Lori Drew Dismissal Motion: Is It Enough?
Simple Justice: The death of teenager Megan Meier at the prodding of adult Lori Drew is a sad allegory for our time. There can be no one who isn’t deeply saddened by what happened, though it’s questionable whether anyone has yet learned a lesson from Lori Drew’s conduct.
But once Missouri mom Lori Drew was indicted in California for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 USC ยง1030, we left the realm of techno-morality and entered a twisted world of criminalizing behaviors so common as to make almost all computer users criminals. No one. of course, plans to arrest people as they type happily away on their keyboards, but should the indictment against Lori Drew stand, the government will have the ability to do so should someone be disturbed by the product of people’s computer.
Lori Drew’s lawyer, Dean Steward, has moved to dismiss the indictment, per the Wall Street Journal Law Blog and the Washington Post. Orin Kerr had a pro bono finger in the motion as well. The WSJ includes pdf links to the moving papers:
Here are the three motions to dismiss for: failure to state an offense, vagueness and unconstitutional delegation of prosecutorial power.
Rather than a single motion, the attack consists of three independent sets of papers attacking the indictment. According to Steward, the most significant motion is the attack for vagueness:
In its 22-year history, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has never before been used to criminally punish the violation of a website Terms of Service. The government’s novel theory is that the statute prohibits the violation of essentially all Terms of Service [hereinafter TOS] that apply to essentially all computers connected to the Internet.
As a matter of statutory construction, the government’s farreaching argument is either right or wrong. In either case, however, the indictment must…