By: Leonard Winters
In line with our class discussion concerning the opinion in Osterlind v. Hill, I came across a case on the New York Times website (”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/us/20myspace.html”) that appears to further illustrate a disconnect between the legal system and conceptions of moral justice.
Today, the prosecution and defense presented their respective opening arguments in the trial of Lori Drew. Ms. Drew, a middle-aged woman, is accused of creating a fictitious MySpace account of a teenage boy and using that fake account to “taunt a 13-year-old girl,” ultimately driving that girl to commit suicide.
In 2006, 13 year-old Megan Meier began some sort of online relationship through MySpace with “Josh Evans,” the account that Drew created. After several weeks of chatting, Megan began receiving nasty messages from “Josh Evans” over MySpace, included one where “Josh” told Megan that “‘the world would be a better place’ without her.” As a result of the cruel messages, Megan responded, “‘You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over,’” before hanging herself in her home.
It appears Lori Drew believed that Megan Meier had been tormenting her own 13 year-old daughter at school and in a twisted way decided to teach Megan a lesson about humiliation and embarrassment through setting up the fictitious account and using the persona of a teenage boy to emotionally torment Megan, with the help of Ms. Drew’s own 13 year-old daughter and an 18 year-old assistant.
I think many people after reading what occurred intuitively assume that the article is a description of some sort of homicide trial; however, Ms. Drew has instead been charged with “conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.”
Does prosecuting Lori Drew under “a federal statute that is generally used to prosecute fraud that occurs across state lines,” run the risk of trivializing the suffering of Megan Meier and her ultimate death? Forgetting about legal elements for a moment, hasn’t Ms. Drew, according to the allegations, killed Megan Meier to the extent that we think of homicide as the killing of one human being by another?
In fact, in his opening statement, the federal prosecutor stated that Ms. Drew had “‘hatched a plan in order to prey on the psyche of a vulnerable 13-year-old,’” and that her goal was “‘to embarrass [Megan], to humiliate [Megan], to make fun of [Megan] and to hurt [Megan].’” Furthermore, the prosecutor noted that “Ms. Drew knew of Megan’s history of depression and attention-deficit disorder . . . because Ms. Drew had given Megan her medicine when she vacationed with the Drew Family.”
After such an opening statement, I wonder how many people in the courtroom still believed that they were simply witnessing a “fraud” trial? Similarly, irrespective of whether Ms. Drew is found guilty of committing fraud across state lines, do any of those same individuals believe that any result in this trial can amount to an adequate form of “justice”?
Judge George H. Wu’s jury instructions further highlight what some people may describe as the morally absurd nature of this trial. Judge Wu told the jurors “that Megan’s suicide would be ‘the subject of some testimony’ that could be relevant to their conclusions but that Ms. Drew was not charged with having anything to do with Megan’s death.”
Thus, If this trial represents all of the charges that Lori Drew ends up facing in connection with the death of Megan Meier, does the legal system run the risk of marginalizing Megan’s death to such an extent that at least in the eyes of the law it never occurred?
As the defense attorney deftly reminded the jury that “‘this is a computer abuse and fraud case, not a homicide case,’” I think this trial presents all of us with an opportunity to ask whether moral justice is being sacrificed for the sake of legal precision and if so, whether it is the “right” thing to do in this situation?
