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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!
How is it joking? Jokes are supposed to be funny, not hurt other people. The internet is a real place not some fantasy land. People are responsible for there comment regardless of what media they use to make their comment. If a terrorist make a threat on the internet should it just be dismissed because it was said on the internet. Oh I was just joking about blowing up the school. Should something like that be a defense, oh he said it on the internet so it was a joke.
Too bad it was used to defend a career criminal.
Anonymous Coward
People are always keen to say "such and such" is just talk but the fact is the language we use about ourselves has a profound impact on our behavior. If a cop enjoys all that bad-ass posturing in art, and then builds that persona for their self, there is little doubt in my mind that at some point, no matter how much they might deny it, that kind of stuff will appear in their actual behavior on the job. I am NOT saying in this case it follows that the officers actually planted a weapon. But I don't really see a problem with someone being given pause over this kind of posturing. They do an important job and maintaining certain professional standards in their behavior keeps us safer all-around.
So when the system uses this kind of bs to keep you from a job it's fine and dandy. But as soon as you turn it around on the system, all of a sudden people are outraged?
Sometimes, protecting the rights of suspects means following a process that fails to convict a criminal. The justice system is imperfect. Crank up the sensitivity high enough to eliminate false negatives and you'll get a whole pile of false positives.
Concern for the innocent should be reason enough; but if it isn't, remember that every innocent person convicted for a crime means a guilty person not convicted for that crime.
What you say in a public forum, ESPECIALLY as a public official in a critical position of trust, matters. Make a joke about crashing planes on the TSA website, see what happens. Make any kind of joke in any kind of public forum about possibly harming the president of the United States and the Secret Service will absolutely pay you a visit.
How would you feel to know your doctor cruelly jokes about involuntarily euthanizing people over 40? A kindergarten teacher making jokes about molesting the kids? A contractor who jokes about building houses to fall in the first earthquake? I'm a network engineer, and I can assure you I don't joke about crashing the 911 systems or bringing down the hospitals and airports I'm the lead engineer for.
I love Bill Hicks. I thank God for Penn Gillette. Richard Pryor is a certified genius. We will not see the like of Jonathan Swift again. But when my wife is in the middle of a c-section, I don't wanna hear the anesthesiologist go "Hey Dude, do you want a hit of this too?" It would be hilarious, and I would have to kill him.
A police officer who jokes about beating people and planting evidence does not have the temperment or trustworthiness for the job.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I guess it boils down to whether someone thinks you're joking or you're 'joking ha ha wink wink'. As a bio-chem researcher your Gattaca comment obviously trips the nerd humor trigger because it's so ridiculous. But we catch corrupt cops all the time. How about that Republican party member who made 'just a joke' about Obama's Easter watermelon hunts? Or if you'd snickered instead that you were 'falsifying COX2 inhibitor research results'?
Cops are given an amazing amount of power - I've seen that if there's no evidence otherwise the judge will take their word over anyone else's, but they're caught lying and falsifying evidence quite often. Given that, joking on your Facebook page about using Training Day as a model he is are makes me go 'Ha ha ha... ha?' because it does happen. It is an admitted prejudice of mine, but I've never met a single good cop (and there are plenty of those too) who ever joked, even in private, about how corrupt they were.
Remember what your peers on here have said about slights committed by police officers. Give the guy/gal on the defense an extra benefit of the doubt, they really need it in cases where the police take it apon themselves to "help" get a conviction.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
every innocent person convicted for a crime means a guilty person not convicted for that crime.
Except for victimless crimes. In those cases (drugs, speeding, etc), the only positive of punishing an innocent is monetary fines. Why else are most victimless crimes punished with fines instead of jail time?
Hard-core gadget geek here. If it says Surefire, Victorinox, Wenger, Leatherman, Nitecore or Spyderco, it's probably a good Christmas present idea for me. I doubt I'm alone on this on this board. I routinely carry a Surefire E1B (a very bright small flashlight the size of a roll of Lifesavers) and a Leatherman. You can't trace a cable you can't see, and the usefulness of a Leatherman around networking gear should explain itself.
The problem is that the laws as they are written define a weapon roughly as "anything the officer wants." People have been arrested for carrying Swiss Army Knives the officers chose to call a "hidden dirk or dagger." People have been arrested for carrying Surefire 6Ps (a six-inch long flashlight. Turns out the officer wanted to "confiscate" an expensive piece of gear). A couple of summers back, an off-duty police officer working private security told my wife she couldn't bring a six-pack of cokes into the amusement park because the aluminum can could be used as a weapon. The vendors were selling cans of cokes not 50 feet from the gate, of course.
When you hear "weapons violation," you used to think hidden foot-long boot daggers, rifles illegally converted to full auto, sawed-off shotguns, live grenades and the like. Today, more often than not, being arrested for "carrying a deadly weapon," means you were holding a Maglight to see your way to your car in a dark parking lot.
You think I'm joking? Anyone remember the terrorist Lite-Brite Toy Incident in Boston?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
His job doesn't require more "discretion", it requires ethics and honesty. "Discretion" implies it's OK to be unethical and dishonest as long as you can get away with it.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
What if it actually was consensual? What if the "victim" was actually the man, falsely accused because the woman got pissed off at him later? If it's otherwise her word against his (which is skewed way in her favor nowadays), then that facebook profile might be the only thing that keeps an innocent guy from getting his life ruined.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That may not mean what you seem to be implying. It could mean they really didn't have anything to arrest him on. More likely it means there were so many different possible charges they didn't know where to start.
It could also be that they were assisting in an arrest where someone else had the lead while they themselves had little idea how the whole thing started or why the guy in question needed to be arrested.
sigs are hazardous to your health
The "falsly accuse someone of rape to get revenge for something else" is just a myth, and one that continues to destroy their victims every day.
And yet it happens every day. Partly because they perpetuate the whole 'noone would lie about rape' myth.