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Friday forum: What sentence would you impose on Lori Drew, the MySpace bullying defendant?

By Douglas A. Berman

Over here at How Appealing, Howard Bashman has linked to a lot of the major media coverage of the split verdict in the MySpace bullying case.  Here are the basics from this New York Times coverage: A federal jury here issued what legal experts said was the country?s first cyberbullying verdict Wednesday, convicting a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager, who later committed suicide. The jury deadlocked on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori Drew, 49, and the judge, George H. Wu of Federal District Court, declared a mistrial on that charge. Although it was unclear how severely Ms. Drew would be punished ? the jury reduced the charges to misdemeanors from felonies, and no sentencing date was set ? the conviction was highly significant, computer fraud experts said, because it was the first time that a federal statute designed to combat computer crimes was used to prosecute what were essentially abuses of a user agreement on a social networking site...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on November 28, 2008 (boomark / email).