Originally Posted by kewlJ View Post
Mission: prosecutors chose not to prosecute and drop charges everyday. It NEVER means there was no crime. It means the are not confident they can make their case and get a conviction.

It can definitely mean that they decided a crime had not been committed, or that the matter was effectively decided for them by a judge's ruling that they chose not to appeal. Of course it can mean many other things as well.

Here's the judge's grant of the defendants' motion to dismiss: http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/upl...mmendation.pdf.

The judge determined that they did not commit a crime under Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, which is the federal law they were charged under. It looks like the main reason is that video poker machines are not "protected computers" which would place certain misuses of them under federal jurisdiction.

I don't know if there are parallel state statutes that could have been applied by state prosecutors but judging from the fact that no state prosecutors went after them there probably aren't.