| Judge Throws Out Lori Drew’s “MySpace Suicide” Convictions
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Last November, Lori Drew, was found innocent of felony charges in the MySpace hoax that eventually resulted in the suicide of Megan Meier. Drew was indicted in May of 2008 on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization. The charges each carried a maximum of 5 years in prison. While found innocent of the felony charges, Drew was in fact convicted of three misdemeanors, of accessing a computer without authorization. Judge Wu threw out the verdict, saying that if she was found to be guilty, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site’s terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor. Megan Meier committed suicide in October of 2006 after a MySpace romance went bad. The romance itself and the boy involved were in fact fictional, reportedly perpetrated as a vindictive prank by Drew, the mother of a former friend who lived down the street. As I said when charges were first filed against Drew, they were a stretch. The jury apparently didn’t believe the prosecutors’ argument that that violating MySpace’s terms of service to inflict emotional distress on someone was equivalent to hacking. Nice try, but … At the time of the incident, the state of resident of Megan Meier, Missouri, had no cyberbullying laws. That has since been changed. |
