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Can a Court Order You To Delete a Facebook Account?
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."
A court can order your execution, I'd imagine they can order the deletion of an online account.
Never mind you being forced to delete an account, will Facebook wipe an account of their servers?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
It's like constitutionality and the supreme court. What the court says is constitutional IS constitutional, regardless of what anybody else thinks.
The same applies here (except for the fact that a higher court can say otherwise).
She got off easy, after a DUI collision she should be in jail for a year or two.
Last I checked, it wasn't possible to delete a facebook account. You can only deactivate them. I realise it's a technicality, but in a system based upon technicalities, it could serve to be an adequate defence?
A judge ordering a defendant to delete evidence of a crime... Well, I must say that's a new one for me.
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.
It was a condition of her release. If she did not wish to comply with the conditions, her jail time would have been higher and/or she would have had greater fines.
If the judge offers something like this up, you take it. It beats spending more time in jail. But you had better follow through. At this level of the court system, the judges are your neighbors. They want the same things you do, a safe community. They are not ivory tower federal judges.
But in this case the court's decision is probably in violation to the first amendment and would be over turned by a federal court (or the USSC). Her facebook comment is within her rights to free speech even if in poor taste.
Sounds like she agreed to get off facebook as part of deal for less jail time. Other deals you might make with the judge. "Less time in exchange for serving in the military", "Less time in exchange for community service", "Less time in exchange for entering into rehab", "Less time with an agreement to avoid certain people"
It is still kinda of awful. Judges should avoid restricting peoples first amendment rights.
What if the site did not allow for account deletion? Facebook arguably doesn't allow this. Maybe you can deactivate, but never delete. Even if it did allow deletion, what if it were some other site that did not allow it. How could the judge order something that isn't (easily) possible?
Now, suppose the judge orders you to give your password, but the site TOS forbids you from giving out the password? Can a judge order you to violate a TOS?
I can't disagree with the logic, but something still stinks about how deeply into one's personal life and activities a judge can go.
Hypothetical extreme example: If you met a girl at a bar, went to bed with her, only to discover later (via arrest) that she was jailbait, and a judge demanded that you get a castration in order to avoid 10-15 years in prison, would you do it? Many (I daresay most) would, while others would not.
Thing is, it's not that it gets you out of jail faster - it's that the punishment itself is unusual, which is constitutionally out-of-bounds. In other words, the judge had no constitutional right or authority to order (let alone enforce) such a thing as punishment.
One other bit: I submit that local judges, far more than state/federal ones, are more prone to viciousness, petty abuses, and vindictiveness - especially in more rural areas, where there is no competition and/or chance of losing one's job to a misconduct charge. If there's going to be judicial abuse, odds are good that it'll happen on the lower levels far easier than the upper ones.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I realize that this is Slashdot, and no one reads the original article, but this woman was mocking the fact that she got a DUI on Facebook, which is what caught the attention of the judge in the first place.
She was laughing it off as a status update, after hitting another car with, I believe (I read this somewhere else), 4 people in it.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that the judge was looking for a power grab, but in this case, I think that the judge was trying to make a point to a person that simply did not understand the ramifications of the situation.
She hasn't actually been convicted yet from the sounds of things. So it is not something she "agreed to" as a condition of release. It apparently was imposed by the judge because he didn't like the content she had posted. Ordering her not to use Facebook for any purpose based on the content of one post has clear first amendment problems.
There was no due process here, at least none I saw. Just a judge going, "Take it down."
Having a judge involved, and the defense attorney not objecting, is due process.
In yet other news... abortion is murder: the killing of an innocent human for the desire of the one who does it.
Gun proliferation, while bad [and in some cases indicative of murderous thoughts], is not necessarily murder.
Go on, get some grounding. You sound like a soundbite.
I'm libertarian on most things. But if the whole purpose of the law is to protect the interests of the strong, while ignoring the weak, then I really don't see the point of it. When you approve of abortion, you cut the logical feet out from under the disapproval of any other murder. In point of fact, regardless of what a currently-insane society says, murder is evil, and should not be committed, no matter what the flavor.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Hypothetical extreme example: If you met a girl at a bar, went to bed with her, only to discover later (via arrest) that she was jailbait, and a judge demanded that you get a castration in order to avoid 10-15 years in prison, would you do it? Many (I daresay most) would, while others would not.
Apples and oranges. You're discussing sentencing options after conviction/plea deal. TFA is about a bail hearing.
The judge in question wanted the offending Facebook post removed as an indication that the defendant was "taking it seriously" and would, in fact, show up for her trial; it was a bail condition, not a sentence.
You know, I don't think I've ever suggested a 'cheap' way of actually doing the execution? I've suggested nitrogen asphixiation as a method that's painless and doesn't mess the body up, require somebody with medical training(and thus Hippocratic Oath to deal with), or restricted, hard to obtain chemicals. You just need a reasonably airtight room and some tanks of nitrogen(available from the local welding supply).
I've mostly suggested streamlining the appeals process, eliminating some of the duplication of effort, and restricting the death penalty to the 'worst offenders'. We're not just talking 1st degree murder. My general standard is '3 or more killed, or deliberate torture in addition to the murder'. You don't try to sentence a 60 year old doctor who killed his wife by poison after catching her cheating to death. You go for the under 25 year old gangbanger 'executioner' who killed 6 people with his bare hands with that sentence. The second isn't containable in a minimum security prison, the first is.
Plus, one thing to realize is that prison costs can vary wildly. A Life in prison without possible parole sentence is the normal replacement for death, but those who receive it are often not 'average' convicts. You might be able to warehouse them cheaper than maintaining them on a death row, but I will call 'foul' when anti-DP groups cite costs and use average incarceration figures, incuding minimum security prisons*, when most of those being convicted of murder are going straight for max, which costs 3-10 times as much as minimum. Even then, you have the problem that when they hit 60 and start needing medical care provided by the prison system... In the end, I conclude that any savings are 'it depends on the specific case', and shouldn't really be considered that much. The decision should be on the basis of 'the dudes just that dangerous', or 'what they did was just that wrong'.
*Though I'll admit that not all do.
I don't read AC A human right
I've mostly suggested streamlining the appeals process, eliminating some of the duplication of effort, and restricting the death penalty to the 'worst offenders'. We're not just talking 1st degree murder. My general standard is '3 or more killed, or deliberate torture in addition to the murder'. You don't try to sentence a 60 year old doctor who killed his wife by poison after catching her cheating to death. You go for the under 25 year old gangbanger 'executioner' who killed 6 people with his bare hands with that sentence. The second isn't containable in a minimum security prison, the first is.
The reason the death penalty is flat out wrong is quite simple. It isn't just that you are being hypocritical about the morality of killing, it is also that you are murdering innocent people.
In any group of convicted murderers, there are going to be some people who are innocent. That's just a fact. People (juries) make mistakes. So some number of people you put to death are going to be innocent. It might be one in a hundred or one in ten thousand, but they are going to be there regardless of your degree of diligence. And when 15 years later, when new evidence comes to light as it seems to with alarmingly frequency, you can't just let them out of jail with an apology.
Whenever I talk to pro-death penalty people, I ask them if they would still support the death penalty if they or one of their loved ones was one of those one in a thousand cases where an innocent person was wrongly convicted, I have yet to hear a convincing 'yes'. Are you so strong in your belief of the value of capitol punishment that you would be willing to die to support it? Would you stand outside the prison when your child was executed with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard', when you knew they were only guilty of not having a good alibi and a good lawyer?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!