home

New Advice For Clients

It's customary for criminal defense lawyers to tell new clients, "Don't do anything stupid while these charges are pending." The advice isn't always heeded. Now it seems necessary to be more specific: "If you're going to do something stupid, don't publicize it on your MySpace or Facebook page."

Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton's drunken-driving case.

Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

Of course, social networking sites hold some benefit for defense lawyers as well. Young people who claim to be distraught victims of crimes have trouble explaining why they're posting pictures of their drunken parties, taken just days after they were supposedly traumatized by a criminal act. It's great evidence when you find it, and it's surprising how often you do.

< Code Pink, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi at Netroots Nation | Psychology >
  • The Online Magazine with Liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news

  • Contribute To TalkLeft


  • Display: Sort:
    My heart goes out... (5.00 / 1) (#1)
    by EL seattle on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:08:48 PM EST
    ...to all the public defenders who have to deal with this sort of trouble, day in and day out.

    Just wondering... how difficult is it for a miscreant to scrub these web pages and claim that they didn't exist or that they didn't have anything to do with them?  I'd imagine that could be turned into an easy perjury pit, but who knows?

    I'm sure that Dick Wolf has heard of this already, and has two or three scripts in devevelopment for his TV shows.

    If they have been up long enough (5.00 / 1) (#4)
    by nycstray on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:26:02 PM EST
    you can sometimes pick the archives up through Way  Back (I'm sure there's other ways, but I'm not up on these things!) When a certain company's name was released as the importer of the tainted wheat gluten during the pet food recall, they scrubbed and changed info on their site with in 24hrs. One day it showed everything they imported that was human grade and pet grade, the next, most had been moved to pet grade or removed (along with a few other changes). I was able to pull up their archives and screen shoot the pages along with archiving them myself. I learned a lot about the internet and hunting things down during that period, oy.

    I'm always surprised at the stuff people post. And it always seems to make the paper if they make the news for the wrong reason.

    Parent

    general rule is 24 hours (5.00 / 1) (#7)
    by DandyTIger on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 02:04:22 PM EST
    before it's too late to scrub. And often less than that. Google cache/indexing mechanisms are working all the time, and wayback and similar web archival systems are also working around the clock also. So if you have something up on the web, and it's referenced by some things, they it will be in the history books very soon.

    One way to try to get it out of those archives is if there are copyright violations. So if your client can say those are copyrighted pictures and anyone posting them is violating copyright law, then that's a way to get them off. But even then there's no guarantee. In fact, trying to force people expunge records is often incentive to archive them anyway.

    Definitely better to educate the client first. Kind of reminds me of the kids that video tape their crime and then post it on the internet. Real genius that. But then if they weren't idiots, they wouldn't be doing that stuff I guess...

    Parent

    I just want to know (none / 0) (#9)
    by cib on Sun Jul 20, 2008 at 03:48:49 AM EST
    Why this is a bad thing?

    Surely we would hope that criminals would stay stupid?

    After all, every dumb crook sitting in jail because he chose to record the beating of that homeless man makes it one less crook on the streets.

    Parent

    Felony dumb. Still applicable. (5.00 / 1) (#2)
    by oculus on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:13:06 PM EST


    and don't be your own lawyer either (5.00 / 2) (#3)
    by Carolyn in Baltimore on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:20:11 PM EST
    My best friend signed a contract for her decorating services that was a trade - she would advise as to decorating a new beach house in return for 1 week in August w/ her kids. After traveling and measuring and offering advice the client said forget it. So my friend went to small claims.
    It wwas dismissed because while in her complaint she included copies of the signed agreements, email, and log of work performed, she did not give another copy to the judge who had all the docs in front of him but apparently they needed to be entered into evidence. Ugh! The judge kept hinting that there was something else she should do besides tell her story.
    The good part is the judge also hinted that the contract was not cancelled in writing and that August (and thus the breach) had not happened yet. So my friend may have another shot.

    So there are many stupid little things we all should know.

    At last in CA, no lawyers (5.00 / 1) (#5)
    by oculus on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:37:48 PM EST
    permitted to represent others in small claims unless a party is a corporation.

    Parent
    Interesting (5.00 / 1) (#6)
    by Molly Bloom on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 01:53:49 PM EST
    I understand the logic, because Corporations cannot appear pro se in Florida, except in small claims court, where they can be represented by employees and corporate officers. However, anyone can have a lawyer in small claims case.

    (My partner in life and law)  Leo actually had a small claims case here where a property manager filed a case on behalf of a HOA, and Leo invoked the rule- property manager was neither corporate officer nor employee, but an independent contractor. Case dismissed.

    Parent

    The two years this twerp does in (none / 0) (#8)
    by hairspray on Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 03:16:14 PM EST
    prison, if he does any time, may be the best investment he could make in his life.  He will either stop drinking and get an education while doing time, or he will go the other way. Lets hope he makes something of his life so that the damage done to the other person will not have been in vain.