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Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop's Facebook Status
longacre writes "A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer's Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne's MySpace 'mood' was set to 'devious' on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read 'Vaughan is watching "Training Day" to brush up on proper police procedure.' From the article: '"You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street," Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. "What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room." Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.'"
That defense actually WORKED? Sorry, but that is nothing more than "locker room talk". If silly bits and pieces like that are valid in court, then the idiotic judge just opened a massive can of worms. Nice precedent, asshole. No more joking on the internet because someone could take it seriously!
I know! This really ticks me off! I totally want to grab a handgun and take out a large handful of innocent bystanders before turning the gun on myself. Or maybe I'll start a blog!
The defendant had better hope never to see:
Officer Vaughan Ettienne's MySpace "mood" set to "vigilante"
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Please, no! Just kill the people!
No existe.
Tough titty. If you're a public official, you have to live up to a higher standard than everyone else - it's part of the deal. Even the appearance of unfairness or impropriety is unacceptable, insofar as it relates to your position.
To this end, I have compiled a list of analogous examples of facebook status lines, as depicted by their various professions:
- Catholic Priest: "Off to work for me...Long day ahead of corn-holing a bunch of kids."
- Astronaut: "Launch time is tomorrow morning. This time tomorrow, I should be safely in orbit, pulling my pud and spewing my wad into someone's EVA glove."
- Programmer for Microsoft: "Damn I got coder's block. Time to find something useful inside the linux kernel."
- Local baker: "I just fooled around for two hours with my raunchy girlfriend and haven't washed my hands. Gonna go bake some bread."
- Medical examiner: "I'm just so bloody horny lately and dammit the online dating just isn't working out for me."
- County Judge: "Feeling a bit woozy right now after sampling everything out of the medicine cabinet."
- Airline pilot: "Life sucks and I want to die."
- Cthulhu: "Sometimes i just want a hug."
I just wonder what his Fark or 4Chan handle is.
On 4chan, I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say it's Anonymous .
Learn the difference between "lose" and "loose." One applies to you, the other applies to your mother :)
I thought the term was "bald-faced lying scumbag", but then again I'm ANAL and not good with language ;-)