Slashdot Mirror
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."
title should be "useful for prosecutors". while prosecutors are "lawyers", this article and topic is far more specific.
The laws should be defined more explicitly, so that the same punishment for the same crime can be applied.
Leave it up to the judge and jury. They will have intimate knowledge of the case, a legislature hundreds of miles away won't.
People with certain personalities
Personalities? What in the hell? Is "dumb" a personality? Read the article, man. People like this deserve to go to prison.
and as we know certain races,
No, I don't know.
get effected disproportionally because the law gives too much flexibility in determining the severity of the punishment.
Wait, what?
too much flexibility
All right. How about this: mandatory death sentence - Texas style, not California - for anyone convicted of drunk driving.
Happy, now?
Any fucktard that drives drunk deserves - at the very least - a serious asskickin'.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I don't have a problem with this. The kid obviously did not take the weight of the crime he committed seriously - he acted with contempt and callousness. Someone who acts like this, versus someone who does something bad but admits he was wrong and regrets it, should, as far as I am concerned, receive more punishment.
As far as you claims about race is concerned, that is totally bogus.
I don't understand the problem here either. This is two "OMG Privacy" stories that have come up in the last few days. This isn't "OMG Privacy". This is quit being a fucking moron and advertising your private life to 3rd parties or the world. In each of the three cases I am fucking glad they found those pictures. Those pieces of shit deserve to be rotting in prison instead of out partying after that crap. In case you skip the article it talkes about 3 cases of DUI, in 2 of which people died and the third almost died. Then these pieces of human filth went out partying and posted pictures showing exactly how seriously they took the fact that they went out driving drunk and murdered someone. I am personally very happy these fuckwits posted these pictures and the prosecution found them. In at least two of the cases mentioned here the bastard was probably going to get probation.
So...let me put it this way. If you are a worthless dumbass criminal making life worse for other people PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE post pictures of yourself doing illegal things online. Record yourself talking about the crime and make it an mp3. Take videos of you beating hobos or other nonsense and put them on youtube. I would much rather a society where the criminals effectively go to the authority and say "Hi, I'm a fucking moron criminal asshole, please arrest me!" than the world where the cops have to wiretap, and search, and investigate. So, please, in the interest of keeping our society free, go post your stupidity online, make it easy to find, that way the authority can leave the rest of us the fuck alone since we aren't doing anything wrong.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The amount of true remorse that a defendant feels and expresses can and should be used when determining sentencing. It's called a 'mitigating circumstance.'
Did it ever occur to you that there were circumstances, such as prior history, that could affect the sentence? The claim that blacks are being unfairly punished is a totally bogus one.
(Temporarily lost my password, so posting Anonymously, but am 'Wonderkid'.) Anyway, Philly, you are 100% spot on. There is a general decline in ethics both sides of the Atlantic. To understand why, read Lord of The Flies by William Golding, if you have not already. As soon as the immature are running the asylum, all hell will break out! (The immature are now running the asylum.)
... but on the "races" bit, yes, for the same offense, blacks more often get jail time while whites walk. Justice might be blind, but it ain't colour-blind when it comes to sentencing.
I've heard that, but I'd need to see some actual data. Not a press release from a Leftist "thinktank".
I suspect the gap would magically disappear if you took the socioeconomic levels into account. I'm sure a poor white kid (with a public defender) would get a worse sentence than a black kid from a rich family (with a family-hired lawyer).
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
All right. How about this: mandatory death sentence - Texas style, not California - for anyone convicted of drunk driving.
DUI level drunk driving or .15 swerve all over the road drunk driving?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Taking his PC i think was a bit overboard unless they had hard evidence that some crime was committed with the PC. The judge should never have permitted that warrant to go thru.
Collecting the public posts of images off myspace was more then justified however.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"I don't know about preventing prosecutors from using photos. However . . . to deter employers from viewing and abusing social networking pages, employees might post legal terms of service [blogspot.com] under which employers agree to scram."
I'd just look at the pages anyway then use the information as I see fit. I have no obligation to hire someone I don't like, and any insights into how that person will work on my team matter to me.
The whole purpose of social networking is vanity and self-display. Fine and good, but don't expect to display then choose how viewers can use what you put out there.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Did I get that right? He went to court, got away with a rather mild verdict, then the prosecutor showed that he is "partying" and this is grounds for a more serious conviction?
Hello? Did partying now become some sort of grounds for a harsher verdict? What should he have done? Mourn and weep for at least 2 years or whatever the court deems "appropriate"?
This is sick, people. This means you're not only judged for what you do but also for what you feel.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If he were black?
The same would have happened of course. He'd still have a rich and influential father.
it's a picture of a man, laughing it up about his time in court, which was supposedly the solemn justice meted out for his terrible crime, which left a fellow man in crippled and maimed for life.
the alchohol is not the issue, and the judge's comments accurately reflect this.
Yes it is, and this wonderful utopian society we are constructing for ourselves is great. Nobody is afflicted with any of that nasty personal responsibility for anything they unless it manages to run afowl of those last few vestiges of silly old sensibilites we have not yet shacken off.
The best part is why have Facebook and MySpace so even those of us without the brainpower to use even the simplest of markup can easily show off for the entire world what kinda of asshats we can be when we really try.
We might not quite be able to get away with running some people down while drunk driving and then parting a few days later like nothing happen but I am confident we will get there, given trends. Somebody somewhere will find a way to make it forgiviable or at least excuseable. That seems to be where all our famous American enginuity is being placed these days. Why I can see future where we are free to rape each other and fling poo, just over the horizon... Dream with me people...
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Last I checked, Red Bull was NOT an alcoholic beverage. Had he been photographed drinking alcohol I could understand the increased sentence.
I guess some people still can't get in through their skulls that the internet isn't some sort of silly game. If you post something, anyone has access to it, including law enforcement. It's like that woman who tried to take out a hit on someone via Craigslist a while back. What the hell is going through these people's minds?
So what we have is a guy who was known for drinking alcoholic beverages, now drinks non-alcoholic Red Bull instead.
It was only 2 weeks after he nearly killed someone because of his partying antics. His lawyer is lousy, all right, but only because he should have made sure lipton:
1. Did not go out partying at all.
2. Enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous and started attending meetings.
3. Enrolled in any other local alcohol treatment programs might be useful.
4. Sure as shit stayed away from alcohol. We don't know he was drinking at that Halloween party, but I'm just saying, he was 20 years old. If he would have gotten a minor consumption ticket, the consequences would have been jail time.
Apparently, the lawyer couldn't convince his client to lay low and pretend to be remorseful for just two frickin' weeks. It doesn't matter if Lipton was drunk in those pics or not. It showed he was out partying while the woman he nearly killed was still in the hospital.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It is not down to interpretation as it is down to the distorted presentation of reality by demagoguery loving lawyers.
The trial should be about the facts and about the crime of the accused, and not about the interpreted image a lawyer is giving to some photos of him.
Instead of reading this article as a warning against the dangers of publicizing your personal life on the internet (where the self righteous can interpret your personal life in a distorted way and use the distorted image against you in court), the slashdotters are reading it as a justified action by the police, lawyers and judge.
Two months ago, my Mom passed away. I'm sure that during the days of mourning, you could have taken a picture of me laughing and joking around. I'm also sure that a f%#&%^&ing lawyer, standing in front of a bunch of self righteous jury, could have presented such photos of me as evidence that I just didn't give a damn.
Something is very wrong in America, when even in Slashdot, people are not taking seriously the right of the police to invade your house and confiscate your personal belongings in order to prove something that can only be proved by reading you thoughts (your disposition towards the crime you are accused of). Why should the police be allowed access to your personal computer if it is irrelevant to the crime you committed (or accused of)?
Now, it may not be so when prosecutors dredge up photos unrelated to, older, than, or from a different person with the same name, so this only argues for more transparent ways for hosts, services, and users to find unshakeable ways to authenticate what happens under their aegis. opt-in automatic encrypted transmission watermarks, anyone?
Only problem is these photos were not used as evidence. The trial was already over. Only sentencing remained.
Those photos never could have been admitted as evidence at his trial unless you got the photographer to take the stand and say that he witnessed Lipton partying, took the pictures, and that the subject was Lipton, etc. After all, you can't cross-examine a photograph.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I actually read the article to see if it was as bad as it sounded... and yes it is.
First of all, he was drinking Red Bull, which is non-alcoholic, and while he was at a party I'd be thinking he'd be excited to be alive. Just me though.
The other cases in the article are just as bad. A lady at a party drinking wine after a car accident? Wine just screams alcoholic!
The prosecution is saying she should be in AA? They know that she's an Alcoholic and didn't just make a bad choice? She's no longer aloud to drink anymore because of a bad choice? AA doesn't teach you to act correctly when you drink, it tried to get you to stop drinking completely
And to say "she was doing nothing but having a good time" is insane. Obviously she's been going from party to party non-stop for the past X months. How do you know she WASN'T going to AA? Just because you have a picture of something less than appealing doesn't mean you have to whole story.
I have to imagine they'd have more than that for a Judge to up the sentence to two years. Not to say I don't think they deserved it but expecting people to become inhuman because of an accident is just plain stupid. A guy drinking red bull is a good example of just how RANDOM these pictures can be and yet they are grounds for upping a sentence? give me a break.
You could make that argument for anyone that breaks the law. People should know they will be held accountable for their actions.
Laws are meant to protect society. If this guy, with his cavalier attitude toward hurting people, goes out and does it again...then what? Will you be ready to "fudge up his life" then?
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
What right does the government have to demand a citizen undergo RELIGIOUS counseling (that is what AA, and in essence, all 12 step programs are, the first step is admitting you have a problem that only 'a higher power than yourself' can fix and you must place your trust in him, meaning god)? Pretty sure that's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
If people feel compelled to stick photos and information about themselves and their possibly illegal and/or immoral activities on a public website of the friggin' Internet, I have not an ounce of sympathy for them. If you want to do things that may get you in trouble with the law, wreck your marriage, engender a lawsuit, get fired from your job, etc., it doesn't take a genius to understand that it might not be a great idea to advertise those activities to the world...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
And the victim's coping strategy would be what? Oh right, lie in a hospital bed for a few weeks or months, out of work and perhaps physically or mentally damaged for life.
Using a party as a "coping strategy" is simply denying introspection or responsibility - thus, the non-reduced sentence is entirely appropriate.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch?
Fail.
Like I said: produce some real data, not from a Leftist "thinktank", and I'll consider it.
As for the Prof's blog, a quick scan revealed:
Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch
It's a friggin' self-referencing circle. Much like the On Killing farce.
I may actually check out both "reports", but I suspect my bias will be confirmed.
If there actually is a widespread problem with sentencing, you're not going to win any converts to the cause by indirectly attacking a third/half of the population (eg: implying that only Leftists care about fair sentencing) or by only citing studies from Leftwing "thinktanks". A systemic problem, if that is the case here, can only by solved in a constructive, bipartisan way.
Save the Kool-Aid for the orgy, because I ain't drinking any.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
The PC can contain evidence, such as unpublished photos.
Unless those photos were of the crime scene, I agree with the GP. It's the state's job to prove that a crime was committed and that he was responsible. While attacking his character may be successful in getting him a harsher sentence, or maybe getting him convicted in the first place by manipulating the jury, it strikes me as a pretty unethical thing to do.
If there's reasonable suspicion that the computer contained something related to the crime, yeah the cops should go search it. If the best reason they can come up with is, "we'd like to make him look like a douchebag," that isn't good enough. That judge was an idiot for going along with it.
Not really accurate. What you are in fact saying, is someone foolish enough to allow photos of them to be published on the internet which could possibly be interpreted as them being unrepentant, rather than perhaps being severely depressed and attempting to deal with that depression by the foolish consumption of alcohol which would alter their behaviour by affecting inhibitions.
On the other hand of course are people who were careful enough and had better friends and hence no pictures were published of their activities, when attempting to deal with the guilt, shock and of course trying to bury the fear of upcoming penalties for their poor behaviour.
After all isn't it extremely rare for people to deal with stress by drinking alcohol, or when dealing with depression, or when attempting to assuage a guilty conscience. Either the judges should wake up to themselves or everybody should be treated the same under law, that after all is one of the most important principles of justice that all should be treated equally.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This is sick, people. This means you're not only judged for what you do but also for what you feel.
Ummm, you realize that this isn't a new thing, right? The facebook part might be, but many lawyers have often pushed for lenience in cases where clients have shown true remorse for their actions, and vise-versa for the prosecutors against those who don't.
Feeling sad for your actions and being willing to change is part of the reformation process, which is part of what the justice system is about. A kid that's partying it up 2 weeks after killing somebody isn't feeling remorse, and isn't so likely to reform after a slap-on-the-wrist or token sentencing.
morale of the story.. don't put your private life on public display.. because sooner or later someone will use it to their advantage
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.
The case did stand on what happened. This was sentencing, which does take into account the defendant's likelihood of recidivism, repentance, social utility, etc. And the defense uses mitigating factors (first offense, volunteers at a homeless shelter, joined AA, etc.) just as much as the prosecution does, if not more.
Maybe you should become a defense lawyer - a few years of law school would let you give an informed opinion on this instead of talking out of your ass.
OK, what is the coping strategy of the guy in a wheelchair for the rest of his life?
What is the coping strategy of the parents of the kid he kills while driving drunk?
What is the coping strategy... Oh wait, nevermind. You have the same mindset he does. Fuck everyone else, you will be assimilated, and I can do whatever I want. Fuck your laws, rules, guidelines, etc. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT.
Entitled punk. Welcome to the real world. The world where you actually have REPURCUSSIONS for your actions. Where when you FUCK up, it can come back to HAUNT you.
That's the problem. His own actions / photos PROVED he was a "3 strikes" kind of kid. Bottom line. Had he had a little bit of intelligence (beyond how to pour a whore into bed), he would have realized that his popularity show (myspace page) COULD have fucked him in the future.
But, then again, he would probably have signed up for an ARM mortgage, drove an Escalade EXT, complained the entire time about how much it costs to drive it, etc. all the time wondering why he has no money living above his means.
Intelligence at it's finest.
--Toll_Free
Frankly, I'd rather elect someone who openly admits to behavior that may be in violation of law than someone who obsessively hides from the reality of his or her past. Both Nixon and GW Bush come to mind here.
And I wonder about Senator McCain with respect to admissions. Of course he did admit to wrongdoing with respect to the Savings and Loan scandals as well as other issues of favoritism. I have met Senator McCain and think he's a good man. Haven't met Senator Obama but I have read the thoughts of his he put into his books. Seems like an upstanding American patriot who would strive to do the right thing for America.
But what I cannot believe is that Senator McCain, after all he went through, did not do drugs and did not drink to excess. I lived across the street from a Vietnam veteran who was not imprisoned by the NVA and there were not enough drugs and there was not enough alcohol in the world for him after what he experienced as a draftee. I lived up the street from another who came back a paraplegic, and he regularly drank to excess.
Fact is, what you put on the Internet about yourself is public. So if you don't want someone to take advantage of you or to disparage your character, don't post anything that might be taken wrong. This lawyer was doing what all lawyers do in a very creative (for lawyers) way: He was raising questions as to the man's character before a jury so that the jury would disregard any testimony from him or from anyone who said he had a good character.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Um. Wow that is a stretch. I guess you could create a trojan that searches for your pictures, uploads them to a server where a team of Photoshop experts doctor them and then upload them and change the date stamps...
Seems a bit of a reach for me.
Now pirated movies and or music maybe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Let's not forget the possibility that a culture that built up around gangstas, bragging about prison time, and shooting people in the face for dissing you; might actually be committing more crimes. What is the product of this kind of culture? Black youth are six times more likely to die of homicide than white youth and seven times more likely to commit a homicide. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American males ages 15 to 29. I don't think about skin color, it's about cultural values. Bill Cosby has it right.
We are all just people.
yes, but they don't usually caption these drinking-jailbird-costume-wearing pictures "Remorseful?"
It doesn't mean God, it means any power higher than yourself - that could be God, it could be your uncle, it could be fate, it could be Gaia, it could be karma, or whatever. That step refers to acknowledging that there is something above, more important, and more powerful than yourself - i.e. you are not the centre of the world, and you have to look outside yourself to fix yourself.
Any fucktard that drives drunk deserves - at the very least - a serious asskickin'.
Set the BAC limit at a reasonable level and I'd agree with you. MADD, really a neoprohibitionist group, has been pressuring states to constantly lower the BAC to a point where it's really meaningless. .08 BAC, most drunk driving accidents are caused by recidivist alcoholics with a much higher BAC. If you really want to save people from drunk drivers, focus on them.
While there is measurable impairment at a
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So the college kid who hasn't lived long enough to be a "recidivist alcoholic" but who still has a .15 on the road gets... what? And the high school girl who "just had one beer" but weighs 90 pounds? How about all the other multitude of situations where people are unable to drive? I agree that BAC is a bogus measure, but, well, impaired is impaired. For that matter, why do drunks get jail when an old lady who plows into a crowd of pedestrians gets her license suspended for a month? It's an imperfect system, that's why. Run for town council if you want to change things.
If you can't drive after even one drink, you should be arrested no matter your BAC. Learn to drink at home, or at a bar that calls taxis for you, or, for cripes sake, with a designated driver. People stupid enough to take/post pictures of themselves like the people in the article (yeah, I read it) deserve the harsher sentence as they are showing that they are not remorseful and that they can't plan ahead ("gee, no one will ever see this if I post in on the intertubes!")
Tee Vee doing gangsta rap doesn't make that indicative of what you call "black culture"
I didn't that it "black culture", you did. I go to But the gangsta culture, is primarily made up of African-Americans. So when a very large percentage of gangsta culture goes to jail for the crimes that are bragged about on the radio, everyone says it's discrimination against African-Americans. Of course the black folks you know don't act like that, you met them in church, which if you had read the link to Bill Cosby's speech you would have seen that not going to church is one of reasons for the cultural failing of poor urban culture. My church here in NYC is about 25% Black, 40% Latino, 35% White. We don't have any gangs, we don't have any shootings, most everyone there is a very decent person (except me I'm a bigoted asshole). But when I come home from work on the subway and over hear a group of teenage boys bragging and laughing about jumping some kid, six to one: "Ha ha ha, I kicked him in the head BAM. Gotta respect me son." Can you guess what kind of music was playing from the crappy speaker in one of their cell phones? I'll give you a clue, the music strongly advocated that the way to get bitches was to earn money and respect by shooting people for failing to give you money and respect. I see something similar close to one a week. Now, this was at at 11pm on a week day, during the school year. Where the kids you knew growing up allowed at age 15 or so to be out at 11pm miles from home on a school night? Since I work evenings, I also get to see the kids hanging out during the day while school is in session. Guess what most of the teenage kids I see skipping school have in common? A culture that places very little value on education or authority. Now perhaps it is just chance that the majority of those kids have the same skin color, but it's not chance that those kids, embracing that culture, end up being crime statistics. Modern poor urban culture is a recipe for disaster. Until the people that propagate that culture face up to that, the situation will only get worse. Not everyone who is black is a proponent of that culture, but most of the people that propagate the culture are black. The culture is the problem, but the skin color is what is reported in the statistics that seem to point to racism.
We are all just people.
Uhh, if he has evidence of criminal behavior posted to facebook, then there's probable cause for a search warrant to collect the evidence on his PC. The search warrant is to collect evidence, not just tools used in crime.