The Dark Diva Diaries

My apologies for not churning out your morning cuppa for a while.  SSG Dizzy got his scheduled changed around and the kids’ new homeschool program and the every day keeps me pretty busy around the house.  Plus, I was feeling a little burned out by some of the news, so decided to step back a bit, hang out with real-live people, until I got my head back on straight.  My schedule will change again in a few weeks, but I think I will keep some semblance of this new schedule because it works much better for me.  I guess we’ll see how it goes.  Thanks for bearing with me.

In any case, this little tidbit caught my eye, this morning, so I decided to add my $0.02:

From the: Washington Post: Woman Accused in MySpace Suicide Case Seeks to Have All Charges Dismissed

The lawyer for a Missouri mother accused of creating a fake MySpace page to harass a 13-year-old girl is arguing that charges should be tossed out of court because if she is guilty, then so are millions of Internet users every day.

Lori Drew became the focus of national outrage after the girl committed suicide. Court papers filed yesterday seize on a possible weakness in the prosecution case that has been noted by several legal experts since the May indictment: While Drew’s alleged behavior may have been wrong, there is no legal sanction against it.

If you haven’t heard about this case, basically what went down is this mother, with the aid of her teenage daughter, befriended a seriously troubled teenage girl, while pretending to be a teenage boy.  Gained her trust and then set out to harass her and essentially bully her, via the internet.  If that weren’t enough, other MySpace users were apparently brought into the mix to help harass the girl via comments on her MySpace page and others (that encouraged others to visit this vulnerable young girl’s page and bully her).

The young girl became so depressed that a “boy that she liked” was beginning to harass her and that “his friends” were harassing her, as well, that she eventually committed suicide (she was known to have attempted suicide in the past).

To her parents, it seemed as if their little girl took her own life because of a boy.  But, further investigation showed that “the boy” was actually a grown woman who had set all of these things into play.  Since I began to read about this case, many people have been calling for this woman’s head on a stake, but, if you follow the link, you will see that bringing this woman to justice via criminal means will be next to impossible.  The best they can hope to come away with is a verdict of guilty of harassment and that’s not going to require any jail time, very little, if any, community service, and minor fine.

What this woman did was heinous and childish.  With the exception of the harassment, she did nothing particularly illegal.  But, they are trying to prosecute her for violating MySpace TOS, something that thousands of people do every day (with no ill intentions, in mind, at all).

In short, this is a civil case.  If this case gets prosecuted on a criminal level, there is only a slippery slope ride down to legislation that makes it illegal for you to use pseudonyms online (something legislators are working on now and the blogosphere has been writing about).  The next step is to make it illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to use the internet, since we can’t protect kids from harassment via the world-wide web (hard enough protecting them from nline child predators).  Then, they’ll require some kind of proof of identity when you sign up for a social networking site.

The cold hard facts are as true on the web, as they are in real life.  You cannot be 100% protected anywhere.  But, if this girl’s family sues this lady and other families follow suit in response to severe bullying and the courts allow precedent to be set in such a way that future bullies understand that our society does not take their antics lightly, then maybe it will make a person think twice about acting like idiots on the web.

But, if they prosecute this lady for using a “false identity” on the web, then a lot of innocent individuals will be forced to pay the piper, even if they mean and are doing on harm.  And, it’s hard to make something, that amounts to a First Amendment issue, a crime.  I would like to see this lady pay for what she did, but I think she should pay with her pocketbook…taxpayers should not be forced to pay for her three hots and a cot.

Related links:

You May Already Be a Criminal