I’ve said it before, give her frickin manslaughter, she mightn’t have meant it but the suicide was a direct result of her actions.

I tend to agree with Tonal Crow (comment 17). Or, as quoted elsewhere on the internet and in newspapers “This was a very aggressive, if not misguided, theory,” said Matt Levine, a New York-based defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. “Unfortunately, there’s not a law that covers every bad thing in the world. It’s a bad idea to use laws that have very different purpose.” The prosecutors really had to twist the law a lot in order to apply it here. I hope the verdict is overturned on appeal.
That’s not to say that Lori Drew is not morally guilty of doing something very bad. But not every bad thing has to be covered by the law. But I like to look at questions like this by thinking of some examples of cases that are similar in some ways.

What if my son asks some woman for a date and after she turns him down in an insulting manner he goes off and kills himself? That would be horrible and the woman should be ashamed of herself for being so cruel. But unless my son had some mental instability that she knew about and she was deliberately using that to kill him, it certainly isn’t murder. One could try to consider that manslaughter, but usually a connection like that is considered too much of a stretch. If you kill accidently in the commission of another crime the death is often separately punishable. But the other crime generally has to be a serious felony, not something like violating the fine print on the rules for signing up for an internet account. Suppose I were to sneak into the circus without a ticket by slipping underneath the tent and my action inadvertently frightened an elderly man who then died of a heart attack. Would that be manslaughter or second degree murder? I suppose the case could be made but it would be a real stretch. But no more of a stretch than this case.

Here is another example. I sign onto an internet dating site with a retouched picture of myself. I also add a few Harvard degrees and triple my salary. I get a date with a hot young executive who realizes she has been duped and is really angry at me for deceiving her. She can sue me for the money she spent getting ready for the date. She can even try to sue me for the value of her time. But should she be able to put me in jail just for violating the terms of the dating site agreement? That would be ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than what they are doing to Lori Drew. Now, suppose the woman was so angry at me for deceiving her that she got into her car and drove off in a blind rage and got herself killed in an auto accident. Before she died she called up her sister and told her what had happened and gave her enough information to identify me. Am I guilty of manslaughter? In a sense, maybe. I guess one could say that my actions killed her. I behaved horribly, dishonestly, perhaps criminally. And it caused some unstable young brilliant beautiful executive to die. But, frankly, I do not think that such a thing should be prosecuted.

Perhaps we need to change the law. The law should state a narrow and strictly delimited set of conditions that would apply to egregious deception on the internet but which clearly would not apply to more trivial cases. Otherwise, many people are going to be at the mercy of over zealous prosecutors. efinitely need not fear prosecution.

First, anybody who is so emotionally unstable that insults can tip them over into suicide should not be allowed any unsupervised socialising. In this regard, couldn’t the girl’s parents be charged with a felony? I’ve seen lesser crimes be pursued as neglect.

Second, if this were to be tried as a sexual offense then there would have to be sexual references on the part of the Adult. As far as I have seen, this isn’t the case. It may have been a dirty trick, but it wasn’t a sexual crime.

Third, suicide is the crime and responsibility of the person who commits the act. No matter the provocation, the choice is on the person who is comitting suicide. They decide to go through with it or not, no one decides for them. Therefore, fault of the action lies with them. If someone sells me a gallon of gas it isn’t thier fault if I use it to burn down a building. If someone insults me, it isn’t provocation for me to beat them. If those are true, how can Lori Drew be held responsible?

What Lori Drew allowed to happen was a bit of a dirty trick. That said, the child did deserve to be taught a lesson by our sociatal mores. Laws rule out physical violence, and it’s quite apparent the childs parents didn’t care, so what avenues were left? The child didn’t do anything illegal, just mean. Still, it was unacceptable behavior and deserved to be shown as such. Thier method of doing so wasn’t even that dirty, not when looked at from a step back. Our culture is rife with instances on this sort of thing, minus the suicide, and in most cases the people who observe it just nod thier heads and say the person deserved what they got.

The only reasons I can find that this is being blown up so large is because the child left a note claiming the incident as the reason for her suicide and the fact that Lori Drew, an adult, knew about it and actively involved herself in her childs activities online. And why not? There was no physical harm intended, quite the opposite. There were no sexual crimes intended, or perpetrated. Being involved as she was she could monitor her own childs behavior and see that the one that hurt her child learned a valuable lesson about how you do and do not treat people. All perfectly acceptable, if the child hadn’t committed suicide. So the main point is the girl killing herself.

Well, no matter what was said, morally and legally, she shouldn’t be held accountable for the suicide. So far they have had to twist the laws to find her guilty of anything. Now think on this. The crimes of a minor can be charged to the primary care givers. Suicide is a crime. Neglect is a crime. Libel and Slander are crimes. All more morally decrepit than insulting the neihbors kid. Hmm.

This case is fraught with problems. Personally I see one of two things happening – either there will be no further pursuit against anonymity on sites, or the whole thing will go to a higher court and the charges will be thrown out.

I fear that the case will become a precedent for further misuse of criminal law to reach pretty much any conduct the prosecutor dislikes. I hope that Drew will appeal, and that the court of appeals soundly will slap down the prosecutor’s theory. There is some hope for that, since the relevant appeals court is the 9th Circuit. Of course, the prosecutor could then appeal to the Supreme Court….

In fact, unless Drew really maintains her innocence, I bet the scentence will be very light and the prosecution sweeps the scentence under the rug in exchange for her not appealing.

The last phrase is most likely. The prosecutor very much wants to preserve and extend his unconstitutional power via this precedent, so I expect him to propose some such deal.

But I’m not entirely sure because if I recall correctly, Drew doesn’t have to be the person who appeals – the EFF, for example, could appeal the ruling.

Only a defendant can appeal her criminal conviction. Another group could, however, sue for a declaratory judgement that the statute, as interpreted by this prosecutor, is unconstitutional. That’s a more difficult row to hoe, however, than a direct appeal, in part because the challenge is more abstract.