Digital Manslaughter

The Julie Group, a worldwide group of digital forensic experts, writers like myself, legal experts, and a few interested parties continue to investigate, explore, and refine ideas about law, punishment, false accusation, and other phenomena having to do with cyberspace and digital media.

I've been involved from before the start. My blogging about Julie Amero contributed to a larger chorus of voices who eventually helped funnel the legal resources and arguments that were used to overturn a profoundly ill-advised and faulty guilty verdict. Look up "Julie Amero" in this blog or on a search engine and the richness of that story unfolds for you to explore.

Another member of the group (Karoli) recently blogged about another case that is just out of the group's scope but deserves your attention.

Megan Meier is a teenager who committed suicide by hanging herself. She was a teenager like so many we all know. Self-conscious, weight problems, suffered from ADHC, and avidly carried on a social life on the internet. The mainstream media gave the story its 15 minutes of attention and has moved on with little trace of ever having paid any attention.

Megan Meier was led to believe that an online chat acquaintance was a teen-aged boy who was attracted to her and in him she shared her trust. The "boy" turned out to be a neighbor parent who created the boy character to gain Megan's trust and use that trust to surreptitiously spy on what teens in the neighborhood might be saying about her own daughter.

And looming behind all of the subterfuge is a back story of petty animosities between the parents and teens of the two families. All of the details can be referenced online.

Megan is dead and that's the last irrefutable fact that can be made about any of this.

This is about how it happened.

We know a lot about teenagers and how they think. They remain physiologically incomplete adults until at least 19 years of age. Their brains remain incomplete until they are no longer teenagers and psychologically they remain a diverse and unknowable cacophony of luminous energies.

And we know they are infinitely sensitive and fragile.

The correspondence that sent Megan to her despair and death was abuse and there appears to be no law against it.

Megan was lured into a trust relationship that she believed was a peer to peer relationship, one teen to another. And she trusted in that relationship. The oh-so clever adult abuser at the other end of the line shaped and manipulated that trust relationship to a vulnerable dependency. Megan believed she had found a cyber-soul-mate, the neighbor had achieved a perfect con.

And once the perfect con had been achieved the neighbor exposed the con to others who shared a contempt for Megan's naive sincerity in the fictional relationship. The voice of the character changed from a loving, caring friend to someone who violated all the trust and shared spiritual goodwill of the earlier conversations into a vicious psychological attack on Megan's very real person.

The real Megan died that day. Emotionally disarmed, vulnerable, humiliated, and irredeemably violated, she checked out. We are told there is no law against this.

Is this not manslaughter performed in cyberspace executed by proxy?

This case is sufficiently and uniquely qualified and it is about time that the authorities answer the question.