From the beginning, people have been reacting to this case emotionally, rather than logically. That's typical of justice in this country, where anger and pain seem to get more weight than justice or logic.
The public, and the media, have been blaming Megan Meier's suicide entirely on Lori Drew's actions in creating a fictitious boy and engaging in a false and misleading online correspondence with Megan. The public seems to think that Lori Drew "drove" Megan Meier to killing herself, and that if Drew had not engaged in her deception, Megan would still be alive today. I disagree with that assessment, vehemently.
The truth is that Megan Meier was mentally ill. She had been under the care of a psychiatrist for five years, been prescribed multiple mood-altering medications, and had been diagnosed and treated for attention deficit disorder and depression. Lori Drew's actions, while childish, cruel, and despicable, were not to blame for Megan Meier's suicide.
Megan Meier's suicide was not Lori Drew's fault. Lori Drew did not cause Megan Meier to feel suicidal; suicidal tendencies are a symptom of a mental illness, such as clinical depression, and mental illness cannot be caused by other people saying mean things to you. Mental illness doesn't just "happen", it's caused by physical factors. It's also not contagious, and even if it were, you couldn't catch it over the Internet.
Nor did Megan Meier's parents cause her suicide by failing to properly monitor her Internet usage or her real-life social interaction with other people. Megan Meier's suicide was caused by her mental illness.
No matter what the movies and daytime soaps would have you believe, it is not possible to harass a mentally healthy person until they "go insane" or "become suicidal". Mentally healthy people have healthy ways to deal with stress caused by harassment or emotional abuse. Obviously, Megan Meier did not, since she was mentally ill, and that lack of healthy coping mechanisms is what led to her suicide. Had she not killed herself over the fictitious boy made up by Lori Drew, she probably would have done so over a real boy, or over an argument with her mother (one of which occurred only 20 minutes prior to her suicide), or over a bad grade, or some other excuse. Or even, as so many kids do, over no excuse at all; that's why so many teen suicides wind up with hundreds of people screaming, "WHY!? WHY!?" - there IS no logical reason for it, because it's caused by the irrationality of a mentally ill mind.
Bad things happening will not, in and of themselves, cause a person to commit suicide. Suicides are caused by mental illness; the bad things are mere rationalizations, used as scapegoats by people who don't understand that mentally ill people do irrational things like ending their own lives for no good reason. We constantly seek to lay blame on a tangible object or person, so that we may seek vengeance on that which we blame, in an effort to gain emotional closure and heal the wounds that a suicide causes in us. But in truth, we have no one and nothing to blame for a suicide, other than the mental illness of the person who commits suicide.
All of that being said, however, I think that Lori Drew's actions, in taking the time and trouble to create a fictitious online personality and use it to develop a false and misleading relationship with a 13-year old girl, reek of mental illness themselves. They are the actions of an obsessed person. And while those actions do not fit the definition of stalking, since Megan Meier could easily have avoided all contact with the fictitious boy - even without avoiding the Internet - the obsession behind the actions is the same type of obsession that can eventually lead to actual stalking behavior.
Not only that, but Lori Drew roped her daughter and her 18-year old assistant into the scheme, which seems like the behavior of a cult leader - narcissistic, self-absorbed, manipulative, perhaps even megalomaniacal.
So while I don't think that Lori Drew should go to jail for "cyber-bullying", or to assuage the grief of those who incorrectly blame her for Megan Meier's suicide, I certainly do think that Lori Drew is in need of long-term psychiatric help. If she is, indeed, mentally ill herself, then she might pose a danger to herself or others, particularly her own 13-year old daughter, and particularly with all of the stress that these legal proceedings has brought upon her. If she's mentally ill, she could become dangerously paranoid; she might blame her daughter or her assistant for the whole thing, and act out violently.
Sometimes there is no one to blame. Sometimes there is no one on whom to wreak vengeance. Sometimes, we just have to deal with the pains of life, and death, as they come.