From the Mind of Meegs

The jury just finished deliberating in the case of Lori Drew, the mother who infamously posted, along with others, vile messages while posing as a teenage boy on MySpace. The target of her actions committed suicide after receiving a message that the world would be better off without her.

But, in that great tradition in which the law itself is always the last to catch up with crime, the only charges that could be brought against Drew were charges of computer fraud: namely, that she violated the MySpace user agreement.

Now, to be clear, I hope the woman rots in jail for the rest of her natural life. But, as her attorney pointed out again in closing arguments, she's not being charged with murder, despite the fact that the DA hopes to paint her that way (hey, if you've already got the jury thinking she's a murderer—which she is—then it's a small thing for them to find her guilty of some random computer charge). Sounds like a good attorney doing his best job to defend a really shitty person, right?

Well, not quite. This attorney, Dean Steward, defends his client by saying that "nobody" reads user agreements and that his client can't have violated something she didn't read. This line of logic has a few problems. First of all, it's absolutely inaccurate to say that you can't violate something that you haven't read. Of course you can! If you put your name to something and you don't read it, then that's your own damn fault. No one will give you a moron pass on that one. Second of all, even if she didn't read the user agreement, any idiot can tell you that harassing someone and creating a false identity are probably against the user agreement. If I polled a hundred people and asked them to tell me what sort of activities a MySpace user agreement prohibited without reading said agreement, I'll bet "don't harass other users" and "don't create a false identity" would rank pretty high on the list. Talk about common freaking sense.

Furthermore, the attorney goes on to make arguments that seem to undermine his stated position that this case is about computer agreements and nothing more. He blames the dead girl's parents for not watching her close enough, and for not pulling the plug on her "relationship" with this imaginary boy. Now, tasteless as that is, I think he has a point. The parents should've been watching more closely. And I'll bet they are the first people in line to blame themselves for that. However, it seems to me that the question of whether her parents should've been watching her is only relevant if the question at hand is "Who is responsible for this girl's death?"—which is the very question that the attorney (correctly) says is NOT germane to the case. What, pray tell, does the level of parental supervision have to do with Lori Drew's decision to commit computer fraud, a decision that was made long before and completely independent of the parents' decision not to steer their emotionally fragile daughter away from MySpace?

That's like dropping a bowling ball from a 50-story building and then saying that the person who caught the ball with his skull should have moved out of the way. Yeah, he probably should have. But by the time his moving out of the way became an issue, you'd already made a reckless decision that put someone else in danger.

Of course, she got let off the hook on the most serious charges, so that shows what I know.