Criminal Law News

Balls of thick, black, crude oil sludge are headed toward the Louisiana coastline, threatening to endanger the health of local communities and destroy their livelihoods. Not that the Jindal administration is wasting any sleep over it. The Louisiana Legislature is all set to pass a bill that will ban cyberbullying of kids.

The bill would prohibit the use of the Internet or text messaging devices to send an electronic communication that is intended to “coerce, abuse, torment, harass, embarrass or cause any emotional distress to a person under the age of 17”. Under the bill, using the Internet, text messages or any other form of electronic communication methods to ”bully” under 17-year-olds would become a crime.

So under the new law, a young Louisiana girl who sends a text message to her ex-boyfriend calling him unprintable names, would be a criminal. For that matter, anyone who e-mails or sends anyone a similar private message on Facebook, MySpace or any other social networking site or public forums, would all be criminals. Supporters of the bill insist that a measure like this was long overdue. This week, controversy rages in Massachusetts over the suicide of a 16-year-old girl after bullying and harassment by her schoolmates.

You don’t have to be a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer to understand how silly this is. There’s no doubt that risks to sensitive teenage minds from, what they perceive as, bullying online or off-line, are real. However, it’s important that legislators define real risks to teenagers definitively. You can’t lug everything from an annoying, but harmless private text message, to a major rant on a public forum or Facebook, in the same category. You need to define exactly what constitutes a serious risk to a teenager’s mental state of mind, and target those risks only. This law targets so many different categories of non, semi, quasi, and total harassment that it could actually end up creating more problems than solving any.