As tends to happen, it appears that Missouri has decided to overcompensate for the mess with the whole Lori Drew/Megan Meier tragedy. After realizing that Lori Drew hadn’t committed any actual crime, Missouri passed a new law making it a potential felony for being a jerk online. And, of course, with that new law in place, Missouri prosecutors have wasted little time in filing charges against all sorts of people. The latest involves the arrest of a teenager for creating a mean website about another student. Now, I’m not condoning the behavior of this student, which does seem despicable — but arresting the kid seems really extreme. Aren’t there less draconian methods for dealing with this sort of thing? Kids can be mean and, yes, they do stupid things at times — but arresting kids every time they’re a jerk online is going to lead to a pretty busy judicial system.

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