results from those archives?)
The danger in walking down an alley in a short skirt is not an inherent danger. The alley is only made dangerous by the willful act of the rapist. Women would be wise to avoid placing themselves at greater risk than necessary, but the blame still lies with the rapist.
Alcohol is inherently dangerous. However, deaths from ingestion of alcohol are not willful acts perpetrated by the alcohol manufacturer. Alcohol manufacturers are not forcing people to imbibe. Alcohol manufacturers and sellers are only held responsible when they do not take reasonable precautions to protect the safety of customers (e.g. when a bartender knowingly serves someone who has already consumed too much). In alcohol-related deaths, the willful act is being perpetrated by the "victim." By consuming too much alcohol - a drug with a known inherent risk, especially when misused - he or she is implicitly consenting to be killed because he or she is doing the killing.
What's an eggshell skull?
"Do you actually want a world like that? In some ways, it's worse than lawlessness, worse than the old Wild West. Why worse? Because in the West in the old days, might made "right". That's clear enough, and you knew where you stood. Practice shooting, or move East where there were laws."
The reality was far different than the popular fiction. Studies have shown that a person was more likely to be killed in a criminal encounter in the large Eastern Cites than it the territories of the 'old west.' I understand that the analogy he was trying to make was based on the 'old west' of fiction and lore. However, the facts do not support the fiction.
See topic, my angry little friend.
And can you please learn to write correctly? Valuable reference material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization. You might be amazed at just how wrongly you've been doing it.
People are willing to give new immigrants a bit of leeway when they're just learning English, but since you seem to have advanced to the "inane rants on Slashdot" phase of literary accomplishment, your free pass has expired.
Huh. Seems like, despite (perhaps because of?) having a much lower lifespan, our ancestors seem far less fragile as individuals than we are today. I remember a president having a fitness program, many years ago. Perhaps it's time to reinstate something like that in our public schools?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty pissed if someone walked up to me and spanked me on the arse as an adult. What makes this act ok when children are involved? What does it achieve? It certainly doesn't work as a disciplinary measure, what it does do is enforce a pointless cycle of abuse. Didn't finish that TPS report, bookmark your butt with a nice red hand print, 'cause you know, that'll make you get it done on time next week wont it.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness. They don't.
Yes they do. They manufacture the product which leads to their customers getting lung cancers and other illness. That's something right there. But, lets play by your logic:
It's okay for cigarette companies to advertise to little kids with fake lolly type cigarettes? I mean, it's their choice after all.
How about the fatties in our world? Now, before I start on this one, I figure some background information makes this more poignant. I used to work in retail, in a reasonably physical role which meant that no matter what I ate I had a 30 inch waist, a great physique and didn't have to do any additional activity to maintain my appearance/fitness. Three years ago, I migrated from the shop floor to management in an office. Also around this time, I quit smoking. I ate more, I did less physical activity, and in two and a half years put on about twenty kilograms (around 44 pounds). I have since taken up a lot of long distance running, totally changed my diet and lost around 10kg of it in the last three months. I don't blame the junk food companies for making me fat. I took it upon myself to change and to work to get back to where I was, so I can sort of sympathize with your "it's not the companies fault" view on things, but it sort of really is.
If a car company knew there was a fault in a product and continued to market the product hiding the fault, they would well get sued. To further the point. If I walked along the road and got hit by a car because the driver was drunk, I wouldn't be angry at a car manufacturer, however if I got hit because the brakes were faulty and the manufacturer knew about it and hid it... wowsa, get your helmet on.
What it all comes down to, is that certain companies make and sell products that can be enjoyed, either in small doses or by the majority of people. Alcohol for example is bad if too much is had, but can be fine in measured doses. I don't have a problem with these. Certain things however, have no good, no matter the dose, no matter the situation.
Showering a clinically depressed person with that sort of mental torture could have had no benefit in any way shape or form - and Lori should take responsibility for what she did - bullies a depressed minor which was likely a significant contribution to her committing suicide.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Apparently, Lori should have been brought up on charges of assisting a suicide. Less of a stretch, anyway...
Seriously: I wish I had the option of pads when I was a kid.
Would have made "jumping from heights" a lot less dangerous.
Or, we could have had higher heights and still bounced safely. :)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Back in the days where people were like "gee, I don't know if cigarettes are bad for me" you could blame the tobacco companies for not doing enough to find out how dangerous their product is. But now, everyone knows that cigarettes cause cancer. The link is firmly established in the public's psyche. Yet people still smoke.
If you don't know by now that eating junk food is bad for you then you should listen to your mother more. It's called junk food for a reason.
Sky diving is dangerous. Skiers get broken legs. Everyone knows this stuff, and yet they still do it.
Driving is dangerous, yet we do it every day. Driving is likely the most dangerous thing the average civilian will ever do, and they do it every day. Life is risk. We're all going to die someday. Get over it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You did catch the part about the suicide, right? That is important because that means that she killed herself. We also cannot say for certain that Lori Drew caused any harm at all. For all we know, the suicide would have occurred in absence of the email. That is why Lori Drew is not being brought up on murder or manslaughter charges. Rather she is being charged with computer fraud and abuse. The fact that the suicide occurred is really completely irrelevant as to whether Lori Drew actually committed computer fraud or abuse. The problem that arises in ruling that she did commit computer fraud or abuse is that she was doing something of which millions of others are guilty. So now, if you bully someone in a forum, you can be charged with the same thing as Lori Drew. It does not matter if the recipient of your bullying commits suicide or does anything else.
Suppose I purposefully throw a baseball at your head, hard enough to sting a normal person, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.
If you purposely threw a baseball at someone's head, then it's very clear that you intend to inflict serious physical injury. AND it is very clear how you intentionally throwing the baseball at their head will make that happen.
And it is a consequence of your own actions, not a consequence of someone else's actions.
The situation is more like someone showed you a football disguised as a baseball.
Told you it was a baseball, and they were going to give it to you, then changed their mind and took it back.
Knowing full well that you liked baseballs, and were extremely prone to excitement/depression.
And with the loss of that baseball you immediately felt irrationally compelled to go beat yourself in the head with one. You did so, and it killed you.
Now your parents want to pursue the person who teased you by showing you a (fake) baseball and then a few moments later decided to take it away
If it was known that there would be at risk of depression severe that attempted suicide were probable, the person should have been institutionalized and monitored already.
It is well-known that the internet, and all social networking sites, forums, etc, are full of scum, and it would be extremely risky to have such a person participating.
This act of bullying may have been especially targetted and a cruel joke/stunt/act/whatever; but it may have been just as possible for some random myspace troll to have eventually committed acts with the same conclusion.
she was an adult
who was a telling a minor child
that she KNEW was depressed that the world
would be better off without her after having deliberately tormented the child . Suicide was a reasonably forseeable consequence.
"Reckless endangerment"
An adult has a higher duty of care when dealing with a child than if he or she were talking to another adult.
A disease? Please do cite your sources for this. Maybe in some cases.
I was a depressed teenager, actually, pretty much depressed from about the age of 14 until 24, then it struck me that the entire fault for this was my own. Change didn't happen overnight, it took a few years, but eventually I managed to get myself a clue. That said, where do you draw the line between 'state of mind' and 'disease'? Mine was absolutely the former, we can argue all day long about causes and such, but ultimately who gives a crap, the fact is that change was possible for me, end of story. I'm inclined to believe this is so in the vast majority of hormonally challenged teenagers, they either need the care and attention of their parents, or a sympathetic ear once in a while.
If I tell someone to go fuck themselves, would that make me a rapist?
We live with all kinds of risks. You leave the house, you risk dying in all kinds of ways. Is someone seriously suggesting that the risks associated with merely using a computer on the internet are so grave compared to everyday risks that no one should do it? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really debate the finer points, and the article didn't quantify risks (are we expecting 1% of MySpace users to be thrown in jail over the next year?). But this really sounds like the kind of needless hysteria that threatens to overshadow legitimate concerns with a bad ruling. I will predict that despite the spectre of arbitrary MySpace rules leading to criminal convictions, no one is going to get thrown in jail for doing anything innocuous on MySpace. The ruling is disturbing for many reasons, but not because it makes using the internet too risky.
Not a lawyer, but I did go about 99% of the way through law school. My school had a writing requirement, and I was going to write a paper on legal issues of usenet. However, I just couldn't think of anything to say! (This is not as stupid as it sounds--it was 1995, and there simply had not been much interaction between usenet and the law back then).
Assisted suicide is, however, illegal.
I'm not sure if handing a gun to a suicidal person qualifies, but it seems to be about the same as what Dr. Kevorkian did for his patients.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Or, as the California Supreme Court ruled in 1855, in a case in which a drunk person fell into a hole in the sidewalk:
"A drunken man is as much entitled to a safe street as a sober one, and much more in need of it." Robinson v. Pioche, Bayerque & Co., 5 Cal. 460 (1855)
.
Ah, sorry. I wasn't speaking in support of spankings, I was pointing out that they've been a no-no for a long time. The 'think of the children' was an attempt at irony. Most of the time, 'think of the children' is used for the wrong reasons. In this case, it was a reaction to child-abuse masked as discipline.
Cyberbullying is a head-scratcher for me: how is it that saying mean things to someone is worse when done on the internet than when it is done face-to-face?
If you're the subject of physical bullying, then you can fight back. You might not win, but you still know how to. The problem with cyberbullying is that the person uses their social, instead of physical power, and most people have no idea how to retaliate or defend themselves from something like that.
It's one thing when they hurt you physically, but when you are injured mentally, its a whole different ballgame.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
No, it's not ok for an adult to pull such a prank against a child, ever. Regardless of whether the child is perfectly healthy or known to have some disease.
Suffering from clinical depression does not necessarily mean unstable. If the child was thought to be unstable stringent monitoring would have been in place.
If the child actually was unstable, then there is not much reason to believe the neighbor's childish pranks had anything to do with the outcome.
The prank was bad and not nice, but that doesn't mean the impersonation and such, the prank itself actually did any real harm.
Clinical depression doesn't mean you get depressed when bad things happen to you.
It doesn't mean you are "super sensitive" to negative things that happen in your life, that they're more likely to make you depressed, or make you more depressed than otherwise.
It means you get depressed, even, for no reason at all.
It would be completely natural for any normal victim fooled by such a prank to be upset and depressed. So this would have been the case, independent of the affliction.
The "victim" could very well have committed suicide independent of Lori's prank.
Or during a bout of the disease-induced deperssion. Or for some other reason not discovered.
Wait a minute. If I post "Man the harpoons" type comments on videos of fat people with a made up name, does that mean I'm guilty of a crime. Shit, what am I gonna do on Saturday night.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Please raise your hand if you have ever set up a computer with free account registrations and someone created an account using a false identity in order to torment a child who later killed herself. Anyone? If you haven't, let me clue you in -- when you found out, you'd be pissed off, and fucking scared.
/. echo chamber.
Next time, it could be your ass on the line with the Feds. You should be glad they convicted her. Not to mention the fact that if they hadn't, every social networking site, not to mention every other Web 2.0 site, should close their doors right now, because there's no way they can protect themselves from exactly this kind of tragedy.
P.S. Of course, they should have hit Drew with more serious charges. But Christ, people can be quick to judge in the
I hope this lady gets off scott-free, then I hope a kid like the one she screwed with shoots up the school her kids go to, killing all of them.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Being punched or kicked is unlikely to leave you unscarred emotionally, either.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
OJ had no chance of declaring bankruptcy. He still owned a home worth millions and he has a fat pension.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't think there was any good reason for this to be tagged 'cunt,' and unless the current iteration of the tag system is just showing me what I said, people seem to agree. However, now we've got this nonsensical !cunt tag on the article, all because of some tag troll. And the !cunt moderation is almost as bad as the cunt moderation, being completely pointless and not belonging on the front page. I think maybe we need some karma weighting and maybe meta-moderation on tags or something to stop this tag trolling crap from showing up.
Strictly speaking, it may be true to say that a website TOS violation was "a circumstance obviously not considered in the law's formulation and passage" because web sites weren't around when CFAA became law. But don't read anything more into that; plenty of online services (including BBSes and similar dial up hosts accessible without charge) had terms of use or terms of service at the time the CFAA went into effect.
I didn't have to think too hard when I first heard about the CFAA to realize that "unauthorized use" was a huge, poorly defined can of worms. And it was clear to me that there was going to be some PR fall out eventually, even if the modem never made it past being a niche product for IT departments and geeky hobbyists.
Bruce Sterling's retelling of the E-911 document saga in his book "The Hacker Crackdown" (http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html) will give you a taste of the Catch-22 climate that the CFAA fits perfectly into.
Now, I don't mean to dismiss the possibility that using a web site against terms might not, in some cases, be "unauthorized use". People are suggesting potential arguments for that here that I haven't heard of before (e.g. "habitual tolerance", "failure to notify") that if effective could cut a wide swath out of existing web site TOSes. But despite all of that, there are still going to be some fraction of web site terms that were properly executed and are properly being enforced, and so are still binding. And a pretty plain reading of the CFAA tells me that breaking any of those ones is at least a misdemeanor even when there is no "collateral damage".
Anyway, what really irks me about this whole situation is this: The CNNs of the world love the 'hacker bust' and have reported over the years about literally hundreds of convictions under the CFAA, even before the Internet became an everyday tool for the average person. Likewise, they've reported about big lawsuits by web site operators against companies that get data from their web sites for purposes they don't approve of (like competitive shopping and news aggregation) and most of these complaints hinge on a TOS violation of some kind. But they haven't had the ability or the inclination to put 1 and 1 together until now. What?
I mean, I'm used to the quality of mainstream media reporting about computing in general and network security in particular being poor. They take the "Hitchhiker's Guide" approach: their coverage may be "apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate", but despite this (or maybe because of it) it is designed to harness as much public PANIC as possible. (Apologies to the late Douglas Adams.) I've largely accepted this awful journalism as an unalterable fact of life, and I don't worry about it too much anymore.
But is it asking too much for them to fulfil even that limited mandate?
Maybe the true-crime sensationalism of this case is what was needed for them to take notice. If so, that's kind of sad.
The death was not a foreseeable consequence of the alcohol use. You might as well hold FedEx responsible for operating a shipping company full well knowing that some people will use it to ship child pornography.
FedEx doesn't know which packages contain child pornography, and shouldn't have to stop running a shipping company just because some of them must. They are not responsible for the cases where their services do wind up transporting child pornography because there is no practical way they can discriminate.
The same is true for alcohol companies. Yes, some of their beverages will wind up killing some people. But they have no way to tell which. They do not need to stop selling alcohol to anyone just because some people will die from it.
Actually that's not true. Red wine is pretty darned close to a miracle food. In any event, you could make the same argument about skis.
How is this any different than the copyright witch trials that have been happening in the US? Yes, the RIAA has been asking for civil penalties so far, but they could just as easily add criminal infingement to their list of charges. It is in the copyright act, and there is real jail time attached to these things -- especially considering the volume and scale of Internet based distribution (which the law could never have anticipated).
In Digital Copyright (2001), Jessica Litman made the point that a room full of copyright lawyers often had trouble with determining what was legal and what was illegal on many copyright issues. By extension, she argued that ordinary people, who had not read the Title 17 or spent years in law school studying copyright would be unable to reasonably determine which activites were legal and which were not. She said the assumption that copyright is fair and makes sense meant that most people would unknowingly violate copyright law.
This sort of overlegislation has been a part of US law for quite some time now. It seems that everyone is a criminal according to these laws.
So, cynically speaking, what has changed? You mean we have one more law -- of many -- that makes us all criminals? So? It is already too late, is it not? We are all already criminals anyway, right?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
On closer inspection, it appears that (despite the requirement to provide accurate information upon request) Slashdot doesn't ask for your name to register.
I love you Slashdot!
A lot of cyber-bullying involves sharing private or fake private information with the world/school/whatever - such a thing can never be reversed or healed.
Apart from stopping it, the only recourse for cyber-bullying is payback, but while you might get some satisfaction from that, and might even stop the initial attacks, you're just ruining more people, not solving anything.
Physical bullying is far easier to stop and payback is a proven method of equaling the score. In my class (grade 1-9 in Denmark) there was initially some bullying but our teacher was cleaver and turned the tables on the bully immediately by - for a short period - constantly picking this person for everything, from questions in class to tedious tasks like wiping the blackboard. He would also talk to the bully after class and let him/her know that the special treatment would stop as soon as the bullying stopped. It worked every time and there as was no more bullying at all after grade 6. Our class had a lot of benefit from the lack of cliques and bullying and we finished with the highest GPA ever on that school because people could focus on learning and not stupid personal vendettas.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I tell slashtards to get fucked on a daily basis but so few of them manage to do it.
In light of this case I won't point out the obvious conclusion. Ok, maybe I did it anyway, so if you are suicidal, don't do it! I really mean that.
Although I agree that Lori had no control over what Megan decided to do, I do have to disagree with a major point of your post. Megan had depression, and that severely reduced her ability to make rational decisions, especially in situations of extreme stress. As someone who has severe depression myself, I know that when I would have a mental breakdown, before my years of treatment, I would have very little to no control over what I did in that period of time. For someone to be aware of this and exploit it is inexcusable. We can put a gun in front of a toddler, and sure, the toddler doesn't HAVE to play with it... But if you know that the toddler doesn't understand the consequences and you do it anyway, who is responsible for their death? Lori Drew cannot say that she did not mean to cause harm in this case. Unfortunately enough, people do need to be protected from themselves because people do choose to make poor decisions. Where to draw the line is debatable (I personally think that freedoms are wonderful things to have and that restrictions should only be placed in cases where there is an immediate and present danger) but if we allowed everyone in America to own nuclear weapons on the basis that they are responsible for what they choose to do with them is utter nonsense because there are people that cannot be trusted to make a rational decision with such power. To blame the victim after everything she suffered through is quite cruel. I hope that her family and friends can find some sort of peace after all is said and done.
Karma, as I understand it, is the universal spirit redirecting the effects of your actions back to you. Karma does not automatically take the form of the action you performed. E.G. Karma for murder would most likely not be a reciprocal murder. What you are describing is more like revenge amplified to the level of massacre.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
I like to mix it up a little. A little "Equal but oppisite reaction" mixed in with some Karma, and in the end I'll just blame it all on God.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
So now, if you bully someone in a forum, you can be charged with the same thing as Lori Drew.
And this is a problem? If bullying is outlawed, only criminals will bully?
No, they don't, not without consent.
Thank god there are still sane people on the planet ... thanks for this post
But what, pray tell, is the function of skiing? Unless you live in the Alps and are using it as some sort of commute method, it's purely entertainment that carries with it a risk of bodily harm---much like drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree, but there was no need for this.
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
LK
Right. While the girl's mother who was apparently aware of a previous suicide attempt and of the emotional state of her daughter goes away free when she doesn't seem to have had her daughter followed by a professional or treated in any way and let her be exposed to the well known hysterical lunacy of web boards ? The mother isn't responsible of anything at all ?
Aren't parents supposed to take care of their sick children in the US ? Wouldn't *willingly* exposing them (the mother opened the MySpace account) to danger be frowned upon ? Or is it supposed to build character or something ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Where to begin?? .. Let me start with ... Nah ... you're just a moron.
Oh .. and hopefully some employee of /. reads this.
Don't be stupid. Either use captcha and trust it or don't and use your stupid time thing. Using captcha and not trusting it makes you look like you can't even tie your own shoelaces ... can you?
Your message and correction were confusing to me, so I had to (gasp) read up on it.
To clarify for other uninformed readers like myself, Lori (the accused, who set up the fake Josh Evans account) had an 18-year old employee (Ashley Grills) who sent many of the messages posing as Josh Evans, including the (supposed) last one. Yet Lori was tried for it.
From Wikipedia:
the problem with your argument is that tobacco companies are the only ones of that list who purposefully made their product more addictive by adding all sorts of random shit to it.
i do beleive that cigarettes are addictive over and above the addictive potential of nicotine alone.
hiram walker is not addictive over and above the addictive potential of alcohol alone.
and while making their products such, the tobacco companies specifically opted not to inform their customers of what the exact nature of their product was.
even apple doesn't do this. they tell you nearly the exact capabilities of the product in the ads, sure they exaggerate how it will affect your life, but they at least give you enough information that if you stop, and think it through that much is obvious.
You just hit the nail on the head. What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better? Would he be on trial? Lets think this through. This girl thought she was talking to a boy (mistake #1) and believed what this internet person said (mistake #2) then acted on that information (mistake #3) to her own detriment. Three strikes and you're out as they say.
The definition of "fraud" is roughly to make someone else believe something that isn't true, which then causes that person to do something that is to your advantage, or their disadvantage, which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Clearly this is fraud: Lori Drew made the girl wrongly believe that a young boy who she loved suddenly turned against her, hated her, and felt the world would be a better place without her. If that boy had been real, and suddenly turned against her, and so on, there would have been no fraud.
Assume there are two people asking people for money. One says truthfully that he is collecting money for a children's home. I give him £100. The other also claims he is collecting money for a children's home, but he is lying, he is spending the money on expensive cars for himself. I also give him £100. In both cases I am left with £100 left in my pocket. But one is fraud and punished, the other isn't.
The fact that red wine contains some chemicals that can be beneficial is incidental. You could get the same benefits without the alcohol.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Alcohol and cigarettes have no function apart from bodily harm. People who sell these things are selling bodily harm.
Don't be silly. Of course they have functions apart from bodily harm. Nobody drinks to hurt themselves, they drink because it feels good, because it releases inhibitions, because it helps them sleep, whatever. People smoke because it makes them feel better, gives them something to fiddle with, etc.
Yes, people who sell those things are selling bodily harm. So are motorcycle manufacturers, fast food joints, and the company that makes B-1 bombers. Only the last of those items is specifically intended to cause bodily harm.
Fast food feeds people. Motorcycles provide transportation. And you won't see me defending bombers. The things you said about smoking and drinking are a bit odd. Why should something deadly be OK just because it helps people feel good? People cut themselves because they say it's the only thing that makes them feel good. Should we just let them go on doing it?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Driving is fun. Skiing is fun. Alcohol is a whole hell of a lot of fun. Cigarettes are also fun, just ask a teenager.
Your problem is that freedom and personal responsibility scares you.
Freedom and personal responsibility? A company makes a product that does nothing but kill people, and you think the people who use it are responsible? Alcohol and smoking GO ALONG with things that are fun. They are not fun in and of themselves.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
What is so fucking hard to understand here? Everything has risk, if you choose to engage in an activity then it is your choice and you are responsible.
Y'know, I fail to see what that has to do with the premeditated, planned emotional abuse of a mentally unstable girl by an adult woman.
I mean, for heaven's sake, you've even bolded "you choose" and "your choice". Do you think that the girl chose to be depressive? Or that she chose to be abused by Drew? No? Then you haven't got a point.
*Of course* it's a different story when somebody knows the risks involved in an activity, then willingly engages in that activity anyway (whether that's true for e.g. smokers and cigarette companies is probably another matter: if the manufacturers knew that smoking was harmful but deliberately misled their customers, for example, the case wouldn't be as clear-cut as you make it out to be, and there's also the issue of whether cigarettes are deliberately made more addictive), they've only got themselves to blame.
None of that applies here. Not even one iota.
You can certainly say that the precedent is troubling, or that if what Drew did wasn't illegal she shouldn't be sentenced for it, no matter how reprehensible her actions were; those are good arguments worth debating.
Your reasoning, on the other hand, is that if someone didn't want to get raped, they just should've chosen not to be sexy in the eyes of the rapist.
"The question is would a reasonable person expect a depressed girl to kill her self because of a fictional breakup?"
I guess that reasonable people have never heard of the concept of "suicide", ever. It's unimaginable to them that depressed people occasionally kill themselves.
The woman went out of her way to hurt a child. That child ended up being hurt, exactly as the woman intended.
I don't see where the moral ambiguity lies here.
There are lots of details in this case, a key one being that Lori Drew was a neighbour of the young girl and therefore probably knew enough about her to have some idea of the effects of her words. Lori Drew in my opinion is an asshole and definitely responsible for her actions and should be punished. I agree with other posts that everyone else should not pay for her deeds, but there must be something it place to deal with people like this.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Yes, I think people who choose to poison themselves are taking responsibility for how short a life they have. What, exactly, is your problem? Live you own damn life.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Being mean may not be a crime, but committing fraud in order to hurt a person should be.
Yes, I know, the title is not fair to most Americans - it is meant as a provocation, of course.
But sadly it isn't far off the mark when it comes to the kind of responses I see on /. that are modded +5 "Insightful" or "Interesting". They seem to range from the dowright disgusting "Who fscking cares about some 13year old brat killing herself" to the rather lame "Lori Drew did something wrong, but 'free speech' is much more important" - and that is at the kind and warm-hearted end of the spectrum.
Freedom is important, oh yes. It is also mostly fictitious, at least in the absolute, quasi-religious sense people on /. seem to think. Everything, from quantum-mechanics up, should tell you that there is no such thing as complete, perfect indepedence; the only real freedom is sufficient freedom to live a worthy and fulfilling life at peace with your neighbors. With freedom comes responsibility, because with action comes consequences.
One can but wonder how it came to that in America, it is certainly not the prevailing viewpoint in the parts of Europe I know of. This is where people usually start pointing to History and Founding Fathers, but I just can't see what that has to do with anything; the freedom of speech should be seen in light of that time, as a reaction to specific oppression of political and religious dissent, and it is clear that it is about the right to practise your faith and express your political views; both of which make a lot of sense. But this idea about "freedom to do and say anything at all with no restrictions or consequences" is simply nonsense - to me it seems to have arisen in the 60es, a time when we also saw some talk about psychopathy as an ideal for mankind, exactly because psychopaths are so void of the moral inhibitions of normal society. Go and look it up if you don't believe me.
Far be it from me to dictate what Americans should think or believe, but before people start idolising what can in many ways be regarded as "the essence of evil", they would be well adviced to at least have thought it through.
I'm sorry, but equating nuclear weapons to the power of any school kid's voice hardly makes your argument worth considering. Unfortunately, not everyone is a qualified psychotherapist and therefore not able to determine when the line should be drawn. The two people who were in her life and qualified were her parents. Even they are not fully to blame, they simply were the best positioned and best informed people who could have and should have made decisions to keep their daughter safe. It is NOT my responsibility to look out after you. Yes, there are cruel people in the world but that doesn't mean you get a free pass, and no one is allowed to make fun of you, or play tricks on you. It's part of growing up. Part and parcel of the testing that our society, practically all societies, put their young through to ensure a healthy social situation when we are adults. Don't worry about how efficient it is, just know that it is. I can't think of a society on this planet where this is not the case.
While you may say just because it has been does not mean that it should be so. Well, there are reasons for it, or it would not survive as a custom. Yes, it's sad that she died. People die every day for much sadder reasons.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
In my country (Croatia), incitement to commit suicide is a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison. If the victim is a minor or a person with diminished capacity, it's 5 years in prison. If the victim is a child (i.e. person younger than 16), and the incitement actually leads to suicide, one gets tried for *murder*.
So, for such an offense, it would be really hard for Lori Drew to escape serious jail time, especially given high degree of mens rea displayed in this particular case. No new laws required, no terms-of-service mumbo-jumbo.
To put this in perspective: Croatia probably has one of the _worst_ justice systems in Europe, but here US criminal code comes out deficient by comparison, and - speaking from my Slashdot-lurking experience - it's far from the first such case.
All the people here commenting on the morality of Lori Drew's actions are falling for the big bait and switch trick:
Its patently obvious that Lori Drew was only in court because the prosecutors wanted her punished for her role in a suicide - and they made damn sure that the Jury knew of this. Yet all of the charges actually blaming her for the suicide either failed to stand up in court or were never brought in the first place.
The only 'crime' of which she has actually been found guilty of is a fairly trivial breach of MySpace's terms of service - something which thousands of MySpace users do routinely and which has not previously been treated as a criminal offence.
In a previous discussion, someone mentioned how they got Al Capone for tax evasion when they couldn't get him for being a rank bad hat, and everybody shouted "hurrah!". However, when they did that, AFAIK, it was already well established that tax evasion could land you in jail - they didn't 'create' a new criminal offense of 'tax evasion' by twisting the laws on robbery.
In this case, the "bait" of a tragic suicide has - possibly unintentionally - been used to set a dangerous precedent.
This doesn't mean that websites are suddenly going to start getting random users locked up for breaking their TOS - but it does mean that if you are even indirectly involved with some scandal (be it, fraud, bullying, murder, genocide or, God help you, copyright infringement) and the prosecuting authorities are under pressure to get a scalp, then they can get you convicted without having to prove anything other than that you broke some part of someones TOS.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Depression is a state of mind, not a disease. We've been sold down the river by a bunch of unscientific quacks peddling their cureall pills. Show me one symptom that isn't ephemeral. Soon happiness will be a disease.
Let's everyone stop posting TOS on our collective webbage.
Noone reads it. Noone follows it (if there's reason not to).
Same goes for EULA and similar.
Stop it. Stop it!
It wasn't name-calling, you ass! That little girl had a game run on her and she totally went for it, hook, line, and sinker. Having a deliberate scam run on you that drives you to kill yourself is for real different from a little - or even a lot of - bullying on the playground. The kid formerly known as "Four-Eyed *Linky" *for "The Missing Link"
..blaming McDonald's for heart attacks caused by fatty foods.
Agreed, shit happens - unfortunately all it takes is one paranoid idiot/asshole with some degree of power and that is not necessarily as philisophical as we ./'ers are, and the end result is scary as it is maddening...
A McDonald's worker in Union City, Ga., was arrested and jailed Thursday night for putting too much salt and pepper on a police officer's hamburger, MyFoxAtlanta reported Friday.
-or-
Search Google for "mcdonalds arrested salt hamburger"
I don't think this case sets a precedent at all. I do think other laws will be crafted though that will more clearly define this type of behavior. The Prosecutor used what he could to punish a woman that deserved punishing.
She is entitled to her opinion.
I think you meant the company that makes the bombs for the B1. Airplanes are generally not intended to cause bodily harm, unless you're talking about NWA's economy class seating.
steampunk web design
The person consented to be inebriated. Their death was a result of their drunkenness, which they consented to. If somebody forces someone to drink against their consent then that person forcing them could be held responsible. Alcohol companies aren't forcing drinks down anyones throat.
Nobody drinks to hurt themselves
This holiday season, your assignment will be to objectively evaluate that claim during family gatherings.
In many cases, "reckless" behavior is considered to satisfy the mens rea requirement.
How does this work with something normally innocuous but seriously harmful to an individual, such as food allergies?
Indeed. Having one's ass kicked tends to only hurt for as long as the bruises are around. It can also lead to you becoming a bit more resilient to pain. Obviously if you're suffering broken bones or major injuries, it's a whole lot easier to make a court/criminal argument against the aggressor too.
Being a social outcast tends to have a lot more long-term results. For one thing, it's a self-perpetuating cycle (no friends = no social skills development = no friends), and the callouses you grow from that tend to make one rather bitter toward one's fellow humans (again, self-perpetuating).
And yes, this is something I would know about. I was pretty much also a dork through to near the end of high-school as well. If I'd not been cut out-of-the-loop earlier on, I wonder if my HS social skills would have developed a little better. Luckily for me at the time, one of my outlets was long-distance biking. A good tan and a decent physique helped me meet a girl outside of my area who didn't know about my geekish reputation, and from there on things got better (IMHO, once you hit college it's a whole lot nicer than HS as well, especially if you're in a course with like-minded people).
Unfortunately - due to what is likely a lot of contributing factors, Lori Drew being one - this young lady will never get the chance to change her life for the better.
What she did seems to be illegal under existing laws, but ones that apply a whole lot more than this cyber-crime BS. There *are* rules for criminal harassment (I believe specific ones for minors), and other such things. As many have mentioned, if this were the case of a grown man and young woman, a number of anti-predator laws would also likely have been applied.
Now I have nothing against drafting a law to better address issues of this nature (personation in order to delude and cause damage to an unstable individual), but why were the crappiest laws possible used in this case?
Doesn't the US have an equivalent to Criminal harassment?
The definition of "fraud" is roughly to make someone else believe something that isn't true, which then causes that person to do something that is to your advantage, or their disadvantage, which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Clearly this is fraud: Lori Drew made the girl wrongly believe that a young boy who she loved suddenly turned against her, hated her, and felt the world would be a better place without her. If that boy had been real, and suddenly turned against her, and so on, there would have been no fraud.
Phewww, that's a relief. She'd still be dead, but there would have been no fraud committed if she had really been talking with a real boy. What you are suggesting is that most of the people on the Internet are guilty of fraud, that the guys in a dance club who are pretending to be something they are not so they can get laid are frauds... and worse, you believe that these things are punishable. I believe that the time that you need to live in was back in .. oh, 17th century?
No, I'm not saying that what Lori Drew did was the exact same as some guy getting laid and never calling the girl again, but I am saying it is no worse. The simple plain fact is that life is dangerous. You cannot trust all that you read or hear, and certainly cannot trust anyone on the Internet. Always get a second opinion. Always check the facts. Always investigate before believing.
You and others are suggesting that this girl should be protected. I have a question for you. What if someone online had told her that people of her religion are going to hell, and should be hung outright or burned at the stake just for believing what they do. That the world would be a better place without people of her religion. If she killed herself because of that, who should be on trial. Should we be protecting people from the other religion?
When exactly is it ok for us to become thought police? Millions of times each day people are told to fuck off and die. Do they? Should saying 'I wish you were dead' be a punishable crime? Capital crime?
When you start down this road you believe you are protecting someone or some group of people. What you forget is that in doing so you are criminalizing some other group of people, and that is simply more wrong then this girl's death.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
But in general, I agree. Look at our recent history: everything has been about shifting responsibility (and blame) for our own actions onto other people or organizations.
Dude, it's not just recent history. I don't consider myself Christian and I certainly don't consider the Bible to be an authority of any kind over me but I do think that if Christians studied the Bible with an open mind, they would learn a lot about human behavior. Take this episode, please:
God is walking through the Garden of Eden and doesn't see Adam. "Adam, where are you?" Adam replies, "God, I am hiding." God asks, "Why are you hiding?" "Because I'm naked." "Who told you you are naked?" "It was the woman, she made me take of the apple." God turns to Eve, "Eve..." Eve answers, "It was the snake..."
So, yeah, I don't think blaming others for our own behavior is a new thing.
That's because there's no logical difference between spanking a child and slapping an adult, other than the relative balance of power being much less equal in the case of hitting a child, and therefore even less justifiable.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Hold on, shouldn't he have said "IAAL" then or something? How else are we supposed to know who to rely on here on slashdot for legal advice?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Her defense attorney did not do his job. It's the job of the defense attorney to *make* the prosecution prove it's case. If the prosecution is twisting the law in an absurd way, as seems to be the case here, then the defense has the burden to make that obvious to the judge and/or jury.
It is also a *good* defense attorney's job to set the grounds for an appeal should such an absurd use of a bad law result in a conviction.
Hopefully he did his job of foundation building well enough that this absurd conviction will be overturned.
I don't see this going beyond the appellate court to the SCotUS so watch for a complete reversal and this whole thing to go whiffing away into the ether soon.
Namaste....
Quite a feat considering the fact that "Josh Evans" never existed. I think you mean Lori Drew's secretary.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
But where would one draw the line between "causing distress" and "physically reprimanding"? A simple spanking, while not looked down upon by the court, causes a child quite a bit of distress, hence the crying et al involved.
'A simple spanking' will get you prison in Scotland, even if it is your child. On the whole I think this is a good thing.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It seems to me that this case is just another in the long line of bullshit scare tactics used to convince the public that the internet is just too dangerous in its current state and can only be rendered safe if it's turned into a corporate owned and operated media wasteland patrolled by the jackboots.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
and this case is the equivalent of then charging this baseball-wielding miscreant with violating the T.O.S. of the baseball. sounds pretty stupid, no?
do not read this line twice.
It would have eliminated the first of the three counts Drew was found guilty of violating (the false information where the ToS required accurate information one.) It may or may not have affected the second count (depending on whether the ToS only preclude adults from soliciting personal information from minors, or prohibit it generally). It would have no effect on third (the using the service to harras or harm one) if nothing else was changed, though the circumstances at issue in the first (the false representation) count also provide evidence that there was intent to harass or harm in the third, without those facts (whether or not they were chargeable on their own), it would have been harder to charge either of the latter counts especially the third, since the misrepresentation itself is evidence of the mental state necessary to establish the other counts.
Because while the first statement is true in a sense, its not the sense implied by connecting it to the question that follows. Rather, its true in the sense that you have a responsibility for your own wrongful actions and their consequences, often even when someone else's action is part of the causal chain leading to those consequences, if that action is a reasonably anticipated consequence of either your action itself, or the results you sought with that action.
Its also unlikely something that Drew didn't know. Its not like Megan Meier was anonymous stranger targeted at random.
Well, I'm not sure law counts for minors...
Speaking as (one of the few) Internet lawyers, and an Internet policy person, the hand-wringing hysterics coming out of this are ridiculous. Online services and sites can *already* sue people for ToS violations - they always could (it's a breach of contract). And a prosecutor isn't going to waste their time trying to criminalize a ToS violation when no action of a criminal nature has occurred. This was a *very* unusual case. To read our full analysis, see our article here: http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/internet-in-uproar-over-verdict-for-lori-drew-in-megan-meier-teen-suicide-case
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cyberbullying is a head-scratcher for me: how is it that saying mean things to someone is worse when done on the internet than when it is done face-to-face?
Because the dumb jocks that were the bullies in person are not emotionally or intellectually capable of defending themselves with words.
Basically the whole "stop cyber-bullying" campaign is a thinly disguised message from parents saying "OUR kids used to be the bullies, but now they are getting picked on, and can't retaliate. So let's encourage your kids doing the online bullying to stop, and say it in person, where my kids can once again use their physical size & aggression to defend themselves from words."
As for the article in question, this was not a case of bullying, etc. It was a case of an emotionally disturbed teen (that should be a redundant statement anyhow) who got mad about a pen pal (E-friend I guess these days?) who she never met, got upset with her parents who had told her to knock it off already, and hung herself.
Yes, it sucks, Yes, it's really too bad. But if Lori Drew caused this girl to kill herself, then all the parents & teachers at Columbine High School should be charged with driving those kids to shoot up the school & their classmates. Accessory to murder, negligent homicide, etc.
I think I'll go drink heavily & avoid the news for awhile, it's depressing me... to the point I might just hang myself... Think CNN will face charges for driving me to suicide?
Besides, I thought this whole debate was already had back in the days of "My child killed himself after listening to Rock & Roll music that told him to kill himself".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If your goal is to promote good health, there are many safer activities than skiing you could participate in.
As for drinking and smoking, I disagree; they are entertaining in themselves.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How is this insightful? I'm not saying that these companies are to blame for every single death that is caused while someone is using their product, but to say that they have NOTHING to do with the deaths is quite a stretch.
Everything has risk. No shit. But that doesn't mean that companies have no responsibility when things go wrong with their products. Especially if they advertise their product in such a way that misleads consumers into making mistakes when making their risk assessment.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Why should something deadly be OK just because it helps people feel good?
So I'm guessing you think sex outside of procreation should be illegal also. The only function it serves is pleasure and it is deadly beyond compare with all the STD's these days. How many have died of AIDS?
Who the hell do you think you are that you should be the judge of what other people do for pleasure? You're a pompous ass is who you are. People like you seem to think the rest of the world should be as miserable and self loathing as yourself.
Who is John Galt?
Everyone understood that they could be sued for violating TOS. But losing money is a little different (for most people) from going to jail.
And while it's convenient to say, "a prosecutor isn't going to waste their time trying to criminalize a ToS violation when no action of a criminal nature has occurred," this has the potential to open things pretty wide for a prosecutor who has extreme ideas of criminal behavior. How about someone who wants to crack down on pornography? Or a republican prosecutor who decides that the servers sending out Obama's emails might be violating the terms of the backbone connection they use?
I imagine (hope) the latter would lead to a huge uproar, but the former might be applauded.
"It's only a problem if you're doing something wrong," has often been used to minimize concerns as rights have been curtailed.
I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty pissed if someone walked up to me and spanked me on the arse as an adult.
Horrible comparison. I think most parents spank their kids because of a reason, they just don't walk up to their kid and spank them for the hell of it. Second of all, if it was a female that slapped me on the ass, I would be the opposite of pissed.
It certainly doesn't work as a disciplinary measure, what it does do is enforce a pointless cycle of abuse.
I was spanked as a child. I've never been in a fight and I'm not even sure if I will spank my children if I ever have any. Yeah it's anecdotal, but I bet you would be hard pressed to fine any proof that spanking alone makes people abusive. Have you even been spanked before? It's hardly abuse. It stings for like a minute and goes away. It seems that I'm in the minority here and I will probably get modded down for it, but I'm all for giving families the freedom of choosing how they raise their kids, as long as the kid isn't being hurt out of pure anger, and doesn't suffer any injuries.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
I could argue that the only function of skiing is bodily harm. You're obviously discounting the "fun" and "social" aspects of alcohol and cigarettes, so it's only fair to do the same for skiing. And at that point* skiing just looks like an outdoor activity designed to sometimes kill or injure people.
* I am excluding the small number of people that using skiing for transportation, as I expect he's excluded the small number of people that use driving exclusively for non-transportation purposes.
Why should something deadly be OK just because it helps people feel good?
We let people do many things that may be deadly but make them feel good. Like traveling cross-country to see their relatives. Or skiing. Or swimming. Or eating less-than-healthful diets. Or using a fireplace not intended as a primary heating device.
All of the examples above are totally unnecessary from a practical standpoint -- people do them just because it feels good, not because they must to survive, or even to hold jobs/participate in society -- and all those examples are potentially deadly.
By your logic if I support banning alcohol when I should also support banning unnecessary travel and any other leisure activities with potential health risks. That doesn't seem like a great plan to me -- I'd like to think that adults should be allowed pretty broad latitude in what sorts of personal risks they're willing to take -- but I guess you're welcome to your opinion. Unless holding or expressing a certain opinion might lead to bodily harm, and then I suppose you shouldn't be entitled to that either.
Except that "some chemicals" includes "ethyl alcohol". But hey, don't let science get in the way of your prohibitionist propaganda.
But Lori Drew and friends did know this girl was unbalanced and used that knowledge to ill effect. I haven't seen any one argue that yet. The fact that the one who sent the final message, that essentially pushed the known unbalanced girl over the edge, got off says much to how meaningless this case has become. So much for teaching responsibility for words and actions to the young. If Drew is taking responsibility for the behaviors of the group then make her pay for intentionally contributing to the known unbalanced girls death. I'm sure there's a couple of laws somewhere that covers this.
It's okay for cigarette companies to advertise to little kids with fake lolly type cigarettes? I mean, it's their choice after all.
It's not their choice. We've decided that children can't consent to all sorts of things (contracts, sex, etc.), and that we need to take legal action to protect them. That's the basis of many of the rulings against advertising to children.
See "Attractive Nuisance":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
Is it too much to ask for parental supervision?
No one is talking about how irresponsible it is to let an emotionally unstable/clinically depressed teen use the internets unsupervised.
After the "breakup", it would be as simple as "I don't want you reading about or associating with that Evans guy because he sounds psychotic".
Which would also be a nice segue into a discussion of what "psychotic" means.
Personally, I think we have a great, new, example.
-- .sig.
I'm a
intentional infliction of emotional distress is already a tort.
That Drew was found not guilty of.
From QuantumG
WTF? She pretended to be an "internet boyfriend" and then told the girl she didn't want to talk to her anymore. She didn't put rat poison in her coffee. No-one is responsible for the death of a person who commits suicide, except the person who commits suicide. Oh, no, life is too hard. A boy I've never met (and didn't even really exist) doesn't like me anymore, where's the sleeping pills?
I think the prosecution would paint a picture like this.
It's the equivalent of handing a recovering pyromaniac a book of matches and a gas can then putting them under extreme stress. After some time they are going to break and start a fire. It's manipulating someone in an unstable mental state.
BUT! It is a crime to press someone who is mentally unstable and "cause" them to lose control? It's like winding up the office crank with conspiracy theories and setting him loose in the office. IANAL enough to know.
Doh! Replying to my previous post. This has already been covered ad infinitum in subsequent posts.
What I get for not reading further.
"Your problem is that freedom and personal responsibility scares you."
And your problem is that you think that everybody is able to handle freedom and personal responsibility.
Driving is fun. Drinking is fun. Combine the two of them and you could end the fun of another person permanently. And that happens far more than I'd like to see.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
A normal, well adjusted person will immediately disregard such a statement to be false. The fact that the suicide victim was not a normal well adjusted person is not the fault of Lori Drew.
But the fact that Lori Drew was aware that the victim was not a normal well adjusted person, and chose to act with full awareness of what impact those actions might have on the victim, and did so intending for those actions to harm the victim, is the fault of Lori Drew.
Stop giving the woman a free ride. There's this thing called personal responsibility. The victim is responsible for her actions (committing suicide), and Lori Drew is responsible for hers (driving the victim to commit suicide).
Committing fraud already is a crime. However, entering random information into websites that want to know things about me that are none of their damn business is not fraud, it's Internet 101 - basics of safe behavior online.
Also, if violating MySpace TOS is a federal crime, then the girl's mother should get the same sentence as Lori.
Besides the fact that your counter-argument to what I said is an argument based on the fallacy of reductio ad absurdium, you've conveniently ignored that seeing relatives, skiing, swimming, and eating junk food serve alternative purposes. Drinking and smoking don't.
And don't say "oh, but red wine has beneficial properties!" because that's post hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
What, pray tell, does ethyl alcohol do to a human being that is beneficial?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
You're trying to tell me the manufacturer has NO responsibility for the deadliness of their product? There's a reason we have laws regulating things that can be deadly, and that is because we, as a culture, accept that manufacturers can be responsible for deaths caused by their deadly products.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Depression IS NOT a disease. It is a condition the brain--ANYone's brain--comes fully loaded to shift into should enough emotional stress and circumstances grow to be overbearing. It is a natural response designed to further separate the strong from the weak, so that the weak can be preyed upon and removed from the herd. That is the purpose of depression/suicide and that is what we have seen here borne out.
Doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated, or that people like Lori Drew should be out there removing people like Megan Meier from societal herds. But depressives are constantly made to believe that they are broken, damaged, diseased and have to be cured or otherwise repaired. That's compounding their problem, particularly if their problem is self-esteem.
Megan Meier wasn't diseased in my opinion .. she was vulnerable, and it was up to her parents, particularly her mother, to give her support and love until she could move through her condition like most teenage girls do. But instead Lori Drew, acting predatory (as in protecting her young), came along and facilitated her suicide. That should absolutely be actionable as a crime, but absolutely NOT in the way it was done.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Except, no. That's just ridiculous. Take "fun" and "social" out of skiing and you still have exercise. There is, flat out, no comparison there.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Argument failed. Reason for failure: reductio ad absurdium (sex is only deadly if you're an idiot about it, alcohol and cigarettes are NOTHING but harmful) and ad hominem. Have a nice day.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Last time I checked, cigarettes were marked with plenty of warnings and labels that make it abundantly clear that they are bad for you.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but:
I don't see many TV ads or billboards showing beautiful women playing with guns in an effort to make gun ownership sexy
They don't have to. Practically every movie and TV show out there is doing the advertising for them.
Well, and that's true too.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Sigh, yet another throwback who doesn't understand addiction pathways in the brain. Do I need to use some sort of science-fiction example to show that sometimes a "choice" isn't simply a conscious, informed, objective choice? There are chemical and psychological underpinnings that cause many choices to be somewhat less than "free". Volition is not absolute.
Some people profit off getting other people addicted. Some people die or get seriously harmed (physically, medically, socially, financially) because of this exploitation. Society exists largely to prevent harm done by people to others through exploitation.
Ergo: it is a valid social policy objective to limit or restrict certain substances, objects, devices, etc. which have a proven track record of leading to addiction and/or to punish those who deliberately set out to addict and exploit others for their own gain.
I thought we all understood this by now. I guess there's always going to be some troglodytes worshipping "personal responsibility" as if it were some graven idol. Ignore them. Society moves on and evolves to deal with its never-ending challenges, regardless of those who cling to outdated ideas of human behavior.
People have a right to get addicted to whatever the hell they like. They also have responsibility for their actions caused by such addictions.
Stop trying to control everybody.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Read my reply to my comment. :)
At least you caught my mistake AND knew what I meant - thank you.
Your evaluation period for Productivity 1.0 has ended. Please purchase more coffee to continue using this product.
But does this meet the threshold for assisted suicide? I mean, its not quite the same as what Dr. Kevorkian did. Lori Drew did not administer a fatal dose of barbituates to Megan Meier.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
This is true, but I'm not sure that making a new law for this circumstance is such a good idea. Laws are made by lawmakers, and, as we all know, lawmakers usually make laws to be overly broad, which leads to all sorts of unintended consequences down the road.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Fast food feeds people. Motorcycles provide transportation.
Eating fast food makes people feel good. It's usually crappy nutrition. Motorcycles are fun, but they are far more dangerous than other means of transportation that are available in most places.
The things you said about smoking and drinking are a bit odd. Why should something deadly be OK just because it helps people feel good?
I suppose it depends on what "OK" means. If it means "permitted, but you're a moron to do it", it should be OK because it's the sort of thing humans do sometimes. Mountain climbing and skydiving are also dangerous/deadly and are almost always undertaken because people feel good doing them, not because the Holy Grail is on top of the mountain, or the redeye flight to NY is going down in flames. Skateboarding. Going to India on vacation. Hunting. Fireworks. Spending all day playing video games. Horse racing. Lots of things.
The state of the victim's susceptibility to suicide is entirely outside of the point. If a person were to say, have an eggshell skull, and you punch them, shattering their skull and killing them, you're responsible for their DEATH, not just for punching them. The extra susceptibility of the victim to your crime is not a defense against murder, or more harm being caused than originally intended.
If you accidentally give a person a peanut-containing granola bar, with no intentions of hurting that person, then you're fine, it was an accident. If however, you had put say, a drug intending to do harm to the person into the granola bar, and they instead react violently to the peanuts and die, you're responsible for their murder. You were INTENDING to do harm against the person, so you're responsible for all the harm that the person sustains.
McDonald's is not responsible for someone overeating their food, that's a misuse or abuse of their food. In the limited quantities intended to be consumed by McDonald's it is sufficiently healthy and non-harmful. It's like Tylenol, if you take it in the indicated amounts, you're fine, but if you over use it, and shut down your liver, it's like "whoops... should have followed our expectations... we even TOLD you what those were."
This woman was SEEKING intentionally to do harm to the victim. That the victim overreacted to the intended harm and killed herself is not an excuse for the behavior of the mother. I would have charged her with a form of manslaughter myself.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Everyone who has replied to me has failed to notice one basic difference between their examples and alcohol/cigarettes: Alcohol and cigarettes exist to perform a function that SOLELY does damage to the body. There is no other function. Anything beneficial is incidental and caused by things that are there entirely by accident.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Only because they're forced by law to do that. Back in the '50s and before, they all used advertisements with quotes from fake doctors talking about how cigarettes were basically good for you.
Putting a warning label on a product that does nothing but kill and injure people is an abdication of responsibility, not an acceptance of it. It doesn't change the fact that the producer is responsible for the product's existence in the first place.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
change the fact that the producer is responsible for the product's existence in the first place.
Uhhh.. I can't imagine how it would.. or how you would think it would.. or anything that could.
You're the kind of person who wants a label on coffee to indicate that it is hot. We all know it is hot.. but oh noes, there might be someone who doesn't know, so let's put a label on it.. then, once the product is clearly labeled, you're still not happy. You want the mere possibility of scalding to be eliminated, and so, when I go to McDonalds, I have to drink my coffee luke fucking warm.
It's really not hard. Some people *want* to hurt themselves. Some companies are happy to sell them products that do this. It's none of your business.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You are aware that every kid is America is being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression, right?
Umm, no. That is clearly not the case. Your statement is ridiculous even taken as a metaphor.
I think perhaps that you are suggesting that depression in teenagers is over-diagnosed. While I might even agree with you in general, that does not change the fact that taunting a person, in such a severe way, who is diagnosed with depression is incredibly cruel and should make one liable for their death in such a situation. Depression is a very real mental disorder and to tell some one who is diagnosed with such a malady that the world would be better off without them should be akin to manslaughter.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
You'll notice I haven't mentioned if I even CARE if people hurt themselves. I just think it's stupid that the government allows it. If unstable people off themselves, all the better for the gene pool.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Why should the government get in the way? Sky diving and skiing are dangerous.. there's no doubt about it.. do you really think the government should stop people engaging in these activities? It's their life, if they want to drink poison, why should the government get in the way?
How we know is more important than what we know.
People who can't take a little ribbing should grow thicker skin or get off the freakin' internet. The freedom of all of us should not suffer because of their infirmity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Everyone cries THINK OF THE CHILDREN OMFG!, but no one is ever there saying 'Where the fuck were the parents?'
Actually, if you read the comments on this story, there are far more people blaming the parents than crying "think of the children".
Nevertheless, you answered your own question. Where were the parents? Well, as you stated, the parents "had fights with her about that as well as her daughter's refusal to get off teh computer when she was told".
They were trying to deal with the situation.
Since the government has a vested interest in keeping people alive, it makes sense for it to get involved in activities that do nothing but cause harm.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
You keep saying that. People who smoke are not doing "nothing but cause harm", be it to themselves or others. They're doing something, which they enjoy, and serves some need. Just because you don't (seem to) understand it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Perhaps you play video games. There's just as many studies that say video games cause harm as there are studies that say cigarettes cause harm. In many parts of the community it is as widely accepted that video games cause harm as it is that cigarettes cause harm. Should Microsoft be prevented from selling Xboxes? It's just non-sense to suggest that the government should have the power to restrict trade based on willing and consenting knowledge of harm. It's anti-liberal.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Really? How come I can say lots of bad things about you and not be put in jail? Yet if I hit you I could. Why do some European countries ban smacking and not shouting at children?
As I am scientifically minded I think an experiment with a baseball bat and the Oxford English dictionary is in order. Any volunteers?
The most dangerous drug
I think it was explained to you in an earlier reply. No one smokes because they think it's a great way to commit a slow suicide. In fact even in our enlightened age it's possible (in some countries) to not even be aware that smoking is deadly. Pleasure from smoking is the primary effect and whatever danger comes from it is accidental. Cigarette manufacturers certainly have a moral dilemma of selling a dangerous product on their hands but even in that case I dare to say it's still not their primary intention to kill their customers.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty pissed if someone walked up to me and spanked me on the arse as an adult. What makes this act ok when children are involved?
There are many things that are allowed to be done to a child that can not be done to an adult. Children are minors, and they do not receive the same rights as adults. Parents regularly and legitimately curtail children; freedom of speech and freedom of action are two obvious ones.
What does it achieve? It certainly doesn't work as a disciplinary measure, what it does do is enforce a pointless cycle of abuse. Didn't finish that TPS report, bookmark your butt with a nice red hand print, 'cause you know, that'll make you get it done on time next week wont it.
Properly used, it does work as a "disciplinary measure" -- however it is often not properly used, and only then might it "enforce a pointless cycle of abuse". The reason that it has been banned in places like schools is that it can be easily abused and misused. I also think that most people who are against spanking have never actually been spanked (abused maybe, but not spanked) and so do not actually see what is going on.
"Pleasure from smoking is the primary effect and whatever danger comes from it is accidental." You're out of your goddamn mind. Nobody starts smoking because they think it's pleasurable. And the danger that comes from it is the primary effect it has on the body.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
'People who smoke are not doing "nothing but cause harm", be it to themselves or others.' Name a tangible benefit of smoking.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
The freedom to encourage a mentally unstable child to commit suicide?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.