Mashable doesn’t seem to be letting me post a comment at the moment. Anyway, regarding @kevinscold is Funny…Is It Legal?
The fact that so many potential jurors will already be familiar with the story is exactly the problem with the judge deciding to let stand the case, despite the strong reasons for dismissal. This means that even though said jurors will likely be instructed not to take the mitigating circumstances of Megan’s death into consideration, they will.
This seems to be rather specious reasoning — Mashable seem to be arguing that if there is a) a potential crime committed by someone and b) that alleged crime occurs in conjunction with activities that are widely publicized and considered extremely inflammatory to the defendant that a judge is acting improper in letting a case go forward.
The problem with this case going forward is that it is an absurd reading of the statute. Whether or not the defendant is likable and/or people are likely to already know more about the case than is presented in the courtroom really shouldn’t affect such decisions.
This will set an unfortunate precedent for the future. It’s important to note that Lori isn’t being prosecuted for what she did with the fake MySpace profile, only that she set one up.
Again, I think this case is absurd but clearly it is not going to be used to go after Kevin Rose. Prosecutors do have something called prosecutorial discretion and clearly this (idiot) prosecutor is using that discretion to attempt to turn a heinous act into a criminal one. Leaping from there to prosecuting Kevin Rose for his cold’s Twitter account seems like the worst sort of slippery slope argument.
The real tragedy here is that latter part — that prosecutorial discretion is frequently used and abused in precisely this manner to transform merely reprehensible behavior into a prosecutable crime.