Three years and $300000 doesn't seem like enough punishment for a 49-year-old woman who made a fake
Myspace with her daughter in order to manipulate and torment their emotionally fragile neighbor, coaxing her into suicide. However, that's as tough as the penalty gets because the jury knocked down felony charges and only convicted her of three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud.
The tech industry worries that if this verdict of "
computer fraud" stands, it could mean that every site on the
internet would be able to define the criminal law. Those small-stakes contracts members fill out (usually without reading) before joining any
website may suddenly become high-stakes criminal prohibitions.
This could definitely be a big change, and likely not a good one either. So the balance of how to punish the bully without setting an unwanted precedent is tough.
What the jury should have done is drop the computer fraud charges and throw her in jail with a felony. Not allowing post-menopausal women to terrorize the neighborhood children seems like a verdict that certainly wouldn't hurt our way of life.
It seems wrong to make for a more difficult relationship between law and the
internet just because of this one woman's actions, and yet it seems horrible to think of this same woman to be allowed to just go home without penalty after her actions have cost another mother to lose her daughter.
Courtesy of
http://www.tothecenter.com/
