By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist
The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles has found a way to bring charges against the suburban St. Louis mom who helped create a fake MySpace boyfriend for an emotionally unstable teenager.
Lori Drew is charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on Megan Meier. Megan, 13, hanged herself in her bedroom after receiving cruel messages from her supposed friend.
I have to say, I prefer this form of justice to the vigilantism that forced Drew's husband to lose his job and her teenage daughter to go into hiding.
But I'm wondering what can of worms is being opened here. The indictment charges that Drew and her co-conspirators "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member."
I'm not inclined to expend much sympathy on Lori Drew, but she's clearly being indicted because of the unintended consequences of her actions. There aren't enough lawyers in the world to prosecute everybody who embarrasses and bothers people in Cyberspace.
The indictment is out of Los Angeles because that's the home of MySpace. Read the details here.
"I'm not inclined to expend much sympathy on Lori Drew, but she's clearly being indicted because of the unintended consequences of her actions. There aren't enough lawyers in the world to prosecute everybody who embarrasses and bothers people in Cyberspace."
It's probably not prosecutable, but it should be.
If you drive drunk, or leave a loaded gun in a school yard, or throw bricks off a freeway overpass, you may not intend to actually kill someone, but if someone dies as a result of your recklessness disregard for their safety, you can be charged with involuntary manslaughter or even second degree murder.
This isn't merely a case of someone being 'bothered' by a stranger in Cyberspace. This woman knew the girl, she knew she suffered from depression. She spent over a month worming her way into the girl's confidence, getting her to fall in love, so that she could devastate her emotionally. As far as I'm concerned, that's orders of magnitude worse that drunk driving; drunk drivers are being careless, negligent, stupid, etc. but they aren't actively trying to hurt others, like this despicable woman was.