Michigan charges up to 20 years for a pattern of cyberbullying that leads to a victim's death. The law has been on the books since 2019. In November 2021, 3 teenagers faced felony charges under it for an Instagram sextortion campaign. The statute is not theoretical. It has teeth, it has precedent, and it works. The real scandal is that only about 6 states have anything close to it.
I hear the objections. Causation is hard to prove. Teenagers' brains aren't finished. Platform algorithms share the blame. All of that is true, and none of it is a reason to leave prosecutors empty-handed. You can hold a kid accountable for targeted harassment and regulate platforms and fund school counselors. These are not competing ideas. They are line items on the same budget.
Deterrence Has a Price Tag, and It's Low
Let's talk incentives. Right now, a 15-year-old in Arkansas who runs a months-long harassment campaign faces, at worst, a school suspension and maybe a misdemeanor. A legal query on Justia from January 2026 explored whether cyberbullying deaths could even qualify as terroristic threatening under Arkansas law. Lawyers are still asking the question. That gap between behavior and consequence is where kids die.
Michigan closed it. The statute specifies: if a pattern of cyberbullying is a proximate cause of a victim's suicide, the charge escalates to a felony. Prosecutors still have to prove causation beyond reasonable doubt. They still need digital evidence, psychiatric records, the full chain. The bar is high. It should be.
But high is not impossible. The JAMA Network's 2022 study found cyberbullying had a stronger link to adolescent suicide than offline aggression. Digital harassment leaves timestamps, screenshots, metadata. Unlike a hallway shove, an Instagram DM thread is a prosecutable paper trail. Prosecutors in cyberbullying cases often have better evidence than in traditional harassment cases. The problem is not proof. The problem is that most states haven't written the statute.
The "Systemic Failure" Dodge
Critics love to say the real fix is systemic: better platforms, better schools, better mental health funding. Fair enough. I'll grant that a felony charge alone won't move the CDC's 4,400 annual youth suicides. That number reflects failures at every level.
But here's what systems thinking misses when it gets lazy: systems are made of individuals making choices. The algorithm did not type "you should kill yourself" into a DM. A person did. And when that person did it repeatedly, over weeks, knowing the target was in crisis, the word for that is recklessness. Recklessness has always been prosecutable.
The Philippines already prosecutes cyberbullying deaths as reckless imprudence resulting in homicide under Article 365, with penalties up to 6 years plus civil damages. Their framework requires psychiatric evidence linking the harassment to the victim's mental state. Imperfect, yes. But functional. Multiple legal systems across different cultures have landed on the same conclusion: when your sustained cruelty foreseeably contributes to someone's death, the criminal law should have something to say about it.
North Carolina's discharge provisions for cyberbullying convictions show that the system can be calibrated. Not every conviction needs to follow a teenager forever. Judges already have discretion. The point is giving them jurisdiction in the first place.
The argument that we shouldn't charge individuals because institutions also failed is an argument against every criminal statute ever written. We don't decline to prosecute drunk drivers because the bar overserved them and the road lacked guardrails. We prosecute the driver and fix the road. The word for doing both is governance.
What I want is simple. Congress or state legislatures in the remaining 44 states should pass Michigan-style statutes by the end of 2027. Tiered penalties. Digital evidence standards. Judicial discretion for minors. The template exists. The legal theory holds. The only thing missing is political will, which is another way of saying the only thing missing is enough dead children to make the cost of inaction embarrassing.
Michigan wrote the law in 2018 because families demanded it. Waiting for more funerals before copying the homework is a policy choice. It's just not one anyone wants to own.
