Prosecutors had asked for the maximum three-year prison sentence, saying Megan's suicide was the "direct result" of Drew's "vindictive assault." Probation department officials recommended a sentence of a year of probation and a $5,000 fine.
Because the criminal case involved accessing MySpace's computer servers, Drew's lawyers argued that Megan's parents, Ron and Tina Meier, should not be able to speak at the sentencing. Federal law gives crime victims the right to speak at sentencing.
"Under the law, they're just not victims. If anybody is, it's MySpace. It's that simple," said Drew's attorney, Dean Steward.
"The entire point of the prosecution has been to make Lori drew a symbol of cyberbullying," her lawyers argued in court papers in May. "The government has created a fiction that Lori Drew somehow caused [Meier's] death, and it wants a long prison sentence to make its fiction seem real."
Tina Meier earlier declined to comment about the sentencing, saying prosecutors asked her not to speak until after the hearing. In an interview last year after Drew was indicted, Meier said Drew deserved the maximum allowable sentence. "She played a ridiculous game with my daughter's life," she said at the time.
Prosecutors contend that Drew suspected that Megan was spreading rumors about her daughter. Grills testified that Drew thought the MySpace account was a funny idea and was present about half of the time when Grills and Sarah Drew sent messages to Megan.
In October 2006, another neighborhood girl obtained the password to the Josh account and sent Megan a message saying that Josh no longer wanted to be her friend. The next day, an online argument escalated until Grills, posing as Josh, told Megan the world would be a better place without her in it.
Do you have more information about this topic? If so, please click here to contact the editors of ABC News.
