@Chris - interesting point… although I find it hard to believe she didn’t know what was going on. If she really didn’t she needed a smarter lawyer :). I’m not holding my breath for more facts though… unless that includes a reversal of the fine.

@strawberry - it’s a shame because it promotes a stereotype. That all Native American people are poor.

Very true that the fact that she’s a single mom has nothing to do with the actual story. However, I believe this is the same woman I read up on a year ago that stated that her son had installed Kazaa on her computer without her knowledge and downloaded quite a bit of music before her IP was tracked and investigated. Either way, she needs to have more control over her stuff than that. The media plays the i-have-kids-so-show-some-sympathy card wayyyy too much.

Also, I read other news sources on this. Apparently, the judge let a few potential facts slip by in the process of making decisions on the case. Some people are just that computer-illiterate (I’d call them unsavvy) that they never know what’s going on inside the system or what could be served off their computer (a dirty filesharing tactic, sometimes having a user’s computer act as a mail server) until it’s too late. Granted, it’s a stretch, but known to have happened. She may not have known what was going on until it’s too late. I’m sorry, but I can’t be quick to judge her until I know a lot more facts than what they’ve given out. Investigative computer science is not normally this cut and dried. Just a gut feeling on my part… something smells rancid about the verdict.

Just my $.02

Cheers!

I’m not sure about where you live, but on the nightly news Every. Single. Night. when a news report is done on a victim and she is a woman and is married or has children she’s noted by the those two facts first. “Today a wife of two children….” “Today, a single mother of a 4 yr old boy….” then some facts about the tragedy. If the woman being reported on has done a criminal act, her race and age are generally the describing facts of the woman. With men, generally the same thing occurs, although criminal reporting is mostly done on men, and victim reporting is mostly about women.

I completely agree with you, Britgirl, in that just because this woman you are talking about has bred and is unmarried has nothing to do with the facts of the story - although her marital and parental status may really be “facts,” they’re not FACTS of the CASE. IMO, her marital and parental status are put out there simply to garner sympathy and support. Lawyers defending their clients try all angles they can.

There is STILL this underlying belief that women “should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” It may not be out there actually *said* in direct form, but it’s in the language that people use, i.e. news reports in describing people in general. Who cares if this woman is a mother, single, and native american? It’s because they want to garner sympathy, “Oh.. look at this poor mother! It’s so haaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrd to raise children alone and just LOOK at what they are DOING to her!”

And then there’s the race issues. “I KNEW those kinds of people were like THAT.” Call me skeptical. Look at the Jena 6. ‘Nuff said about that.

What incidental facts like these do is help to get the reader or listener to do one of 2 things: relate to the sympathetic (or pathetic for that matter) hero/heroine, or separate them and distance them from the villain. I don’t agree with it, but then again … writers writing “news” stories ARE writers and so they are out to tell a STORY, not just the facts. Cold hard facts are usually left to the lawyers and the court room. Even criminal profilers use these sorts of incidental facts as information to determine possible stories and situations around the crime - what the victim must be like, how the criminal thinks to hopefully catch him before the criminal acts again.

I’m sure there are other reasons and others will pipe in. These are just some of my observations.