Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Well, I've been at .09 and I didn't stagger around and slur my speech. Of course, that's not really drunk - the guys that cause the actual damage start at around .12 and are usually .15 and up.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I remember that Boston incident: it wasn't a Lite-Brite, it was a hand-built blinking widget clipped to her sweatshirt with wires and things sticking out of it. (Picture at http://hackaday.com/2008/09/19/boston-led-sweatshirt-arrestee-interviewed/). She also was holding something made out of clay in her hand (as it turned out, a rose sculpture). In this day and age, it's very understandable to think "holy cow, idiot terrorist with plastique!!!!". And some of us are old enough to remember when American college kids did noticeable amounts of poorly targeted anti-war violence. (I'm old enough to remember the Weathermen, and Patty Hearst.)
So the security response there was perhaps excessive, but understandable. Please actually do a bit of research before claiming that something was wildly out of line.
I definitely agree with you that cops who lie should be fired and prosecuted for perjury. But I'm curious if you felt the same way when a past President lied to a judge in a civil rights trial? Or was that OK because it was "just sex"?
I'll take this one, although I can only speak for myself, and only if I understand which president you're talking about. If I do, the question was allegedly asked to establish a pattern of conduct to prove that that particular past president was prone to behaving in a manner which is a crime. However, he was being asked if he had engaged in conduct which was not a crime. The question was complete crap and should never have been asked. If he were not in front of a grand jury then he would have been able to plead the fifth. Since he was, his only remaining option was prevarication. The system permits and indeed encourages this. If you want to complain, complain about the system - but first complain about how it was used to attack a president's character in a way irrelevant to the alleged crime, not about how he used it to avoid having to admit something which was irrelevant to the case. Then you can complain about his misuse of the so-called justice system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Will these people puhlease stop trying to behave "tech savvy" by trying to jam myspace, twitter and facebook in everything they do?
It's a pathetic way to try and stay relevant
Fact is, these judges,congressmen,lawyers etc. are total noobs at interpreting implications of technology and lack the common sense to distinguish the virtual world from the real.
Just because u have a facebook page and tweet does not make u "hip" or enroll u into pop youth culture.
It only qualifies you as an idiot with half-knowledge of these technologies who try to enforce laws that were written in an era when these technologies did not exist
There is a difference between reality and facebook. The difference is that reality is who you are and facebook is what you pretend to be.
gtfo facebook,myspace and twitter
gimme bak my internetz
Slashdot - I went there to fix their grammar that they're so bad at.