Updating a previous item:A Missouri prosecutor said today that no charges would be filed in the case of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old girl who hung herself last year after a MySpace user told her the world would be a better place without her.
It was an 18-year-old girl working for Megan's neighbor who started the "Josh" account.
"There is no way that anybody could know that talking to someone or saying that you're mean to your friends on the Internet would create a substantial risk. It certainly created a potential risk and, unfortunately for the Meiers, that potential became reality. But under the law we just couldn't show that." -- St. Charles County, Missouri, Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas
Missouri's harassment statute says nothing about the Internet, and the stalking statute requires repeated conversations, so neither would apply in this case, Banas said.
Regardless, he said there is no doubt that parents should have stopped what was going on, and this does not mean that the responsible parties would not avoid punishment.
Posts
3 comments:
I hope the bitch who left the comments and the 'family' with her who allowed her to post this stuff meet with enough bad karma in their lives to partially compensate for this tragedy. Just because we are more anonymous due to the Internet doesn't mean we should be absolved from blame, nor does it give us a license to screw with people's lives.
I as a mother can not believe how unsupporting her mother was. she needed the love and support of the people closest to her ,Her parents.
Wow, that's terrible, I'm a bit surprised that there's no law currently in place about intentional actions that lead to another person's suicide. Either way, the other mother and her family's life will never be the same, and I imagine that they will face a massive civil suit.
But this has me wondering - if a man is standing at the top of a building, and someone yells at them that they are ugly or should just kill themselves, and they jump, is that unlawful? Clearly, it's immoral, but are there laws out there right now that would deal with something like that? Involuntary Manslaughter? Anything??
Post a Comment