If we can't freely get girls to commit suicide, then the terrorists have won...

Remember Lori Drew? Sure you do. She's the sub-human mother who created a fake MySpace account to send hateful messages to one of her daughter's former friends, a 13 year old girl with a history of depression. Messages that caused the child to hang herself in her closet. Since there is no way to charge a person with being generally evil, prosecutors had to charge her with violating MySpace's user agreement terms.

It would be hard to find someone to defend the first person who shows up when you google the phrase "people you'll meet in hell". At least until you head over to Reason magazine:

[L]ast week Thomas P. O'Brien, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, brought four federal charges against her: one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. "To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation," O'Brien said. "But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look."

A little too hard, I'd say. O'Brien is by no means alone in wanting to hold Drew at least partly responsible for Meier's death, but the law does not allow him to do so. So instead he has resorted to legal contortions aimed at converting Drew's violation of MySpace rules into a federal crime. (The rationale for indicting Drew in California, by the way, is that MySpace is based in Beverly Hills.) There are plenty of reprehensible things people do that are not and should not be crimes. One of them is being mean to emotionally vulnerable people. Since individual reactions to insults are unpredictable and highly variable, a rule that criminalized speech when it leads to suicide or other forms of self-harm would chill any expression more negative than "Nice day, isn't it?" Because there is no such rule, O'Brien has twisted a law aimed at fraud, spying, vandalism, and child pornography into an excuse to punish a woman everyone hates.

Don't you see? The Man is trying to keep Lori Drew down! We need to elect RONPAUL!!!1!11!!!eleventy!!! to keep injustice like this from spreading.

/Libertarian