A federal grand jury finally took action today:
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles today indicted a woman of fraudulently using a MySpace.com account to “cyber-bully” a Missouri teenager who later hanged herself because she believed she was being rejected by a 16-year-old boy she met on the social networking website.
Lori Drew, 49, of O’Fallon, Mo., faces three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on the girl and one count of conspiracy.
The case set off a national furor when it was revealed that 13-year-old Megan Meier was the victim of a hoax perpetrated by Drew, who was the mother of one of the girl’s former friends.
Drew could do quite a bit of time:
Drew is scheduled to appear in court in June. If convicted, she faces up to five years in federal prison on the conspiracy count, and up to five years on each count of accessing protected computers for the purpose of intentionally inflicting emotional distress on Meier.
While much of the public anger has been focused on Drew, others were involved as well:
Last month, an employee of Drew, 19-year-old Ashley Grills, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” she created the false MySpace profile but Drew wrote some of the messages to Megan.
Grills said Drew suggested talking to Megan via the Internet to find out what Megan was saying about Drew’s daughter, who was a former friend.
Grills also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. The message was supposed to end the online relationship with “Josh” because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.
“I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace,” Grills told the morning show.
Ashley spoke to Good Morning America about her role in this tragedy. You can watch the video on Mahalo.
Update:
A blogger at Popehat raises interesting legal questions about the indictment:
The indictment also charges that she did these things in order to commit the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress against Megan Meier. But that isn’t an element of the crime. It’s a penalty provision, triggering the five-year maximum sentence under section 1030(c)(2)(B)(ii). If they didn’t make that penalty allegation, the penalty would have defaulted to the catch-all penalty provision of (c)(2)(A).
Let me run that past you again — she’s charged with federal crimes because she created a profile on a social networking site using a fake name, and then using the same access that anyone with a profile would have, accessed information about another user of the social network site. Everything else is just about the extent of the penalty.
That’s remarkable. It demonstrates how flexible many federal statutes are. When I was an AUSA, we used to say that we could indict nearly anyone for any transaction if we looked hard enough for a theory. This indictment makes that boast something less of a joke. Let me be clear — if Drew did what she’s accused of, she’s a vile human being and deserves punishment. But I, for one, am not entirely comfortable with a scheme of federal law flexible enough to address any wrong we might want to punish. I’m also not comfortable with the notion that creating a profile on a web site with a fake name — even if the site’s terms of service prohibit it — can be bootstrapped into a federal felony. The potential for abuse and selective prosecution — and for suppression of (for instance) anonymous and pseudonymous posting — is enormous.
Lore Drew and friends deserve some sort of punishment for their actions but it does seem like the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles is getting a bit too creative here. I’ll be looking for more legal experts to weigh in on this one.
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