VENTURA, Calif. — A federal jury in Los Angeles recently largely rejected a landmark, cutting edge cyberbullying prosecution against a woman charged in the suicide of a teenager she had tormented online through the social networking Web site MySpace.
But a Ventura County cyberstalking prosecution, also involving MySpace, appears to be on surer legal footing, an expert in the growing field of cyberprosecutions said.
Though cyberstalking cases are also considered cutting edge, the pending Ventura County case against George Costales is more of a traditional prosecution, and considerably less of a legal stretch than the mostly unsuccessful federal case against Lori Drew, said Pepperdine Law School Assistant Professor Naomi Goodno.
Costales, 39, a welder from Warren, Mich., is charged with stalking a Thousand Oaks woman he became obsessed with on MySpace, driving to California and showing up on her doorstep with roses in hand. He is due back in court for a hearing Monday.
Basing her analysis of the Costales case on The Star's news reports and not the evidence, with which she is not familiar, Goodno said the case appears to be "more of what you think of as your traditional stalking case. The guy who hides behind, not bushes, but in this case a computer screen."
Conduct hasn't changed
Ventura County Deputy District Attorney David Russell, who is prosecuting Costales, said even though the case involves alleged cyberstalking, the defendant is charged with violating the same traditional stalking statute that has been California law since at least 1990.
"Though the tools used to commit stalking-type behavior have evolved to include e-mail, the Internet, MySpace, Facebook or any other Internet social networking Web site, the essence of the underlying conduct hasn't changed, and we prosecute stalking-type behavior under the existing statutes prohibiting such conduct," Russell said.
"Our office has prosecuted stalking cases involving the use of the Internet in the past, and we take very seriously stalking-type behavior whether it involves the use of more modern tools like the Internet or not," Russell said.
Costales' attorney, Deputy Public Defender Justin Tuttle, declined to comment.
In the first cyberbullying case ever brought, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles charged Drew, 49, a Missouri mother, with felony conspiracy in an Internet hoax played on 13-year-old neighbor Megan Meier.
Prosecutors said Drew and two others posed as a fictitious 16-year-old boy on MySpace in 2006 and sent flirtatious messages to Meier. Prosecutors said the "boy" then dumped Meier, writing, "The world would be a better place without you." Meier soon thereafter hanged herself.
Federal computer-fraud law
However, jurors deadlocked on the conspiracy charge and acquitted Drew on three other felony counts of accessing computers without authorization to inflict emotional harm on the girl. Instead, the panel convicted Drew of three lesser offenses of simply accessing computers without authorization.
The case hinged on a groundbreaking application of federal computer-fraud law, which the jury did not buy and which some legal experts said was a highly questionable stretch. The case was filed in Southern California because MySpace is based in Beverly Hills.
Goodno wrote an influential article about cybercrime in the Missouri Law Review shortly before Meier's death. After the girl's suicide in her home in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., Goodno's article was instrumental in that city's drafting of an ordinance making the type of online harassment to which Drew subjected the teenager a crime, the professor said.
Costales allegedly became fixated on the 29-year-old woman after spotting her MySpace profile and sending her unwanted e-mails for more than a year, even after the woman repeatedly tried to block his access to her MySpace page, Ventura County Sheriff's Department officials said. Costales also allegedly e-mailed video clips of himself that included explicit sexual language, and wrote that he was selling his business and moving to California because he loved the woman, the officials said.
Costales was arrested Nov. 5 after showing up at the woman's house. He remains in custody in lieu of $500,000 bail pending trial scheduled for Jan. 13. If convicted of the stalking charge, plus a second charge of possession of a deadly weapon, he could be sentenced to a maximum state prison term of three years and eight months.
'Hard case to prosecute'
Goodno said that key to the case is whether Costales made a "credible threat" against the alleged victim as required by the California stalking statute under which he is charged.
"Usually cases are only prosecuted if, for example in this case, the e-mails that he sent to her weren't just creepy, but they actually threatened her," Goodno said. "So if he didn't threaten her, I think it's a hard case to prosecute."
She added that even though Costales allegedly drove from Michigan and showed up on the woman's doorstep, "does that rise to the level of a threat? I don't know."
While prohibited from discussing the evidence in the case, Russell noted that late last month, Superior Court Judge James Cloninger determined that there was sufficient evidence for Costales to stand trial on the charges.
Goodno said cyberstalking prosecutions "are still cutting edge," noting that about one-third of the country's 50 states, not including California, have passed specific cyberstalking laws. California belongs to another group of states that have amended their existing general stalking statutes to make cyberstalking a crime, too.
"It's just a smorgasbord of laws," she said.