I agree. The understandable desire for retribution against this horrible woman (which I certainly do feel myself) is blinding folks to the fact that there may not be any legitimate crimes with which to charge her. She should be sued for every penny she owns or ever will own, and beyond that she should be shunned by every community in America, or anywhere else in the world. But beyond that, we need to be careful about how far we’re willing to go to punish her.
We’ve seen plenty of examples in recent years that justifiable moral outrage can lead us to make terrible mistakes. If a case for manslaughter or child endangerment can be made against Lori Drew, that would be fantastic as far as I’m concerned. But cooking up highly questionable pretexts for criminal prosecution based on the MySpace terms of service is wrong, and it does put us all in danger.
