Social Networking Sites Becoming Useful For Lawyers

chareverie writes "With how the internet has become, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become a tool for crime solvers, employers, and now, lawyers. Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunk driving case, the college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner, with the words 'jail bird' on his costume. Not surprisingly, his prosecutor was able to obtain photos of him at the party that were posted on Facebook, and claimed he was an 'unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital.' The photos were presented in a slideshow, with one of them showing Lipton holding a can of Red Bull in one hand, and an arm draped around a girl bearing sorority letters. The judge agreed with the prosecutor, and changed Lipton's sentence to two years in prison. The article also cites other instances of people getting harsher sentences from pictures of them posted online."

Comments

This is Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The laws should be defined more explicitly, so that the same punishment for the same crime can be applied.
People with certain personalities, and as we know certain races, get effected disproportionally because the law gives too much flexibility in determining the severity of the punishment.

Re:This is Stupid

[sharp-bang]

So, having stated that you haven't seen any data, and having implied that you discount the opinions of so-called "Leftists" (i.e. the only people in America who actually care about the unfairly incarcerated, or, lately, about human rights in general), and are therefore motivated to expose the problem), you then proceed to float an unsupported opinion. Now that's some mighty funny stuff right there.

That being said, if you are open-minded enough to read studies containing *actual data* from so-called "thinktanks" that support the notion that racial and other demographic disparities exist in criminal justice, here are a couple:

The Sentencing Project: Geography: The War on Drugs in America's Cities
Human Rights Watch: Targeting Blacks Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States

I found these on Prof. Douglas A. Berman's interesting Sentencing Law and Policy blog, which links to many other sources of the facts you seek.

Red Bull(shit)

[kklein]

It's shit like this that makes me want to become a defense lawyer. Fuck this prosecutor. The case needs to stand on what happened, not on the defendant's sense of humor.

I can totally see myself making light of something terrible like that. It's a coping strategy. It doesn't mean that I don't feel remorse, but what the hell? Am I supposed to sit around for the rest of my life feeling sorry? Whose business is it but my own how I handle things emotionally? It would be one thing if the guy then got in a car and drove drunk after that Halloween party, but that's not what he did. He went to the party, and he wore a costume the jackass DA didn't like.

DAs are vermin, along with the cops. You can't incentivize throwing people in jail and have a working society. The US has 1% of its population behind bars because of this kind of theatrical bullshit.

However, this is one of the problems with more photos being taken these days. You do anything, and someone has a picture of it. All of us are cretins; we just don't realize it until we see the pics.