Missouri woman charged with cyberbullying
After the 2006 suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier, the victim of an Internet hoax, Missouri is taking cyberbullying very seriously.
Elizabeth Thrasher now has the dubious honor of being the first person charged with the felony of cyberbullying under a new Missouri state law.
According to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Tuesday, Thrasher is accused of posting a photo of a teenage girl, along with personal information about her, in the "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist.
Prosecutors in the case said that the 40-year-old Thrasher posted the girl's picture, e-mail address, and cell phone number on the site, which is geared toward people interested in quick sexual encounters, reported the Post-Dispatch. The 17-year-old girl, who has not been named, reportedly received e-mails, text messages, and cell phone calls from strange men, forcing her to call the police.
The incident isn't random--the alleged victim is the daughter of Thrasher's ex-husband's girlfriend, noted the Post-Dispatch. And according to St. Charles County Prosecutor Jack Banas, Thrasher and the teen's mother had been arguing, prompting the girl to send a MySpace message to Thrasher telling her to grow up. The situation then escalated when Thrasher created a listing for the teen on the Craigslist adult site.
The Post-Dispatch quoted authorities who said the case is the first felony charge filed in St. Charles County under the new state law. Misdemeanor charges have been filed in other local cases.
But Thrasher's attorney, Michael Kielty, said he's not sure prosecutors can meet the elements of the charge, claiming that the statue is poorly written, according to the Post-Dispatch. "To charge a woman, a mother, with a felony for what is tantamount to a practical joke, that's awfully rash," he said. "That's taking it to the extreme."
The St. Charles County sheriff's office and attorney Kielty were not available for comment to CNET News.
The new cyberbullying law was passed as a response to Meier's suicide. Lori Drew, a neighbor of Meier, had been charged with using her MySpace account to bully the 13-year-old. Drew went so far as to manufacture a fake online boyfriend who eventually broke up with Meier, telling her in the final message that "the world would be a better place without you."
In July, a judge dismissed misdemeanor charges against Drew, with her lawyers arguing that the law at that time was vague.
Lance Whitney wears a few different technology hats--journalist, Web developer, and software trainer. He's a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. You can follow Lance on Twitter at @lancewhit. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET. 
FELONY. CYBER. BULLYING.
We're so far down the dominant-government sniveling dependent victicrat whinefest I don't know that there's any hope of recovery. Maybe there'll be sufficient backlash in 2010, but we might be too castrated at this point.
Not to give credence to the smart-mouth remark of "grow up", but the teen was right, in this case. Grow up, woman, and be the adult. How petty. (And stupid.)
Trying to pimp out a 17 year old is already a crime isn't it? Adding a BS, meaningless charge isn't helping matters, that it was done on line is irrelevant. That is what ruined the Megan Meier case, stretching too far. A good judge will always smack the hand of an overreaching prosecutor.
You have no clue on how mentally stable Megan was.
Whoever would prey on a 13 year old girls emotions like this is sick and deserves a one way ticket to the loony house.
The Meier situation is not comparable. The prosecutors had to do what they did because they were exploring a new theory of law for a new situation for which there were no specific statutes. Under the circumstances, the term "overreaching" hardly seems to apply. A 13-year-old girl was dead after an adult toyed with her emotions by impersonating another child on the internet. It was not a prank, as some seem to want to call it. It was bizarre and wanton cruelty directed at a child. Only luck and our respect for the rule of law has the perpetrator in that case avoiding jail.
As for cyberbulling laws, we all have to suspect that the first iterations of these might not achieve all we want. Anyone who cares also understands the difficulty of having such laws work without running afoul of basic freedoms of speech. But this is not BS---unless you are in favor of leaving a loophole in the law that allows 40-year-old adults to offer up the sexuality of children with impunity. In these areas, the courts have long recognized that there are reasonable limits to speech--even if those limits are hard to define. Moreover, it is not just the offenses, offering the child and fomenting harassment, that are legally critical here. The manner in which they were done amplifies the nature of the offenses. This was not a single individual speaking to one other, limiting the scope of the potential harassment. It was not an ad in a newspaper, which due to limited circulation area and the relative impermanence of the medium, will also have a limited impact. This was not a bathroom wall which will be seen by a handful of people in a very limited area, most of whom are not looking for sex at all. Who takes such scribblings seriously anyway? This was an ad in Craigslist, in a section devoted to sexual encounters by consenting adults, exposing a child to the unwanted sexual attentions of the world--which is exactly what the girl got. Pentest must think it OK to fail to protect children against the potential of vengeful adults to use the internet to target them for broadscale harassment, or that there is not something qualitatively and quantitatively different about the internet that make the situation potentially much worse than it might otherwise have been when the general laws about harassment were written. Had this person done a similar thing on the phone, getting some friends to harass the girl, there would be no question but that incitement could be added to the charges.
Nice.
"Judges come in good and bad. And even the good ones are not always legally free to put the brakes on overzealous, even fraudulent, prosecution. It often takes time for the problems to be seen. An innocent person might enjoy a few months of jail time, spending huge sums on attorneys, before the judge can even make a decision on say, coerced or false testimony, mistaken forensics, or even an clearly obvious rush to judgement on the part of police or prosecutors. I've seen it happen, innocent people waiting in jail before it was possible to a judge to rule. "
Some have spent decades.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/07/27/death_deceit_then_decades_of_silence/
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/7/26/223620.shtml
"The Meier situation is not comparable. The prosecutors had to do what they did because they were exploring a new theory of law for a new situation for which there were no specific statutes. Under the circumstances, the term "overreaching" hardly seems to apply."
Stretching a statue (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and attempting to justify it with what is at best tortured logic to get a conviction on a tangentially related issue (breaking MySpace's EULA), cause they could not sustain their original charges, is not over reaching? It looked like they where looking for anything that had a snow balls chance in hell of sticking. That was not only over reaching, it was shameful and pandering to an enraged public. It is not the prosecutors job to invent new crimes, that is the legislators job.
"A 13-year-old girl was dead after an adult toyed with her emotions by impersonating another child on the internet. It was not a prank, as some seem to want to call it. It was bizarre and wanton cruelty directed at a child."
Megan Meier clearly wasn't emotionally stable anyway. Most teenagers do not commit suicide over break ups and even less so over exclusively online relationships with people they've never meet in real life. I can't imagine her reaction being any better if she had been rejected in real life. It doesn't make it any less tragic, but the prank was probably just the last straw.
"But this is not BS---unless you are in favor of leaving a loophole in the law that allows 40-year-old adults to offer up the sexuality of children with impunity."
There is no evidence of a loop hole in this case. Missouri's harassment statute (Chapter 565
Offenses Against the Person 565.090) more than likely covers this. T Also offering up child for sex is already a crime as is purposely exposing them to sexual explicit content or purposely causing said exposure. This woman had to have know the responses to the ad would have been sexually explicit and even pornographic.
"In these areas, the courts have long recognized that there are reasonable limits to speech--even if those limits are hard to define."
They've also recognized that some definitions are to broad and target protected speech as well. The Communications Decency Act, Child Online Protection Act, and Pennsylvania law requiring ISPs to block the IPs of child porn sites where all found unconstitutional because they encroached on legitimate speech.
Protecting children is fine, but you can not do it at the expense of everyone else. This statute was rushed through in response to Megan Meirer's suicide, it is broadly worded and probably covers a lot of conduct it shouldn't. Had the legislators taken the time theyprobably could have crafted a much better, much tighter law. Now congress has gotten into the act with HR 1966 which is every bit as broad. Legislators are doing no favors to anyone by passing such ill conveived legislation in wake of tragities.
There are already many organisations trying to help those who are subject to bullying online, including one that Mozilla work with in the UK.
I think there is high likelihood that the constitutionality of these laws will be challenged since they are broadly worded. In fact as far as I can tell these laws these laws are little better than the law Bush signed in 2006 criminalizing annoying people online unless you disclose your identity.
http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-annoyance,+go+to+jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html
In this case I don't think they needed cyber-bullying law.
There is offering a minor up for sex and this women more than likely knew this would result in sexually explicit messages. Not to mention Missouri's harassment statute (Chapter 565
Offenses Against the Person 565.090) likely already covers this without cyber-bullying.
I pretty sure they could find something to charge her with, without this idiotic law.
Reminds me of a Simpsons bit.
Homer: Well, Dean, I'm really sorry for the running-you-over prank.
Dean (weakly): ...prank?
"Practical Jokes" can backfire ... and whoever engages in that practice should know that.
I'm awfully tired of American adults acting like a bunch of spoiled children who will say anything to rationalize their arrogant, obnoxious, anti-social lifestyles and/or actions.
Personally I'm ELATED that they threw the book at that woman. Maybe after another decade or so of such punishments, people will start to understand what it means to be a productive member of society that doesn't constantly revolve around ME ME ME ME ME.
I would like to see what all these *sses who think it's such a "joke" will think if we take THEIR sweet little 16 daughter and post her cellphone data to a place where dozens of men 2-4 times her age are relentlessly sexually propositioning her, and see whether they think it's such a BIG JOKE THEN.
I have absolutely no problem throwing the book at her. She handed out personal details of a CHILD to men seeking sex, she put this girl in genuine danger by flaunting her detail over he internet. But that's where things should end. This isn't a new offence. it's an old offence done in a new way. We never needed separate laws to protect people when this kind of thing was done through personal ads in the papers, or even when people put up hooker's calling cards with other people's details on them out of spite, and we don't need new laws to Cover this.
That woman needs a short spell in prison and to be registered as a sex offender, just like any other pimp offering an under-age girl to sex predators, what she doesn't need is to be a martyr to a poorly thought out law that will probably be struck down, leaving her unable to be tried a second time under double jeopardy.
This is a story for America, yeah?
What about other countries, that may - or may not, depending on the country - have a law of simmilar definition of under-age-ness that endanger someone in your country?
Or, how about making the law about cyberbullying to prevent international offences from being widespread?
The difference between this and putting the information of a person on the bathroom stall is scale: This is more like writting "For a good time call ***-***-****" on Frank's 2000-kilometer H.D.T.V., in 9001pt Comic Sans font, in permanent red/green/blue/white/black marker, and pointing the display upwards towards Google Earth's Satalites. Even if you were slapped on the wrist for something like that [Or served time], that number has to be officially black-listed forever as a result of the number being in Google Earth's database, and seen by many, many people - not all benign -; combine that with name, e-mail, the original person now has to take a whole new identity - even harder if a HD picture was imprinted on Frank's H.D.T.V. Now they have to get a full facial lift, etc., AND they have to remove all photos of their original identity for security. Even if they aren't underage, that's plenty worth creating a new law for unique punishment.
Given America's patent lawsuits and lawsuits pertaining to hot coffee [Bean coffee or the GTA kind], you'd think this law would pass and the punishment brought through without a second thought. You guys are weird.
- by rolexx69 September 15, 2009 5:38 PM PDT
- LOL!!! HAHAHAH!!! someone acctualy got in trouble for this? me an dmy buddys pull pranks on each other all the time.. throw each other up or a pic of a hot chick with their cell number.. get bombarded all night by pervs. ******* FUNNY! but if they busten always remember to use like 5 proxys.. this **** will always be funny tho
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(29 Comments)