The threats on a Hawaii-bound cruise ship should not be brushed aside or laughed off.

Oh, the way some defense attorneys can spin a situation to coddle their clients! A 20-year-old Laguna Hills, Calif., woman who said she missed her boyfriend, was arrested on terrorism charges in Hawaii. It appears she left two notes in a cruise ship bathroom threatening to “kill all Americans aboard” if the liner docked at an American port.

Kelley Marie Ferguson, who had been on a 10-day cruise from Ensenada, Mexico, to the Hawaiian Islands with her parents and three sisters, was nabbed and booked for the threats. She was, reluctantly, on the cruise with her parents and three sisters and obviously wanted to get back to Mexico where she could connect with her significant other. She didn’t want to wait until the ship got to Hawaii, the American port.

She’s in Hawaii facing “acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.” Said an FBI agent in Hawaii, “She stated that she just didn’t want to go on the cruise ship with her family and didn’t want to leave her boyfriend. In her mind, she thought that leaving the notes would cause the ship to turn back to Ensenada.”

While intensive searches were conducted, the ship cruised on to Hawaii, with its passengers increasingly on pins and needles because of the threats.

Perhaps the situation would have been just as frightening before the 9-11 disasters, but with those tragedies and the wartime status in Iraq, there had to be heightened concerns.

Then hear the public defender in the case. “She is basically a kid with a personal problem,” said Pamela Byrne. “Instead of being charged as a terrorist, she should have been charged with being a teenager.”

At age 20?

The head U.S. attorney in the case declared that Ferguson is a legal adult whose actions disrupted the lives of nearly 2,400 other passengers and crew. Law enforcement authorities had to be called out in the middle of the night to search the ship.

“I don’t know that the gravity of this has sunk in at all,” said the U.S. attorney. “… I don’t know that she has a handle on the inconvenience she has caused others.”

What about passengers with health problems, such as heart conditions? What impact will this selfish caper have on them down the line?

This is not to say the pining 20-year-old with the boyfriend fixation should be dealt with as harshly as if she had intended to do actual harm. But she needs penalties to drive home the dangers of her self-serving actions and to discourage others from using similar ploys to get their way.