PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."
In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton's drunken-driving case.
Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.
Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.
Just a reminder. I am not saying that I agree that prosecuters and police and employers are right to use info taken from social networking sites to make decisions about individuals, but it seems they do. So we all might want to be a little careful.--don't be a jackass and post it online.
I recall in my second year one of the students in one of my review sections totally disappeared for half the semester. I emailed him repeatedly to tell him his absenses could cause him to get an F. Nothing. Then he shows up in the last two weeks of class. I tell the professor about it, and she says "fail him. The absence policy is clearly stated in the syllabus." He shows up to appeal, and says he has lupus and had gone back to his parents' house because he got sick in the middle of the semester. So the prof checks him out little on Facebook. Not surprising, his page is full of pictures of him drunk and frat parties and posted throughout the semester. And what's worse, he even bosts about how good he is about lying to profs and getting around paper deadlines and missed classes--his recommendation: "claim to have a chronich disease." So he failed the class.
1 comment:
Well, as a proponent of the free exchange of ideas on the internet, I'll still be the first to tell you that you shouldn't post anything on Facebook or MySpace that you wouldn't plaster across a billboard in Times Square.
When you post private images or information into the public domain where anyone and their brother can see them, you absolutely cannot be surprised, disgusted, or even somewhat vexed that they could potentially be used against you in a court of law. Or Reed's gradebook. :)
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