The tragedy involving the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier because of cyberbullying brought on by her former friend’s mother Lori Drew is far from being over. Megan’s mother, Tina Meier, wants to press for maximum charges against Lori Drew, who set up a fake MySpace account in order to find out if Megan Meier had been badmouthing her daughter, after the two girls apparently had a falling out.

After Lori Drew got all the information she wanted out of Megan Meier, she decided to take things one step further. The fake account was of a boy, “Josh Evans”, who decided to dump Megan, with whom he was in an online relationship. One of the last things “Josh” said to Megan was that the world would be a better place without her. Lori Drew claims that some of the messages were written by third parties, indicating that more people were involved in the cruel joke.

The biggest sentence Drew can face so far is of three years in jail and a fine of a maximum of $300,000. Drew’s attorney, however, wants to ask the judge to overturn the verdict. This can be accomplished if the judge declared a verdict to be lacking of “legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury” to find it as the jury had done. Such a thing may be hard to achieve, especially since the jury eliminated the felony charges. The problem is that this decision will influence the extent to which Internet websites can define criminal law, and how big the stakes are if you commit Internet fraud.