Web suicide watchers tough to prosecute
A teenager lay dying in bed after swallowing a lethal does of narcotics while his suicide attempt is broadcasted to the Web. A group of concerned viewers attempted to intervene by alerting the authorities. Others however prodded the teen to take his own life with messages such as "do it."
Authorities in Pembroke Pines, Fla., are now trying to determine whether any of the people who encouraged the teen to kill himself violated Florida law, according to several reports. The incident began last week when the 19-year-old man Webcasted himself on Justin.TV and posted a message at a Web site dedicated to body building that he intended to commit suicide. About 12 hours later, police found his body in his Hollywood, Fla., home.
A. Randall Haas, a criminal lawyer in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., believes that state law gives prosecutors plenty of room to charge someone with manslaughter in cases where someone allegedly "assists" a person with suicide or a death occurs because of someone's negligence. Florida criminal statute 782.07 says: "The killing of a human being by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another...is manslaughter."
"It all comes down to how much is contributed to the victim being able to do the act," Haas told CNET News on Monday. "If you tell me you're depressed and want to kill yourself and I hand you a gun, I could be found criminally liable. If someone is on the edge and you help give him a push then you may have to answer for that. What has to be decided is whether communicating with someone over the Internet rises to the level necessary for someone to be considered culpable."
Some of the other questions that have yet to be answered are whether Florida officials can hold someone living in Los Angeles or the United Kingdom accountable for violating one of their laws. Also, should prosecutors bring charges, how will they prove to a jury that the people who encouraged the victim to kill himself knew it was real suicide attempt?
They can't, says Guy Womack, attorney with Houston-based Guy Womack and Associates. Womack is an expert at federal criminal law and recently tried a criminal case in Florida.
Womack said that the Internet is full of hoaxes and spoofs and game playing is common. He said all anyone charged for negligence has to say to defend themselves is that they had no way to determine the suicide attempt was legitimate.
"For prosecutors to prove their case, they would have to prove that that those watching knew what the (victim) was going to do," Womack said. "And there was no way they could have. They didn't realize what they were seeing. They couldn't reasonably foresee that he was going to kill himself."
Haas gave the same assessment of what a defense would be but said that authorities may feel compelled in a case like this not to let such callous behavior go unpunished.
"I'd hate to be prosecuting the case," Haas said, "but I got to tell you something else, I'd hate to defend it. A person that is in such fragile condition, those words could have put the person over the edge."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
If person A says they wish person B would die, but person B never got that message, then is person A still responsible?
I'm just imagining that the kid is laying there and people are typing comments as he's lying there. If he doesn't get up to read the comments, then whatever was typed never had an impact on him.
Really.... I hate to say this, but if the guy really wanted to die, it might have been better to just let him die. Maybe he will have a better time in his next life on this planet.
2. The people who encouraged it are despicable, but are not murderers under any rational definition. This guy was sick and it was his choice.
You know, laws are generally created for some rational reason. And, I think stretching the intent of this one to include a bunch of people encouraging the guy to do what he apparently set out to do cannot be viewed as illegal.
Perhaps the next time a fighter dies in a boxing ring, we arrest everybody? That's even worse, because the guy didn't want to die, yet everybody encouraged the winner to keep punching...
See how silly this can get?
You most likely can. Unless you're going through a proxy computer that would hide your IP any computer you connect to will know your IP number so that it can send info back to you, but you'd still have to figure out who was using it. Like was it you or was it your brother watching it at the time or was one of your friends over or something or was your next door neighbor just stealing your wi fi. Never used Justin.TV. Do you need usernames to log into that or what? How's that work. They could use usernames maybe to figure out who was who once they had the IP.
Finally, I think that suicide should be legalized, because if you've gotta go, you've gotta go, right!
Here's the question, why would you tell someone to jump off the cliff?
p.s. when you actualy do it and break a leg don't sue me please
I ought to go to jail? I sound horrible, I know, but I was getting really tired of hearing that and even more tired of being woken in the middle of the night to hear that crap. I sure as heck felt no remorse for my words at the hours he would wake me. And who is at fault here? I did not raise the boy, nor was he my responsibility; I was just his roommate for one semester. A tortured roommate, I might add, who should not have been forced to listen to such nonsense in the middle of the night.
I do not think you can put the blame of death by suicide of a depressed individual on the people around them, and especially a bunch of anonymous voices over the Net. We are not doctors and we can't fix his problems. I most certainly could not fix whatever problem my roommate had, nor did I feel a sense of responsibility for his mental health. That might sound really cold, but live through it and you might do exactly what I did.
Perhaps this is not quite the same as telling somebody to jump off a cliff, but it is probably even closer to home on this story. In my opinion, you cannot publish the public for suicide of a mentally depressed individual. Having lived with one, I can tell you that they are a few screws short and a normal person not having seen this before would think the guy is a goof-off and would dismiss his claims as bogus... until it happened.
No one lives in a chat room or on a webcast. You don't have to chat with him or watch him if you don't want to.
A life is a precious thing. To have the heart to sit there and encourage the act of taking it away is plain sick and wrong.
An attempt of prosecution, resulting in conviction or not, will at least put some sense in some of us and hopefully discourage them from saying "do it" again.
Cyber space is much uncharted water for the justice system. But it doesn't mean they shouldn't go in and seek justice.
If these people were saying "do it" face to face with the kid, would that make a difference to you? At one point in history, drunk driving wasn't illegal, but was it the right thing to do?
For those who doubt the impact of cyber-interaction, there's a thing called cyber-bullying. It has caused fatalities in many cases. Precious young lives have lost because of the nasty act of the cowards sitting behind a web curtain. Guess what, cyber space needs justice too.
Everything you say in your reply can be used as an excuse by any cyber criminal. But how can spam companies be prosecuted and found guilty? And how can individuals be sued and found guilty for downloading pirated music?
"The concept of enforcing some local law on citizens of another country/jurisdiction is questionable at best. "
Or is it?
You're walking down the street in Central Park in NYC.
A perfect stranger accosts you and gives you a sob story about how bad his life is and that he is going to try to commit suicide. He shows you his pills.
You tell him fine, do what you want, leave me alone.
He takes the pills and runs off before you can even try to stop him.
You shrug your shoulders, and continue on your way.
Later, on your way back, you come across his body.
Under the same logic of prosecuting the participative audience on the internet, you're guilty of manslaughter.
In a similar case dealing with the suicide of Megan Meiers, the perpetrators of the hoax that led to her death were only tried for violation of MySpace's EULA, NOT for homicide. In that case, the people knew the victim personally, and were shown to have engaged in harassing behavior. Megan did NOT invite harassment, and did not seek out others to harass her.
The fellow who killed himself apparently did invite the audience to push him one way or the other. It was not unwanted harrassment. While those who screamed for him to do it acted in a despicable manner, they did not force the young man to kill himself, that was his action, and his decision alone.
So skip the legal procedings. They are stupid, expensive, and won't make any tangible difference in people's behavior on the net. Win or lose, it will make some greedy lawyers very well off financially.
Give the names to MySpace, and the ISPs of the people. If they violated the terms of service, then let those companies boot them of the net.
If you would, let's try changing only one thing in this story - the location - from a virtual room to a real room.
If this all happened in someone's house, would you change your perspective now?
- by November 25, 2008 2:18 PM PST
- The past prexent and future tenses of broadcast are broadcast, not broadcasted. Similarly with Webcast. In both cases the verb and the noun are the same.
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(34 Comments)Thank you