A mother and her 18-year-old daughter face charges of having an illegal abortion in Nebraska, USA. The peculiarity of the case is that the police came up with a supposed crime thanks to the fact that they managed to access the accounts of Facebook of those indicated and track messages online to start the investigation in April.
A court order forced Facebook to deliver the private chat between the people involved. In the messages, Norfolk police identified Celeste Burgess and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 41, as referring to abortion pills and the burning of evidence.
“One pill slows down the hormones and then you have to wait 24 hours to take the second one,” says Jessica. “Remember that we burn the evidence when everything is out,” her daughter replies.
Two pages of the conversation in Facebook Messenger have been included in the Madison County Court’s investigation. The two were charged in July and always pleaded “not guilty.”
According to the chain NBC Newsin Nebraska Voluntary termination of pregnancy is illegal after 20 weeks.
The mother bought and gave the abortion pills to her daughter, who was 17 at the time, according to the prosecution. She also helped bury the fetus.
The investigations began after a “friend” of Celeste told authorities that he had seen the young woman take the first pill in April, according to an affidavit from Detective Ben McBride. Norfolk police also said the miscarriage occurred when the teen was 23 weeks pregnant.
Celeste told investigators that she had unexpectedly miscarried a stillborn fetus and that her mother helped her bury the body. But, when she was interviewed by a detective, she “scrolled through her messages on her account from Facebook Messenger” to corroborate the date of her miscarriage, according to the document. This was suspicious for the police, who managed to request the search warrant.
According to the document, the police assure that the fetus appeared to have “thermal injuries” that indicated that it could have been burned after the termination of the pregnancy.
Meta delivered all the material requested by the authorities on June 9. He presented the two conversation pages, more than 250 MB of data related to the account of Facebook Celeste and more than 50 MB of data on Jessica’s account: images, audio recordings and videos.
“Court documents indicate that police were at the time investigating the alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn baby. The court orders were accompanied by non-disclosure orders, which prevented us from sharing information about it. The orders have already been lifted.” mentioned Facebook it’s a statement.
But the spokesman for MetaAndy Stone, said on Twitter that at no time was the word abortion in the petition: “Nothing in the valid warrants we received from local law enforcement in early June, prior to the Supreme Court decision, mentioned abortion.”.
Celeste and Jessica They were charged with felony prohibited acts involving human skeletal remains, misdemeanor concealment of the death of another person, and misdemeanor false information. Only the mother was also charged with inducing an illegal abortion and performing an abortion as someone who is not a licensed doctor. The trial will take place at the end of the year.
As reported by the Lincoln Journal Star, a 22-year-old man received a citation in connection with the case for the crime of concealing the death of another person. Like the two involved, the young man pleaded not guilty.
Possible common practice
The investigation was launched before the Supreme Court struck down protection of the right to abortion at the federal level on June 24.
This is one of the few known cases in which Facebook has provided information to judicial authorities in an abortion case. However, according to CNN, digital privacy experts and some legislators have warned that the authorities of some states could, increasingly after the Court’s decision, use users’ personal data to enforce laws that prohibit abortion. .
Facebook Messenger offers the ability to have encrypted conversations that cannot be read by the platform or any government authority, but that option is only available when the discussion is held on the mobile phone app and marked as secret. Otherwise, the Palo Alto firm retains most of the information on its servers and can access it if forced to do so by court order, as was the case with Celeste.