Can a Court Order You To Delete a Facebook Account?

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Can a Court Order You To Delete a Facebook Account?

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 20, 2012 @02:46AM from the seems-even-worse-than-no-internet-orders dept.

First time accepted submitter jaymz666 writes "Can a court really order you to delete a Facebook account? When Asher initially appeared in court after the July 20 accident, the judge told her to delete her Facebook account, Kittinger said. Asher did not take it seriously, and was charged with contempt of court when the judge learned her Facebook page was still active. Seems like a big overreach."

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Probably by Shajenko42 · 2012-09-20 02:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

A court can order your execution, I'd imagine they can order the deletion of an online account.
1. Re:Probably by fredrated · 2012-09-20 03:22 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Don't know much about the topic do you?
  In fact, the automatic appeals, lawyer fees etc. involved in attempting to execute someone are well known to cost the state far more than simply keeping the perp in jail for life.
2. Re:Probably by mcgrew · 2012-09-20 03:29 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  violent crimes in the USA are largely committed by certain few subcultures
  Do you have the balls to outright name these "subcultures"? The police subculture maybe? Or perhaps Rich people?
  Please clear this up, I fear you're making a thinly veiled racist statement about blacks and hispanics, or a classist statement about poor people. Crime doesn't fit any subculture; every culture has honest people, peaceful people, thieves and murderers.
  
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3. Re:Probably by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-20 03:30 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost
  for those to lazy to click through here's the juicy:
  "Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present system ($137 million per year), the present system after implementation of the reforms ... ($232.7 million per year) ... and a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty ($11.5 million)."
  So, not only are you wrong from a pure economic stand point, the fact you try to justify civility as meaning "cheapest wins" is frankly testimant to how thoroughly uncivilised you are.
  If you do find yourself in a 8'x6' room feel free to administer your own desired form of justice FoC, but please stop supporting state sponsored murder on from a moral high-ground.
4. Re:Probably by gl4ss · 2012-09-20 03:31 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  rape is too easy way to get someone to death row on purpose.
  so are a lot of other things.
  but civilized people don't have death penalty because for the innocent it's too cruel and for the guilty it's too easy.
  
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5. Re:Probably by interkin3tic · 2012-09-20 03:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It's always funny when you tell proponents of the death penalty that it costs a huge amount more. In my experience, they generally suggest cheap ways of killing people. You know, because the logical first assumption would be not lawyer costs but that we were killing prisoners using thousands of diamond swords or something.
6. Re:Probably by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-20 03:46 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  A deterrent means that the threat of the punishment prevents crime from happening in the first place - not that it prevents recidivism.
7. Re:Probably by gorzek · 2012-09-20 03:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If we are going to execute someone, should we really not give them full due process of law? Taking a life is the most extreme action available to our justice system. We owe it to ourselves to take every measure possible to ensure the accused is guilty of the crime in question under the circumstances related by the prosecution. This is why we have multiple appeals: so different individuals can take a fresh look at the facts and the trial and any previous appeals and see if anything went wrong.
  Even then, we stand a good chance of missing exculpatory evidence. For instance, there are death row convictions based on eyewitness testimony which are later ruled out by DNA evidence. This happens way too often, and it is naive to think we have caught or will catch every instance where an innocent person has gone to death row--just as a matter of statistical probability, we must have executed innocent people. There is no legal process to prove this since there is no victim to redress or petition the court (the victim is dead) so you will never see a court case where an executed individual is exonerated by a court of law.
  As the AC said, deterrence and recidivism are separate issues. The death penalty has been demonstrated to, at best, have no effect on murder rates. Some studies have shown it actually increases murder rates.
  In any case, this is all beside the point as far as I'm concerned, given that this is a power government should not possess in the first place.
  
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8. Re:Probably by Nadaka · 2012-09-20 04:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The death penalty isn't a a deterrent because the class of crimes that it is reserved for are those that are nearly impossible to deter.
  The death penalty would make a fantastic shoplifting deterrent. Murder? not so much.
9. Re:Probably by richard.cs · 2012-09-20 04:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I would like to include rape for the death penalty but the Supreme Court has said no, that's too cruel.
  You absolutely should not have the same punishment for rape as for murder. Doing so gives rapists a big incentive to kill their victims: without the victim as a witness they're much less likely to get caught and if the penalty is identical....
  This should hold true whether you think the death penalty is a good idea or not.
DUI, collision, no jail time? by Freddybear · 2012-09-20 02:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

She got off easy, after a DUI collision she should be in jail for a year or two.
Taunting by hawguy · 2012-09-20 02:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

When you taunt the victims of your drunk driving accident with a flippant post, I am glad a judge can make you take it down, or even your whole FB account if you've shown that you're not responsible enough to use it wisely. If the judge can put you in jail I don't see why it's worse if he tells you to stay off of FB.
1. Re:Taunting by pla · 2012-09-20 03:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  When you taunt the victims of your drunk driving accident with a flippant post, I am glad a judge can make you take it down
  
  You can taunt your victims in person. You can taunt your victims by mail. You can taunt your victims by phone. You can taunt your victims via press conference (if the press considers you important enough to give you an audience). You can taunt your victims with frickin' sky-writing for all it matters.
  
  And yes, you can taunt your victims on Facebook.
  
  The fact that she chose to do it at all makes her an ass, but it doesn't take away her first amendment right to act like an ass.
  
  That said - She may have agreed to delete her account as a condition of a lighter sentence. Personally, I have a problem with games like that in general, but since it happens, and she took the deal, she damned well better hold up her side if she wants to remain on the outside of a cage.
Re:Pro death == pro stupid by nospam007 · 2012-09-20 07:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

" Mostly we just see circumstantial stories about somebodies innocence."
There are 140 of them.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row
California could save $1 billion over five years by replacing the death penalty with permanent imprisonment.
California taxpayers pay $90,000 _more_ per death row prisoner each year than on prisoners in regular confinement.
http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42
Re:Pro death == pro stupid by Asic+Eng · 2012-09-20 07:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

I have never seen a good study of the actual proved innocent after death penalty administered, but I imagine the numbers will be very low.
The Colombia University Law School has done a study, which suggests the error rates are high: http://www2.law.columbia.edu/instructionalservices/liebman/liebman_final.pdf
Re:Pro death == pro stupid by hey! · 2012-09-20 07:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

but I imagine the numbers will be very low.
On what basis to do you imagine that? Why is it that in this country, where we assume the government can't do anything right, somehow we assume it is near *perfect* when it comes to condemning people to death?

If it turned out to be one in a hundred, then we would need to take a serious look at the processes involved. However, I have no problem with an error rate of one in ten thousand death penalty convictions being wrong.
Alright, how did you decide that 1/100 is unacceptable, but 1/10000 is? Do you have a rational basis for where you draw the line, or are you going by your gut feeling? If you are going by your gut feeling, what makes you think that's a reasonable basis for deciding to execute somebody?
There are two common styles of ethical reasoning you can use to approach a question like this.There is utilitarian reasoning, which maximizes the public good. At least under utilitarian reasoning at least you *could* come up with a conclusion that 1/100 errors is unacceptable but 1/10000 is, but you'd have to have to identify some approximately measurable good which you can set against the costs of executing an innocent man. You can't appeal to "justice", because that belongs to a *different* style of ethical reasoning: deontological ethics, which deals in rights and obligations. In that case it doesn't matter of the innocent defendant is 1/100 or 1/10000, his rights cannot be violated unless you can show that *not* executing him violates somebody else's superior right.
In either case your feeling good or bad, satisfied or dissatisfied about executions has no bearing on the morality of capital punishment.

This little strawman is always a fun one. Let me turn it around on you. If I knew for a fact that my child committed a crime that merited the death penalty, heck, even if I am the one who turned him in, I still wouldn't stand outside the prison with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard.'
I'll go out on a limb here and guess you don't actually have any children.

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