Criminal

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has begun issuing subpoenas in the Megan Meier case, the Missouri teenager who committed suicide after a "boy" she met on MySpace abruptly turned on her and ended their relationship. According to the Los Angeles Times, the boy was allegedly Lori Drew, a neighbor who had pretended to be 16-year-old "Josh Evans" to gain Megan's trust. (You can read more about the case in a post I wrote in November.)

According to anonymous sources who spoke to the Times:   read more »

Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information about the identity of a user who had posted comments on the paper's website, LJWorld.com. The warrant, which appears to violate the federal Privacy Protection Act, raises serious concerns about governmental overreaching and highlights the need for adequate procedural protections for anonymous online speech.   read more »

Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com reports that a British blogger was recently threatened with arrest for inciting racial hatred. The blogger, who runs a controversial Christian blog and goes by the pseudonym Lionheart, stated on his blog that British police are threatening to arrest him for "stirring up racial hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

Reynolds recommends that if you're interested in supporting free speech rights -- and you should be if you are reading this blog -- you can contact the British Embassy to let them know that people shouldn't be arrested merely for writing things that the powers-that-be find distasteful.

(Note: Glenn Reynolds is on the CMLP's Board of Advisors.)

Boston Now reports that Peter Lowney, a political activist from Newton, Massachusetts, was convicted last week of violating the Massachusetts wiretapping statute (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99) and sentenced to six months probation and fined $500. The criminal case arose out of Lowney's concealed videotaping of a Boston University police sergeant during a political protest in 2006. Apparently Lowney was shooting footage of the protest when police ordered him to stop and then arrested him for continuing to operate the camera while hiding it in his coat. As part of the sentencing, the Brighton District Court ordered Lowney to remove the footage from the Internet.

The Massachusetts wiretapping statute criminalizes "interception of wire and oral communications" and defines "interception" as the secret recording of the contents of a communication through the use of an "intercepting device" without the permission of all parties to the communication. The statute provides that a person who "willfully commits an interception" may be punished with a fine of up to $10,000, imprisoned for up to five years, or both. Massachusetts is among the minority of states that prohibit recording a conversation without the permission of all parties involved. Most states and the federal wiretapping law permit secret recording of a conversatino if one party to the conversation consents.   read more »

City officials in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri unanimously passed a measure on November 21 making online harassment a crime, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail. The city's six-member Board of Aldermen passed the ordinance in response to 13-year-old Megan Meier's suicide.

Meier committed suicide after a "boy" she met on MySpace abruptly turned on her and ended their relationship. The boy was allegedly Lori Drew, a neighbor who had pretended to be 16-year-old "Josh Evans" to gain the trust of Megan, who had been fighting with Drew's daughter, according to the Los Angeles Times. (In an interesting side note, the local media refused to identify the neighbor who was allegedly involved, so several blogs such as RottenNeighbor.com and hitsusa.com did some investigating and identified Drew and posted the Drews' home address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and photographs.)

When it looked like local and federal prosecutors could not find a way to charge anyone for Meier's death, city officials stepped in and made online harassment a crime. As the Associated Press reports:
  read more »

As mentioned in our previous post on the Phoenix New Times arrests, two Phoenix-area news organizations filed a motion on October 19 requesting the Arizona Superior Court to publicly release documents related to the New Times grand jury investigation, presumably including the subpoena that caused all the ruckus.

The First Amendment Center reported yesterday that the court ordered the release of the requested documents on Wednesday, October 24. According to the First Amendment Center's article, Judge Baca of the Superior Court indicated that release was appropriate in part because the New Times had reported the existence of the grand jury subpeona on October 18, and in part because "other documents in the file didn't need to be kept secret to protect the grand jury process and the matter was of public concern."

The CMLP applauds this move, which is sure to contribute to free and open debate about the subpoena, which plainly overstepped the legitimate bounds of prosecutorial inquiry.

Welcome to the first episode of the Citizen Media Law Podcast, providing practical knowledge and tools for citizen journalists. This week, David Ardia responds to the federal shield bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, Colin Rhinesmith talks about legal threats to co-bloggers, and Sam Bayard reflects on the Phoenix New Times arrests.

Download the MP3 (time: 7:00)

Music used in this podcast was sampled and remixed from a track titled "Jazz House" by the Wicked Allstars, available on Magnatune.

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There's been extensive coverage (here, here, here, and here, to start) of the arrest and subsequent dismissal of charges against Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the founders of the Phoenix New Times, a print newspaper that also publishes on its website. I'll add my voice to the chorus in order to elaborate on some of the legal issues at stake.

The facts are as follows: Starting in July 2004, the Phoenix New Times published a number of articles critical of Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio. In one article published on its website in 2004, the newspaper disclosed Arpaio's home address as part of a story raising questions about his real estate holdings. The address was available in pubic records on the County Recorder and State Corporation Commission websites.

Authorities in Maricopa County began a criminal investigation of the newspaper for violation of section 13-2401 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, which makes it a felony to   read more »

knowingly make available on the world wide web the personal information of a peace officer, justice, judge, commissioner, public defender or prosecutor if the dissemination of the personal information poses an imminent and serious threat to the peace officer's, justice's, judge's, commissioner's, public defender's or prosecutor's safety or the safety of that person's immediate family and the threat is reasonably apparent to the person making the information available on the world wide web to be serious and imminent.

Notice that the statute only applies to publication on the Internet, not to print publications. The New Times filed a lawsuit in federal court in Arizona seeking a declaration that section 13-2401 violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and an injunction barring Maricopa County law enforcement officials from investigating or prosecuting the newspaper for violation of the statute.

Judge Neil Wake of the United States District Court for the District of Arizona issued an interesting opinion last week dealing with the uneasy tension between publicity rights and the First Amendment. The case, Frazier v. Boomsa, 2007 WL 2808559, addresses an Arizona law that makes it a misdemeanor to "knowingly use the name, portrait or picture of a deceased soldier for the purpose of advertising the sale of any goods,wares or merchandise or for the solicitation of patronage for any business" without the consent of the soldier or a family member. Arizona Revised Statutes section 13-3726. A companion provision creates a civil cause of action for using the name or likeness of any US soldier for advertising the sale of goods, soliciting patronage for a business, or "receiving consideration for the sale of any goods." Section 12-761. Both provisions have exceptions for "noncommercial purposes, including any news, public affairs or sports broadcast or account."

The Arizona legislature enacted these statutes in response to the activities of Dan Frazier, an Arizona resident and peace activist who runs a website called CarryaBigSticker.com. On his site, Frazier sells t-shirts, buttons, and other paraphernalia expressing his political views on a variety of topics. Among the items sold by Frazier are three t-shirts that contain antiwar messages printed over a background consisting of the names of 3,461 US soldiers who died in Iraq from March 20, 2003 to October 23, 2006. Elsewhere on the site, Frazier posted an "Open Letter to Families of the Fallen," in which he explains his decision to sell the t-shirts as connected to his personal views on the war. Frazier also uses his website to promote his political views in ways unrelated to the sale of merchandise by posting photographs documenting a local antiwar movement and commentaries by Frazier and others who share his political views.  read more »

Kuensel Online, the electronic version of Bhutan's English-language national newspaper, reported last week that a man who posted comments on its discussion forums was convicted of criminal libel:

On July 16 the Paro district court sentenced an employee of the National Housing Development Corporation (NHDC) to one year in prison, with an option to pay thrimthue, in the first ever online defamation case in Bhutan. The thrimthue of Nu. 36,000, in lieu of one year imprisonment, has to be paid within 10 days.

Defendant Yeshey Lotay was ordered to pay compensatory damages of Nu. 36,000 each to a couple, both forest rangers, within one month of the judgment. Pema Dorji and Ugyen, both civil servants in Paro dzongkhag, had filed the case against Yeshey Lotay for defamation in a kuenselonline discussion forum in August, 2006.

According to Kuensel Online, the defendant "pleaded guilty" in his opening statement and admitted that he acted with malice and had no proof to substantiate his allegations of bribery, corruption, and misuse of power.

Although it doesn't appear that Kuensel Online or the defendant's ISP were implicated in the case, the article quotes the court as stating that regulatory authorities and Internet Service Providers share equal responsibility to regulate Internet related crime:   read more »

"The websites that solicits online discussion forums must also be equally responsible to protect from the vices of any internet related crimes and the principle of vicarious liability impugn that it is just not good enough to say that the webmaster or editors are not responsible of the content with a disclaimer clause," said the Paro drangpon.