A Stitch in Haste

The twin canards of "sue the deep pockets" and "it's never the parents' fault" strike again:

In the lawsuit, the parents allege that Texas resident Kiley Ryan Bowers, now serving a nine-year prison term in California, "utilized the site to contact, seduce, meet, assault and then harass and torment" their 15-year-old daughter, Kristin Helms. Bowers pleaded guilty last year to two counts of interstate travel to have sex with a minor and transporting child pornography. Helms committed suicide while an investigation against [Bowers] was pending.

The parents allege that MySpace should be held liable, and sued both Bowers and the site. "MySpace provides a ready means for sexual predators to easily gain direct access to young, innocent children that those predators would otherwise have no ability, or a substantially decreased ability, to locate or contact," the suit alleges.

It may well be true that MySpace "provides a ready means for sexual predators to easily gain direct access to young, innocent children" (we'll leave aside the gratuitous use of the word "innocent" and stipulate that the sexual intercourse between the two, while clearly not forced, was also not strictly "consensual" given the girl's age).

But "providing a ready means" is simply not a tort. Where, exactly, is the negligence by MySpace? Putting aside the pesky provisions of the Communications Decency Act (i.e., that insulate Internet sites from liability related to content posted on them), basic negligence law requires that a duty existed and was breached for there to be liability. What, exactly, was the duty owed by MySpace to Helms or her parents?

Was it this?

MySpace recently agreed to implement measures aimed at protecting youngsters on the site, including banning known sex offenders from the site and setting defaults on the profiles of teens to "private," so they can't easily be accessed by strangers.

Just two problems: (1) Bowers wasn't a "known sex offender" at the time (he certainly is now); (2) they didn't meet on MySpace — they met via Yahoo! IM and migrated their online contact to MySpace after the fact (i.e., Bowers was not a "stranger" to Helms when they started interacting on MySpace).

More:

They [her parents] took away her computer, shut down her MySpace.com profile and forbade her to contact Bowers. But Kristin Helms secretly communicated with Bowers, calling him behind her parents' back and using school computers to contact him.

Curious that the parents are not suing the school. That would be a far more viable negligence claim (it is trivial to block a website on a computer).

In any case, not every tragedy is a lawsuit, not every party involved in a criminal act is a criminal and not every party in a tortious act is a tortfeasor. The parents should certainly feel free to pursue Bowers to the fullest extent the civil law allows. But MySpace simply isn't responsible, any more than the store that sold Bowers the shoes he wore to his meetings with Helms or the station that sold him the gas he used to drive to her.

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Meanwhile:

A federal judge in New York ruled on Tuesday that a lawsuit contending that an NBC television series on pedophiles had played a role in the suicide of a Texas prosecutor two years ago could move forward.

The decision was a defeat for NBC Universal, producer of the "Dateline NBC" series "To Catch a Predator," which had asked the judge this year to dismiss the lawsuit.

The $105 million suit was originally filed in July by Patricia Conradt, the sister of Louis W. Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney in Rockwell County, Tex., who shot himself in November 2006 as he was about to be arrested by the police and accused of trying to solicit a minor online.

The alleged tort is the infamous "intentional infliction of emotional distress," which is always a thorny legal question that can vary widely from state to state. Another fascinating claim that the judge did not summarily dismiss is that NBC staff essentially became "state actors" — de facto police — and that the Fourth Amendment therefore applies to them (for example, a SWAT team was deployed even though the suspect had no history of violence — was that done for NBC's cameras, and was it constitutional?).

Stay tuned. (No pun intended.)