MySpace cyberbullying suicide verdict overturned

Remember the case of Lori Drew, the so-called "MySpace Mom" who masqueraded as a teenage boy on the notorious social networking service and ended up goading a former friend of her daughter into committing suicide? Her guilty verdict -- three misdemeanors for computer fraud -- has been overturned.

Many headlines were written at the time bemoaning the original verdict. Drew was not convicted of any felony charges and was unlikely to earn any prison time, primarily with the dismissal of a conspiracy charge that she was directly responsible for the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier. Ultimately Drew was convicted only of violating clauses in the MySpace terms of service.

Sentencing was pending (she could still have faced a theoretical three years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines), but then, over the weekend, the case was "tentatively" dismissed altogether, setting aside the jury of the verdict.

What happened? The judge in the case is siding with defense attorneys and others who have argued that the jury's verdict is more about emotion than it is about the law and the way that law is supposed to work. Mainly, the real crime that Drew was found guilty of committing is creating a phony MySpace account, but she was prosecuted under laws designed to punish hardened computer hackers who use systems to abscond with data or wreak havoc on computer networks.

More specifically, legal observers have been deathly worried that the precedent set in this case would have subjected anyone who ever used a phony name to sign up for an account on an Internet service to a prison sentence. Definitely not good for the common man, and the verdict could have had catastrophically chilling effects for whistleblowers, activists, and other individuals who have to work beyond the letter of the law to get important messages out without fear of prosecution.

And yet it's hard to separate the horror of what Drew did from all of this, and clearly the public wants to see her punished for her hand in Meier's death. That day may yet come, should Meier's parents sue in civil court -- but it won't involve Drew spending time behind bars, and, thankfully, it won't have anything to do with her failure to read and abide by those nebulous terms of service agreements that every online service clings to.