Call Me Crazy

[July 23rd, 2008] This much can be said about Joseph “Yoshi” Beres and Sheridan Thompson’s short-lived relationship: Even before Thompson called Portland police on Beres, the couple had irreconcilable differences.

What makes their split unique was that—according to Beres—their cell phones also were incompatible. A 39-year-old IT guy, Beres was arrested April 13 after sending what he calls two verbose messages from his $499 4GB iPhone that Thompson’s $30 Nokia read as multiple messages.

Now facing one misdemeanor charge for telephonic harassment and a date Aug. 5 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Beres blames his iPhone for his legal problems.

And as farfetched as that might sound, it appears he’s not exactly wrong. Beres was arrested because his iPhone on the AT&T network was ready—in relationship language and as a matter of technological record—for the next step. And the cell phone Thompson used as an event coordinator—an older-model Nokia with the T-Mobile network—was not.

The courts will decide next month how, and if, old rules on the use (and misuse) of telephones should apply to new technologies like the iPhone.

Since 2005 in Oregon, a telephonic harassment charge has included the abuse of text messaging. If convicted, Beres faces a sentence of up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $10,000, though probation is more likely for a first offense.

Multnomah County Senior Deputy District Attorney Wayne Pearson says there’s no way to tell if telephonic harassment via text messaging has risen since 2005. The DA’s office doesn’t track how many people charged with telephonic harassment used texts. He adds that sending a large volume of text messages to a person is not, on its own, a crime.

“Someone has to say, ‘Stop doing this,’ for it to be criminal,” Pearson says. And that’s exactly what Thompson did.

Here’s what the court records show happened:

Thompson called police sometime after midnight on April 13 and said “she had been receiving disturbing and threatening text messages from her ex-boyfriend.”

At 3 am, she texted Beres to stop contacting her. At 4:30 pm, a police officer went to Beres’ apartment and told him not to contact Thompson again. But at 5:20 pm, Thompson told police she’d received another text. The officer returned to Beres’ apartment to arrest him.

Here’s what Beres says happened:

The couple hadn’t seen each other in months, but Beres thought Thompson was talking trash about him. He wrote her a very long text message asking her to stop.

His iPhone lets him write texts with several hundred characters—far longer than his carrier’s capacity of sending 160-character text messages. The result: Beres’ message was chopped into smaller messages that appeared as several texts on Thompson’s phone, Beres says.

At some point, not realizing his long message was being broken into several messages, he re-sent the message, doubling the volume. The cop showed up and told him to stop contacting Thompson. Beres says he obeyed the order. “That’s where the iPhone comes in,” Beres says. “My messages were still queued up. Something was going on, because...the cop showed up again.”

Thompson says she got far more than two text messages from Beres on her work cell phone. In fact, she got so many that her phone switched off automatically, she says.

A spokeswoman for Apple, the company that makes the iPhone, says the character limit on text messages depends on the carrier, not the device. However, spokesman Simon Pope acknowledges long texts from iPhones will be broken into several texts “unseen” by the iPhone user at the other end. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel says, “It’s the nature of text messaging itself. It’s meant to be a brief message.”