Facebook prosecute
Meta provided user information to police in Nebraska that led directly to the prosecution of a 17-year-old girl for alleged crimes relating to an abortion, court documents show. The company could have challenged the legal order, but instead provided the teenager’s direct messages to cops, who are now charging the girl with three felonies for using a mail-order abortion pill and burying the miscarried fetus.
According to court documents first published by Motherboard (the case itself was first reported by the Lincoln Journal-Star), a Nebraska detective was investigating “concerns that a juvenile female… had given birth prematurely supposedly to a stillborn child.”
Geluz v. Court of Appeals Case Digest – G.R. No. L-16439 – July 20, 1961
He apparently did not believe that the child was stillborn, though an autopsy (after exhuming the body seemingly without reason) was consistent with the story, showing that the fetus had never had air in its lungs. But because it was in a plastic bag, he asked Meta to provide all the girl’s Facebook messages, photos and other data for “statements that might indicate whether the baby was stillborn or asphyxiated.”
This information was duly provided, and messages appear to show the girl discussing taking an abortifacient medication. Based on this information, police raided the family’s home, seizing six smartphones and seven laptops, with data like internet history and emails totaling 24 gigabytes. Among this trove the investigators hope to find the evidence of a teenager ordering abortion pills.
Now the 17-year-old is being tried as an adult for performing an abortion after week 20 of pregnancy, performing an abortion without a license, concealing a dead body, concealing the death of a person and false reporting.
It must be pointed out that at no point before they received the messages from Facebook was there any evidence of a crime beyond improperly disposing of a miscarried fetus. The detective’s asphyxiation theory, based solely on the presence of a plastic bag, was incompatible with the autopsy evidence, which supported the girl’s account. Generally speaking, it seems cruel and unusual to conduct a multi-day investigation into a miscarriage and panicked disposal of remains.
Facebook prosecute
