Criminalizing internet chat room comments

The BBQ Pit
1

Gerald Krein is inder arrest in Oregon, charged with solicitation to commit murder. This AP story claims that prosecutors are expected to file an additional charge of attempted manslaughter.

What did he do? One thing was starting a Yahoo chat room called “Suicide Ideology”, and inviting women who entered to have sex with him and then kill themselves. According to the story, he claimed to have a large beam in his home suitable for multiple hangings. But there is no nuch beam in his home, which is a trailer.

The police claim that Krein has been making similar suggestions for several years, suggesting that people kill themselves. They acknowledge that they are not aware of any instances in which any of the people Krein chatted with have committed or even attempted suicide.

I’ve Googled numerous stories about Krein with different interpretations of the “plot” – that this group was to some to his home, or that they would kill themselves in their own homes on Valentine’s Day. There is also question about the size of the group – I’ve seen stories saying 31 women, but it is unclear whether these are all related to the current “plot” or whether this is a cumulative number of women who Krein has made this suggestion to over several years.

I have to say, while I find his concept reprehensible, charging this guy with a crime is bullshit. Maybe there’s more information that hasn’t been released, in fact I hope so, because if not we all might face charges based on some outrageous statements in the forums here.

Here are a couple of other stories with slightly different spins:
The Klamath Falls News
The Corvallis Gazette

2

I have a feeling our view might be unpopular, but I agree with you. Grownups can make up their own mind about whether they want to live or not.

3

The whole reson he was reported was because one woman was planning on killing her two children, before taking her own life (don’t know if they found her or not).

I agree that people can make up their own minds about what they want to do, but at least one person crossed the line from suicide into murder.

4

Yeah, but that was her choice as a free, individual adult. Why hold Krein culpable for the woman’s intentions?

5

Why, specifically, is it bullshit?

6

Supposedly planning. This is a yahoo chat room we’re talking about.

7

I thought he made that reasonably clear in his OP.

It’s not all about you, Bricker. I know you love it when threads like this turn into debates over legal minutiae and arcania, but it might surprise you to know that people can disagree with legal and lazw-enforcement decisions based on criteria that fall outside the legal code itself, and that rest on moral, ethical, or other principled grounds.

8

No, that’s not the reason for my request for specifics.

The OP says, "…we all might face charges based on some outrageous statements in the forums here. "

My first impression, and the reaction of the first reponse to the thread, is that suicide is a personal choice, so it should not be illegal - and therefore suggesting that someone commit suicide should also be legal. So it’s unclear to me if the OP is saying that outrageous statements online should never be considered seriously enough to warrant criminal charges, or if the charges are bullshit because suicide is a personal right for adults.

9

I thought suicide per se wasn’t a criminal offense. Didn’t Cecil cover this?

Isn’t this a HUGE stretch on the meaning of “solitication to commit murder”. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person by another person. This man didn’t hire a hitman or anything like that. I don’t see how this charge is going to fly in court.

10

At least one woman was planning, or stated she was planning, on killing her children, and he was -presumably- (it’s not explicitly stated) going to allow other women to murder their children in his home. Would that not qualify as accessory to murder, if he were successful? I presume these women will also stand trial, if found mentally capable of it. I presume that’s where the aforementioned charge stems from.

11

It was a yahoo chat room. Not only is it unlikely the woman who posted that she was planning on killing her children really was, but we don’t even know if there was such a woman at all. Anyone can go to a chat room and say “I’m going to kill my kids.” It could be a guy, a teenage girl, anybody.

12

How can you charge someone for soliciting a woman to murder her kids, when you don’t even know the woman or kids exist, let alone that she was really planning it?

13

I have had experience with this type of stuff. I used to work at AOL and had to deal with all the cases where someone would state in chat/IMs/email that they were going to kill themselves. There were basically two types of these things. The first type usually started with something like "Next week at this time(usually with a specific time/date) I will no longer exist on this planet as I plan on {insert suicide method here}. The second type were like “I’m really sad. My life sucks. I just swallowed a bottle of pills”*. When I got these I had to call Operation security and call the police. It wasn’t much fun.

From my limited understanding, a suicide threat via chat/IM/email is treated exactly the same legally as it would be if someone came up to you on the street and said they were going to kill themselves. I am sure that many people who threatened suicide on AOL were suprised when the cops knocked on their door. I know of at least one case where the person was serious and the cops got there in time and saved the guys life. Whether or not the guy is happy about that, I don’t know. I also read a transcript of an IRC chat where, supposedly, a guy overdosed, live on his home cam while his nice IRC friends watched. The IRC one could be an urban ledgend but I don’t think it is.

Even though this is “just a chat room”, suicide threats and death threats are taken very seriously. The people making these threats could be lying but then again they could be serious. Since you do not know you have to take the threat seriously.

Slee

14

It’s not an urban legend, it did happen. Link: kuro5hin.org

15

This is not an Urban Legend.
It was on a website for drug-users.
This kid was bragging about how much different type of drugs he was using and a couple of guys were egging him on.
When he passed out in front of the webcam, people didn’t know where he was.
Most of them panicked and got out, but a few stayed around joking about it.
It was a pretty sad story actually, mostly for the kids parents.

16

Fair enough.

I thought you were making a sarcastic point about specific legal issues, and that you were responding to the OP’s belief that “charging this guy with a crime is bullshit.”

My apologies.

17

That’s a fair question, and in my mind the issue isn’t about suicide per se. It’s one of free speech and advocating outrageous acts or moral (maybe more accurately, immoral) positions, as opposed to acting in furtherance of those acts or positions.

I can imagine Krein crossing a line into what I would agree is illegal behavior or speech. For instance, if he provided his RW name and address and offered one of these woman a safe and private space where she could murder her children before killing herself, I would agree that he would be at least an accessory before the fact to murder, and perhaps a murderer himself depending on how Oregon’s conspiracy laws are written. Even if no one died because a plot was foiled, he might legitimately be charged for the attempt.

But that’s not the sense I get about this situation. My impression is that he was advocating suicide as a good idea, and suggesting that if a bunch of people all do it on Valentine’s Day, it would somehow be more meaningful or have more impact. Oh, and, yes, well, if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, why don’t you drop by and fuck him first?

Let’s take the internet out of this. If my neighbor tells me she’s thinking of killing herself and her children and I say, “Great idea!”, am I committing a crime? I don’t think so. Let’s go a little further… I say to my neightbor, “You are an embarassment to the species. It would really be better for all concerned if you swallowed some Drano. And think about feeding some to those brats of yours, 'cause they’re going to whine incessantly when they find your body, and that will be really annoying to me.” Again, am I committing a crime by suggesting this? I don’t think so. I would be a total shithead, but not a criminal one, IMO.

The sense I get is that this guy is a cheerleader for suicide, others’ suicide of course. That makes him a really sick fuck, not a murderer.

And like my OP said, perhaps there is more evidence that hasn’t been released that points to criminal culpability, but I don’t see it in the stories so far.

18

That may be true, but the question here is whether failing to do so constitutes murder. I just don’t see as how it does. If a person can be charged with murder for making comments in an internet chat room that may or may not have convinced someone to kill themself, it sets a pretty scary precedent, IMO.

19

It was not a website for drug users, actually - it was IRC. He was a friend of a friend, so I got to know a good bit about what happened - most of it is online now anyways.

20

Well, what a lot of people seem to forget (or not get at all in the first place) is that chat rooms/IMs/emails are the same as real life meetings. Threatening to kill someone in an email is that same as mailing a threatening letter which is the same as calling the person which is the same as telling it to them personally(#1). Same with suicide.

Legally it is the same unless something has changed since I worked at AOL. At AOL they had policies about this because if someone reported to AOL a death or suicide threat and AOL did not take it seriously then AOL could be held liable. I dealt with 5 or 10 of these a week(and hated all of them). People tend to get removed from it because it is over the computer, heck I’ve done it myself on these forums back when I was drinking, not realizing that there is another person on the other side of the computer. So they say things they never would in real life.

I am not a lawyer so I do not know if the crimes this guy is charged with are valid but that is a matter of the law itself. The fact that he did it in a chat room is trivial to the case as far as I know.

Slee

#1. This is the way it was explained to me at AOL when they put us through training on these issues.