Legal News

MySpace Case Sent to Jury, But Will Judge Have the Final Say?

By Ashby Jones

Well, that didn’t take too long. The jury trial involving Lori Drew — she of the fictitious MySpace page — was sent to the jury yesterday, after less than a week of testimony. A verdict could come any day now. Click here for the LA Times’s take on the final day of testimony.

To recap, briefly: the case centers on events leading up to the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier, an eighth-grader in suburban St. Louis. Meier hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom closet two years ago after she was suddenly dumped by someone she believed was a 16-year-old boy she’d met on the MySpace website. But the boy, Josh Evans, was a fictitious creation of Drew, the mother of one of Meier’s friends.

During the trial, prosecutors sought to portray Drew as a callous and reckless woman who gleefully took part in the hoax on Meier. But Drew’s attorney, H. Dean Steward, accused the prosecutors of engaging in a prosecution that was meant to exact revenge for the tragic death of a pretty young girl, even though Drew is not charged with her killing.

“You’d think this was a homicide case, but it’s not,” Steward told jurors during his closing arguments.

At least in this regard, Steward’s right; it’s not a homicide trial. Drew was charged, in essence, with intentionally violating the rules governing the use of computers on MySpace and then using a computer to intentionally inflict emotional distress.

On Friday afternoon, after the government finished its case, Steward asked to have the charges thrown out, arguing that Drew could not have intentionally violated MySpace rules because there was no evidence she’d ever read them. Judge George H. Wu, after considering the matter over the weekend, said Monday morning that it was “a complicated legal issue” that he had not yet resolved.

He allowed the trial to proceed, but said he would take the motion to dismiss under submission. That is, he could decide to throw out the case even if the jury reached a verdict.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 25, 2008 (boomark / email).