Prosecutor Wings It

What is it about federal prosecutors with Irish surnames that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up? Going back to the days when Patrick Fitzgerald told the entire nation a running series of lies in order to nail Scooter Libby for the actual crimes of the Democratic Party, an Irish surname these days is a warning flag for prosecutorial overreach and misconduct, and all too often, somebody ends up convicted as a felon and facing jail time for no better reason than that a Federal Law Enforcement official wanted to play God.

For today's instance, I give you Thomas O'Brien, federal prosecutor from L.A. He is the prosecutor who handled the so-called "Cyberbully" case, where a woman posed as a teenage boy on MySpace so as to play a cruel joke on a teenage girl. The girl later committed suicide after arguing with her mother.

Whether she caused the girl's death or not, the hoax perpetrated by the adult Lori Drew on teenager Megan Meier was despicable, but despicable doesn't equal illegal. It also does not justify a Fed using laws for other than their intended purposes and reading into them whatever the hell he wants to in order to pursue a prosecution, which is what O'Brien did.

After state of Missouri prosecutors determined no law had been broken and refused to prosecute the woman, O'Brien decided to do a little free-styling and proceeded to prosecute Drew with a law designed to punish Hackers and others using the Internet for explicitly criminal enterprises. There is nothing in the statute regarding harassment of individuals or minors. If this sounds a lot like Fed abuse of the RICO statutes, it’s because it is.

What Mrs. Drew did was not hacking, and thus, the premise for its use in a manner totally unintended by lawmakers was unwarranted. Not that that could stop O'Brien. Unconcerned about such niceties as waiting for the Legislature to actually reflect the will of the people on Cyberbullying, by, say, passing a law, O'Brien instead used the time-tested legal principles known as "Condita sursum res" and "Vestitus planto sententia", which roughly translated mean "making it up as I go along" and "flying by the seat of my pants".

On Tuesday, he secured a conviction, albeit one that had most of the jury in a dither as to whether justice had been served. And, not content to merely bend the law to his mighty will, O'Brien then mounted his lectern to give a scolding to the good citizens of America: "If you have children who are on the Internet and you are not watching what they are doing, you better be".

I wait with bated breath for the next words of wisdom to spring from O’Brien’s giant legal brain, including "look both ways before crossing the street", "floss regularly", and "don't get up from the table until you've eaten all your vegetables".

And let's put aside the patronizing tone of voice for the moment. Can we be entirely sure that O'Brien didn't intend his remarks as a threat? After all, this is the guy who conspired to put a woman in prison based on a crime that he invented. If we don't "watch what our children are doing on the Internet", what's going to happen to us?

Democrats, boys. They're everywhere.