Online vigilante scumbags take note: You CAN be convicted of a crime

This isn't RSO related but relevant here because this girl was convicted of a crime for using the Internet for the purpose of goading someone to commit suicide.

No doubt there will be an appeal, so we'll have to see what those courts decide.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/suicide-texting-trial-michelle-carter-conrad-roy.html?_r=0

Guilty Verdict for Young Woman Who Urged Friend to Kill Himself
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JESS BIDGOODJUNE 16, 2017

TAUNTON, Mass. — For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him.

That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility. Ms. Carter, now 20, is to be sentenced Aug. 3 and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The judge’s decision, handed down on Friday, stunned many legal experts with its conclusion that words alone could cause a suicide.

“This is saying that what she did is killing him, that her words literally killed him, that the murder weapon here was her words,” said Matthew Segal, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which raised concerns about the case to the state’s highest court. “That is a drastic expansion of criminal law in Massachusetts.”

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Ms. Carter’s defense team is expected to appeal the verdict. Legal experts said that it seemed to extend manslaughter law into new territory, and that if it stood, it could have far-reaching implications, at least in Massachusetts.

“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

Judge Moniz unspooled his verdict in a packed courtroom, which was silent except for his voice and Ms. Carter’s gasping sobs. By the time he told Ms. Carter to stand up, and pronounced her guilty, the two families seated on either side of the courtroom’s aisle — Ms. Carter’s and Mr. Roy’s — wept, too.

The verdict concluded an emotionally draining weeklong trial in southeastern Massachusetts involving two troubled teenagers who had built a virtual relationship largely on texting from 2012 to 2014. Ms. Carter, then 17, started out encouraging Mr. Roy, 18, to seek treatment for his depression but then abruptly changed, and in the two weeks before he killed himself on July 12, 2014, she encouraged him, repeatedly, to do it.

For all the scrutiny during the trial of their texts, the judge based his guilty verdict on a phone conversation.

Once Mr. Roy drove his truck to a remote spot at a Kmart parking lot, the two ceased texting and instead talked on their cellphones. When Mr. Roy, with fumes gathering in the cab of his truck, apparently had a change of heart and stepped out, the judge said, Ms. Carter told him to get back in, fully knowing “his ambiguities, his fears, his concerns.”

“This court finds,” the judge added, “that instructing Mr. Roy to get back in the truck constituted wanton and reckless conduct.”

But the phone conversation was not recorded, and the only evidence of its content came three months after the suicide in a text from Ms. Carter to a friend.

“Sam his death is my fault, like honestly I could have stopped him,” Ms. Carter wrote. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared.”

She said she then instructed him “to get back in.”

The prosecution made this phone call, as described in Ms. Carter’s text, the heart of its case. And the judge accepted it as factual and incriminating.

The defense strongly argued that there was nothing to substantiate what Ms. Carter had said on the phone and insisted that Mr. Conrad, who had tried to kill himself before, was determined to take his own life, regardless of anything Ms. Carter did or said.

Judge Moniz acknowledged that Mr. Roy had taken steps to cause his own death, like researching suicide methods, obtaining a generator and then the water pump with which he ultimately poisoned himself. Indeed, Judge Moniz said that Ms. Carter’s text messages pressuring him to kill himself had not, on their own, caused his death.

Instead, the judge zeroed in on the moment that Mr. Roy climbed out of his truck.

“He breaks that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” Judge Moniz said. “He takes himself out of that toxic environment that it has become.” That, the judge said, was a clear indication that Mr. Roy — as on his previous suicide attempts — wanted to save himself.

But, the judge said, Ms. Carter had a duty to help Mr. Roy after she had put him in danger by ordering him back into the truck.

“She admits in a subsequent text that she did nothing, she did not call the police or Mr. Roy’s family,” the judge said. “She called no one. And finally, she did not issue a simple additional instruction: ‘Get out of the truck.’”

The verdict stunned many legal specialists because suicide is generally considered, legally, to result from a person’s free will.

Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University, said the decision surprised him because the manslaughter charge seemed “a stretch” to begin with. Because Ms. Carter was not at the scene, and Mr. Roy ultimately acted alone, he said, it was difficult to prove she “caused” the death.

Ms. Gertner of Harvard said that likely grounds for appeal would be that the verdict had “extended the law of involuntary manslaughter to an arena into which it hasn’t been extended before — the notion of liability with respect to a suicide for someone who failed to act, who wasn’t present, who didn’t provide the instrumentalities for the suicide and the concept of a failure to intervene are all unique and that’s what would be litigated.”

At its core, the case was about two troubled teenagers and the fatal path their online relationship took.

Mr. Roy was a gentle but deeply depressed teenager who worked as a tugboat captain. He had graduated from high school with a college scholarship, but worried about the social anxiety he might experience there.

Ms. Carter was a high school student with homework to finish and a love of the television show “Glee,” but she said her life was controlled by an eating disorder. She too was wrought by social anxiety, desperately seeking the approval of friends whom she admired but worried did not truly like her.

When Mr. Roy told Ms. Carter in June 2014 that he was considering suicide, she told him he had a lot to live for and urged him to seek help.

“I’m trying my best to dig you out,” Ms. Carter wrote.

“I don’t wanna be dug out,” Mr. Roy answered, adding later, “I WANT TO DIE.”

By early July, she began to embrace the idea. “If this is the only way you think you’re gonna be happy, heaven will welcome you with open arms,” she wrote.

They talked at length about how he could kill himself with carbon monoxide. “If you emit 3200 ppm of it for five to ten mins you will die within a half hour,” she wrote. In the last days of his life, she told him repeatedly, “You just need to do it.”

Prosecutors said Ms. Carter wanted Mr. Roy to kill himself because she wanted the sympathy that would come as the “grieving girlfriend.” Ms. Carter’s lawyers cast her as a naïve teenager who wanted to help people and was not even on the scene when Mr. Roy took his life

But the prosecution argued in its closing — and evidently Judge Moniz agreed — that Ms. Carter’s physical absence was immaterial.

“The phones that we have now allow you to be virtually present with somebody,” Katie Rayburn, an assistant district attorney, said, adding, “She was in his ear, she was in his mind, she was on the phone, and she was telling him to get back in the car even though she knew he was going to die.”

Canada's "Creep Catchers" implodes after these vigilante thugs cause the suicide of a transgendered woman

And to think, Canada's Conservatard party wants to make the registry public so these idiotic fucktards could find more people to harass. Notice that none of these "hroes" have the balls to reveal their identities. This isn't Batman, so why hide if these douchecanoes are so "heroic"? I'd slap the shit out of these motherfuckers if I met one in real life.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/creep-catcher-katelynn-mcknight-vigilante-justice-1.3794017

Creep Catcher vigilantes under fire over death of mentally ill woman in video

Tragedy has members of the self-styled pedophile hunting group speaking out about controversial tactics
By Sheena Goodyear, CBC News Posted: Oct 11, 2016 3:00 AM MT Last Updated: Oct 11, 2016 3:00 AM MT

Katelynn Ariel McKnight's life was turned upside down in April when a man showed up on her doorstep in Edmonton, pointed a camera phone in her face and accused her of trying to lure a 14-year-old girl online.

"I can't believe that you would accuse me of this," she told him through gritted teeth, her hands shaking. "I was sexually exploited when I was a child."

She told him her phone had been stolen four days earlier and that she'd just been released from the hospital after a suicide attempt.

Five months later, on Sept. 7, McKnight died. Her friends and family say she took her own life. She was 27.

Edmonton police say her death has been ruled non-criminal but that an investigation into the circumstances surrounding it is ongoing.

The man who took the video of McKnight is John Doep, president of the Edmonton chapter of Creep Catcher, a national network of self-styled pedophile hunters who pose as minors online in order to bait would-be sex offenders and share videos of the encounters online.

The McKnight video was one of Creep Catcher's biggest hits, racking up millions of views across multiple websites and YouTube channels, with headlines like "Man Confronts A Dude Who Was Allegedly Trying To Hook Up With Him After Pretending To A Be 14-Year-Old Girl Online!" and "Creepy Child Predator Confronted!" 

McKnight, who used to be known as Joe Dunn, identified as female.

Reached for comment, Cathy Dunn, McKnight's mother, told CBC News: "I don't agree with the tactics of vigilante justice. It wasn't right in the old Wild West, and it's not right now."

Trouble in the Creep Catcher ranks

The McKnight video has created rifts within the Creep Catcher network, which has chapters spread across 19 cities in six provinces.

Three former members told CBC News they quit the group because of it.

"That video was a red flag for me as far as targeting people — targeting people for fame," said Mira, who asked that her real name not be used because she fears reprisal from Creep Catcher supporters. 

"I really felt that Katelynn was an extremely vulnerable person … mentally."

Mira brought her concerns to Doep and Dawson Raymond, the group's president and founder, but says she was dismissed.

Another former member, who uses the online pseudonym Dylan Massett, said the video was not up to Creep Catcher standards because Doep went to McKnight's home instead of meeting in public.

"There's a reason that you have the meet in public, right? It shows that it's actually them, and they have come with intent," he said.

Mira shared screenshots with CBC News showing her and Massett asking Doep to take the video down. 

He responds: "I don't think you guys have any idea what it is to be a creep catcher."

Doep did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Dawson, when asked about McKnight, replied: "The one that pulled the suicide?" He did not provide further comment.

Christian Ruckus, a member of the Lloyminster, Alta., chapter of Creep Catcher, told CBC News that he is a relative of McKnight's and he believes posting the video was the right thing to do. 

"I still stand by the decision 100 per cent," he said. "The fact of the matter was there was a potential predator trying to lure a minor. And regardless of any state or being, that needed to be exposed."

Ruckus said the video has since been removed from all Creep Catcher-affiliated sites "out of respect for the family" and that Creep Catcher has asked other sites to do the same. 

'Judge, jury, executioner'

Publicly shaming people without due process is dangerous, says Michael Seto, who researches pedophilia and sex offenders. 

"There is so much stigma and anger about sexual offending, and I worry about the unintended harm this public identification can have on vulnerable accused," said Seto, who is the director of the forensic research unit at University of Ottawa's Institute of Mental Health Research. 

Members of vigilante groups have no training, accountability or resources at their disposal, says Staff Sgt. Stephen Camp of the Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Unit, which includes investigators from the RCMP and municipal police forces. 

"They publicly shame them, and they pretty well act as the judge, jury, executioner at that point, and they wash their hands of it and walk away," he said. 

"Let's look at the vulnerable people that get caught up in Creep Catcher's methods. McKnight is an example. There's other examples out there."

'A human, with loved ones, with dreams'

R.L. Daikin started the Facebook group "Creep Catchers Harassing Mentally Ill and Disabled People" after her own daughter, who has bipolar disorder, appeared in one of the group's videos.

She said McKnight reached out to her on Facebook, and the two often chatted about McKnight's mental health struggles and the time she spent living on the street and in group homes. 

"It was so apparent that this woman was in desperate need of help," Daikin said. 

She says McKnight was harassed because of the video and often talked about taking her own life.

"It's very painful to have somebody who might be dying right in front of you, and you can't do anything about it," Daikin said.

Still, there is a lot of support for Creep Catcher.

Dozens of people have taken to the Creep Catcher Facebook page in the wake of McKnight's death to voice their support for the organization.

Some even say McKnight deserved to die.

"Have you people no respect?" said Vicky Penny, who stepped down as Creep Catcher's webmaster over the McKnight video. "She may or may not have been trying to meet [someone]. Either way, she was a human, with loved ones, with dreams, feelings, life."

A memorial was held for McKnight on Oct. 1 in Spruce Grove, Alta., where her parents live.

"There were many comments from people about how she had been very caring and giving of people in her community," her mother said. "She will be sorely missed."