The trial of Lori Drew of Missouri, will begin today in Los Angeles. The opening statements are expected this afternoon. 13 Year old Megan Meier committed suicide on October 17, 2006 after a fight with the hoax “Josh”, whom Megan thought was a 16-year old boy. Her former friend, the friend’s mother Lori Drew, and the mother’s 18 year old assistant Ashley Grills had set up the MySpace account with the fake identity of a “good-looking” boy who had just moved to the area. Megan Meier and Lori Drew’s daughter and their family were friends who lived in the same street, but the two girls drifted apart in 2006 .
Lori Drew allegedly encouraged her daughter and her employee Ashley Grills to “flirt” with Megan. But on October 16, another girl form the neighborhood received the password for the “Josh” account and sent Megan a message, telling her that he didn’t want to be her friend anymore because she was mean to her friends. After Megan received more mean messages from other people, Ashley Grill sent Megan Meier a final Message on October 17, saying that “the world would be a better place without [her]”. Grills told Good Morning America that she had wrote that message to end Megan’s relationship with the online hoax because she thought things had gotten too far. Later Megan’s parents found that she had hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom. She died in the hospital the next day.
After learning from Lori Drew’s involvement in the case, Missouri officials did not charge her, because they did not find any law that she had violated. Looking for anything to hold Drew responsible, the federal court in Los Angeles, where MySpace has it’s headquarter, has charged Drew with conspiracy and three counts of unauthorized access to protected computers (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [CFAA], 18 U.S.C. § 1030). The trial will not focus on whether Drew caused Megan to commit suicide, but on whether she violated MySpace’s terms of service in order to inflict emotional distress on Megan.
Each of these charges involve a maximum prison term of five years. According to the prosecutor, this will be the first time that the statute that was originally intended to fight cyber hacking will be used in a case of cyber bullying. Drew’s attorneys and other outside legal experts argued that a criminal convcition for a terms of service violation would be a dangerous expansion of the law. They argue that most people never read the terms of service before joining a social network. And that if Lori Drew never read the terms of service, could not have “(…)intentionally accessed and caused to be accessed a computer (…), namely, the MySpace servers (…), without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and, by means of interstate commerce obtained and caused to be obtained information from that computer to further tortious acts, namely intentional infliction of emotional distress on [Meier]”, as the indictment reads. As there is doubt as to whether the CFAA statute even applies to the conduct here, the outcome of this trial will be interesting and defining for the internet law.
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