Intellectual Property Law

Prosecution: Dead Girl?s Parents Must Be Heard at Cyberbullying Sentencing

By Kim Zetter

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are urging a U.S. district judge to allow the parents of a deceased girl to speak at the sentencing hearing of Lori Drew on Monday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krause, in writing to the court (.pdf), argued that Drew’s crime led directly to the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier in Missouri in 2006. Therefore her parents, Ron and Tina Meier, were unquestionably victims of her crime.

Krause argued that under the Crime Victim’s Rights Act, a victim was defined as “a person directly and proximately harmed as the result of the commission of a Federal offense. . . .”

Therefore, he said, “depriving the Meier family of their right of allocution would be an error.”

Prosecutors were responding to a request Drew’s defense attorney made last week, asking the court to not allow family or friends of the dead teen to speak at the sentencing hearing. Defense attorney H. Dean Steward told the court that Meier’s family and friends were not victims, since Drew was not convicted of causing Meier’s death, merely of unauthorized access to a computer.

“MySpace was the victim under the fraud statute, and if MySpace wants to bring people into the hearing to speak, fine,” Steward told Threat Level last week. “But under the law, she is not a victim.?

Drew was convicted last year in the nation’s first cyberbullying-related case after she and two teens created a fake MySpace profile in the identity of a non-existent 16-year-old boy named “Josh Evans.”

Following a heated online exchange between Megan Meier and “Josh,” Meier hanged herself in her bedroom closet.

In the absence of a federal cyberbullying law, prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Drew with violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law. They charged that Drew broke the law when she violated MySpace’s terms of service in opening a fake profile page and using it to harass the teen. The case was tried in Los Angeles, where MySpace’s servers are based.

Drew was found guilty of three misdemeanor counts involving unauthorized access of a computer and faces a maximum three years in prison and $300,000 fine. In a pre-sentencing report submitted to the court, probation officers recommended that Drew get a year probation and $5,000 fine. Prosecutors are seeking the full three-year sentence, plus a year of probation and a $5,000 fine.

In arguing that Meier’s parents were direct victims of Drew’s actions, Assistant U.S. Attorney Krause pointed to the last message Megan Meier purportedly wrote to “Josh Evans ” as evidence of Drew’s culpability in her death.

The government’s star witness testified during the trial that Meier wrote Josh that he was the kind of guy over whom a girl could kill herself.

“As [Megan's] own words explain, her death was the direct result of defendant’s vindictive assault,” Krause said.

That message, however, was called into question during cross-examination when the government’s witness admitted that she had no memory of it until a week before the trial against Drew began. During interviews with police after Meier’s death, as well as with media more than a year after the incident, the witness never mentioned this message from Meier.

See Also:

• Probation and $5,000 Fine Recommended for Lori Drew
• Can Lori Drew Verdict Survive the 9th Circuit
• Lori Drew Not Guilty of Felonies in Landmark Cyberbullying Trial
• Government’s Star Witness Stumbles: MySpace Hoax Was Her Idea, Not Drew’s
• Lori Drew Indicted in MySpace Suicide Case — Updated
• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Case Sets ‘Scary’ Legal Precedent
• Prosecutor: Lori Drew Intended to ‘Prey’ on Girl’s Psyche
• Lori Drew Files Motions to Dismiss in MySpace Cyberbullying Case …

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 12, 2009 (boomark / email).