Jurors would have convicted Lori Drew on three felony counts for unauthorized access to MySpace's computer system if they had been given the evidence from prosecutors, the jury forewoman in the Drew trial said Monday. They had to convict her of misdemeanors, instead, given what they had to work with.

"Trust me, I was so for this woman going away for 20 years," Valentina Kunasz told Threat Level. "However, on the harsher felony charge, it was very hard to find her guilty on the specific [evidence] given to us."

Kunasz said despite all the debate outside the courtroom about the prosecution's use of an anti-hacking statute to charge Drew for violating a website's terms of service, jurors never considered whether the statute was appropriate. However, she said she agrees with the idea that users who violate a website's terms of service should be prosecuted.

"The thing that really bothered me was that [Drew's] attorney kept claiming that nobody reads the terms of service," she said. "I always read the terms of service.... If you choose to be lazy and not go through that entire agreement or contract of agreement, then absolutely you should be held liable."

Should they be punished with a federal prison sentence?

"I guess that's an option for debate," Kunasz said. "When it's gross circumstances of someone killing themselves.... "

Kunasz, a 25-year-old resident of Long Beach, California, who volunteered to be forewoman, said the emotional case was very difficult to handle. "This was a very serious subject for every single one of us. We wanted to make sure that we came to the right decision and that there was no question on anything," she said.

With regard to the three felony charges accusing Drew of obtaining illegal access to MySpace's computers, jurors acquitted Drew unanimously because they felt the evidence prosecutors presented didn't rise to the level of maliciousness required to convict Drew.

To find her guilty on felony charges they would have had to find that Drew intentionally accessed MySpace's computers to commit a tortious act – that is, to intentionally inflict emotional distress on 13-year-old Megan Meier, who subsequently committed suicide. The jurors instead convicted Drew on three counts of a lesser misdemeanor charge for simply accessing MySpace's computer system to obtain information about and from Megan.

Drew, of O'Fallon, Missouri, was charged with one felony count of conspiracy and three felony counts of unauthorized computer access for helping create a fake MySpace account for a non-existent 16-year-old boy named "Josh Evans" to woo Megan and determine if Megan was spreading rumors about Drew's then-13-year-old daughter Sarah. She faced up to 20 years in prison for the four charges.

According to testimony during the trial, Ashley Grills, a then-18-year-old employee of Drew, created the "Josh Evans" account with Drew's approval and conducted most of the communication between "Josh" and Megan. After "Josh" sent Megan a final message in October 2006 telling her "the world would be a better place without you," Megan hanged herself in her bedroom.

Kunasz said jurors were given printouts of three conversations between Megan and "Josh" as evidence of Drew's three alleged felony violations. But Kunasz said the final message that Megan received wasn't among the printouts, and the three that jurors did receive weren't malicious.

"They were 'oh you're so hot,' 'I love you' and who-loves-who messages," she said. "It wasn't something that to me personally – and I think the rest of the jury felt the same way – was malicious in mind."

Kunasz said jurors were not allowed to take into account the last message sent to Megan, because the message was not sent through MySpace. Ashley Grills testified that she sent the message through American Online's instant messaging service.

To find Drew guilty of a felony or misdemeanor, the correspondence had to involve interstate communication, but prosecutors never introduced evidence discussing whether the final AOL message involved interstate communication. The AOL message also would not have been covered by MySpace's terms of service, which were at the core of the case against Drew, hence the message was not included in the juror's evidence packet. Testimony did establish, however, that the three messages jurors saw that were sent through MySpace were interstate communications because they traveled from the Drew computer in Missouri through MySpace's servers in Los Angeles County.

"The last message was a huge piece of evidence," Kunasz said, "but we had no way of knowing whether it was interstate or not. I honestly think that if they gave us a little more solid, hatred-type e-mails or MySpace messages it would have been a lot easier [to convict her]."

Kunasz also said that eight jurors were ready to convict Drew of a fourth felony count for conspiracy but were deadlocked by four jurors who didn't think Drew committed a tortious act.

"The tortious thing was a huge issue for us," Kunasz said. "The definition of 'tortious' was the first thing on the first day that we all sat there and thought about for an hour."

They read carefully through jury instructions from the court and even asked Judge George Wu for clarification on the definition of "tortious" before they finally came to a consensus definition.

Unlike the other three felony counts, the conspiracy charge didn't rely on specific messages to obtain a conviction. Instead, it was based on the case as a whole – testimony and evidence. Based on all of this, eight jurors felt that Drew's behavior on the conspiracy charge was a form of cyberbullying that rose to the level of tortious or malicious behavior due to Megan's mental state.

Megan's mother and even Drew's daughter Sarah testified that Megan was on medication for depression and was seeing a psychiatrist. They also said Megan expressed suicidal thoughts and had scratched her wrists at one point, suggesting a suicide attempt.

"We felt that ... knowing that she's got mental stuff going on, was enough to turn what normally wouldn’t be tortious into tortious or malicious," Kunasz said. "And the fact that this 47-year-old woman is participating – whether it be physically or just egging them on verbally – to me something was very off. What they were trying to do as a whole in the long-run was humiliate this girl, make her feel like a piece of [dirt], and make her feel sad.... They were intentionally trying to hurt her."

But four jurors felt that because Megan and Sarah Drew had a opened a MySpace account months earlier to meet boys, that Megan was emotionally functional and should have known what she was getting herself into by communicating with "Josh." She should have been prepared to be rejected by "Josh."

After voting on the conspiracy count nine times, the four jurors couldn't be persuaded to convict Drew of the felony. Because the jurors could not agree on acquitting her of the felony either, they couldn't find her guilty of a lesser misdemeanor charge and, therefore, ended in a deadlock on that count.

Kunasz said because the testimony of so many witnesses contradicted each other it was hard to determine who did what with the "Josh Evans" account. She found the testimony of Ashley Grills and Sara Drew to be non-credible and said it as "very obvious" that Sarah Drew was coached extensively, particularly when the 16-year-old used the phrase "after the fact" several times in testifying about what her mother knew and when she knew it. Kunasz said all the jurors picked up on the phrase.

"It was too grown-up for a 16-year-old; even an 18-year-old would not say that over and over again," Kunasz said, adding that Drew's testimony was "very detrimental" to the defense. "It was a joke to me. And between her and Ashley's testimony, it was really hard to believe anything that either one said."

Nonetheless, Kunasz said Lori Drew bore ultimate responsibility because she should have known better and put an end to the ruse.

"It was so very childish; so very pathetic," Kunasz said. "This was Sarah's parent, her guardian. She could have done quite a few things to stop it, and she chose not to. And I think she got kind of a rise out of doing this to another person and that bothers me, it really irks me."

Kunasz said she's found it difficult to shake the case. "I still have dreams about the testimony," she said.

Right before the court clerk read the jury's verdict last week, Kunasz had glanced toward the gallery at Tina Meier, Megan's mother, as if to convey a message to her. I asked what she'd meant to say to Meier.

"I honestly wanted to reach out to this woman and give her a hug and tell her I'm sorry – sorry for what she went through and sorry for what she felt and sorry for losing her child. I wanted to say 'I understand what happened to you,' and we did everything in our power within the law to give this woman the justice that should have been served upon her. The reason I looked at Tina was because I felt like I didn’t serve her the justice she was looking for."

Drew's attorneys will be seeking a re-trial on the three misdemeanor counts but are awaiting a decision from U.S. District Judge George Wu who can decide to acquit Drew. If Wu lets the verdict stand, Drew's lawyers plan to appeal the case to the 9th Circuit Court. Legal experts say the court is likely to overturn the jury's verdict on grounds that prosecutors overstepped in using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to criminally charge a contract breach, which is normally a civil violation.

Photo: Lori Drew and her daughter, Sarah, outside the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles/AP

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