Because a 17-year-old apparently got an abortion pill and buried the dead fetus, Meta passed the chat logs from Facebook to the police - apparently , because Facebook said it knew nothing about an abortion.
The course of the case
A Norfolk police detective began his investigation in late April after receiving a tip that a 17-year-old had suffered a miscarriage and that she and her mother had buried the dead fetus, according to a statement accompanying the search warrant.
The detective obtained her medical records and discovered that she was more than 23 weeks - or almost six months - pregnant at the time and was due to give birth on July 3rd. A few days later, the detective interviewed the young woman, who said she unexpectedly gave birth to her stillborn baby in the shower early in the morning.
The young woman is then said to have woken up her mother and, together with her, put the fetus in a sack and loaded it into the trunk of a van in order to bury it a few kilometers north of the city with the help of a 22-year-old man. On April 29, the young woman showed the police detective the place where the fetus was buried.
In early June, the two women were charged with removing, concealing or abandoning a corpse, a felony, and two misdemeanors: concealing the death of another person and making false statements.
But the case wasn't over yet!
The Facebook chat logs
The police detective also contacted Meta to get access to the 17-year-old's account. The reason: Although the autopsy showed that the fetus never had air in its lungs, so it was truly stillborn, he suspected that the fetus may have been asphyxiated because it was in a plastic bag.
That's why he wanted to find out if there were any clues in the girl's chat logs, photos and other data that would indicate whether she actually suffered a stillbirth or killed the newborn, which would constitute an additional charge.
The chat logs revealed that the mother obtained abortion pills and gave her daughter instructions on how to take them. The 17-year-old also wrote that she couldn't wait to remove "that thing" from her body and discussed the plan with her mother to burn the fetus afterwards.
During a house search based on the chat logs, the police confiscated six smartphones and seven laptops with 24 gigabytes of data such as Internet history and emails in order to find further evidence of the ordering of abortion pills.
A month later, Madison County Prosecutor Joseph Smith added two more felonies to the mother's charges: performing or attempting to perform an abortion while more than 20 weeks pregnant and performing an unlicensed abortion.
An immense effort
Importantly, before police were able to view the chat logs, there was no real evidence of a crime beyond the improper disposal of a miscarried fetus. The police detective's asphyxiation theory, which was used as a justification for using the Facebook chat logs, was baseless since the autopsy clearly showed that the fetus was stillborn.
Officially, the request for information to Meta referred to " prohibited activities involving skeletal remains ", but this was more of a cover for an investigation that alleged another crime without any evidence, which brought the Norfolk Police under criticism because of the immense nature of the investigation effort caused by an unfounded theory.
Meta and Facebook are also criticized because their position on such requests for user data is that they contest them or only release them in part if the request does not comply with applicable law or guidelines or if it is legally incorrect or too broad. But in this case, Facebook freely revealed all the data based on a theory.
Meta issued a statement
In a statement about the case, Meta clarifies that the inquiry into the case received no mention of an abortion, so the release of the data was not based on a suspected abortion:
“There was no mention of abortion in the valid arrest warrants we received from local law enforcement in early June, before the Supreme Court decision. The warrants were for charges related to a criminal investigation, and court records indicate that police at the time were investigating the case of a stillborn baby being burned and buried, rather than the decision to have an abortion.”
Conclusion
In the beginning there was “only” a stillbirth and the secret burial of the fetus, which certainly justified criminal prosecution. However, the autopsy clearly showed that the child was actually stillborn and that the 17-year-old or her mother did not kill him.
The case should actually be closed at this point. That's why it's all the more worrying when an authority can still request data from Meta/Facebook without any evidence and these are then freely released.
The new charges of “ performing or attempting to perform an abortion with a pregnancy of more than 20 weeks and performing an unlicensed abortion ” only came about because an authority had full access to the Facebook data due to an unfounded suspicion (death of the fetus due to suffocation). 17 year old got.
So you can feel whatever you want about the behavior of the 17-year-old and her mother, but the frank use of the “digital footprints” by an authority based on shaky suspicion is something that does not necessarily strengthen trust in Facebook.
Article image: Unsplash
Sources: TechCrunch , Lincoln Journal Star , Vice
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