While I see what you’re driving at, I’m not really worried about a slippery slope here. There’s a world of difference between trolling (or whistleblowing) under an anonymous handle, and an adult plotting for months to deliberately drive a child to suicide.
Yes I suppose the precedent could be used maliciously against people in other circumstances with better motives for their anonymous identity, but as collateral damage to society goes, I’ll take that over the aftermath of the lynch mob that would otherwise have been absolutely necessary.
Why would it have been absolutely necessary, Stacy? Furthermore, wouldn’t it have actually been less theoretically harmful to our legal system for a lynch mob to have gone after the Drew family than to have a precedent which criminalizes all of the possible actions listed in this article? Not that I advocate retributive violence against the Drews, but objectively speaking, the lynch mob would be far less harmful to society than the bad precedent which can be, despite your protests, extremely easily abused.
As I said on my own blog about this subject, the ability to get people in trouble for free speech here is catastrophic if the prosecution’s arguments are taken seriously. Not only that, but Drew will have to live as a social leper wherever she and her husband go. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if her husband ends up divorcing her so that he can have a sense of normalcy in his life. Even as a conservative Reformed Protestant, I would find myself entirely sympathetic to a man who divorces his wife after finding out that she has a heart this utterly black and cold; at a minimum, she’d deserve the nickname “Satan’s apprentice” for life…
