A 47-year-old woman pretended to be a 16-year-old boy on line and tormented a 13-year-old girl she knew.

After getting the girl to fall in love with this nonexistent boy, the middle-aged woman turned mean, argued, and said "The world would be a better place without you." The girl immediately committed suicide. Has the woman committed a crime?

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what [Lori] Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

"Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

You need a statute if you want something to be a crime. Internet harassment is a crime in many states, including Wisconsin, but there are free speech limits on what can be criminalized.

Anyway, what was Drew's motivation? It looks as though she started out wanting to help her own daughter, who was rejected as a friend by the girl who killed herself:

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter...

“Lori laughed about it,” {said a neighbor], adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

A bizarre part of the story is that the police only heard about it because of a foosball table:

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

Drew went to the police about that. She filed a complaint that said she thought the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Incredible. It's hard to believe that a person who seems to be a functioning member of society could have such bad judgment, distorted perception, and pitilessness.