The jury rejected felony charges against Ms. Drew, and was deadlocked on a conspiracy count. Judge George Wu declared a mistrial on that charge.

The trial was an unusual use of computer fraud statutes prohibiting accessing a computer without authorization through interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Local prosecutors in Missouri declined to bring charges. But Thomas O’Brien, the United States attorney here, asserted jurisdiction on the theory that MySpace is based in Los Angeles, where its servers are housed.

Mr. O’Brien, who tried the case himself with the firepower of two subordinates, said he was pleased with the verdict. "The overwhelming message,” he said, “is if you are going to attempt to annoy or go after a little girl and you’re going to use the Internet to do so, this office and others across the country will hold you responsible.”

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Random Thoughts on the matter.

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The suicide was tragic but the notion that one event in a person's life can cause a person to kill themself is naive.

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Creating a teenage boy, or posing as a teenage boy, so as to get the troubled girl to write revealing letters is no doubt going too far. I am not overly familiar with the case but if the letters were intended as a type of blackmail or extortion, just take the internet out of it and deal with the case as you would any other blackmail or extortion case.

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It is ashame that the girl hadn't been taught the pleasure of getting fucking even, rather than turning ill feeling inward. When someone attacks you, you don't beat yourself up. Within the bounds of the law, you get even.

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Put this case aside. When the government or employer releases emails so as to hurt someone, that should not be acceptable behavior either. The state of georgia and local television stations recently used emails to taunt and hurt and try to destroy a female member of the DOT who has been trying to clean up the DOT. Who the hell cares if she wrote sexually explicit letters to her boyfriend or boyfriends. I say good for her.

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For some reason our society has decided that emails and chats do not deserve the same level of privacy as snail mail or that opening them is not the same as eavesdropping on telephone conversations. If the government had gone after the culprits in the most common sense way, they would have had to deal with their own internet bad behaviors and set precedent to establish those behaviors as illegal.

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Police routinely pretend to be someone else online so as to get damaging information against people. Course they always do it in the name of "saving the children" even when the actual reason has nothing to do with catching a predator.

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Anyways, the case was tragic. The trial as it was handled was ridiculous. To whether the woman drove the girl to suicide, that is really doubtful. Did the Federal Government drive the woman to suicide with their attacks on her? No, but only because the woman was not suicidal. The government and media's attack on her was just as savage.