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Social Networks Help Detectives Solve Crimes

Posted on: Saturday, 19 July 2008, 18:50 CDT

Popular social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are helping detectives solve crimes, and are becoming an important resource for employers vetting job applicants.

One example: 20-year-old Joshua Lipton, who just two weeks after he was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him dressed in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."
 
It's not hard to guess what soon happened in the age of the Internet. Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And prosecutor Jay Sullivan offered that as remarkable evidence during Lipton's drunken-driving case.
 
Sullivan used the pictures to portray Lipton as an unrepentant young man who partied while his victim recovered in the hospital.
 
A judge sided with Sullivan and called the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.
 
Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on both their character and motives. Prosecutors use them during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.
 
Phil Malone, director of the cyberlaw clinic at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society said, "Social networking sites are just another way that people say things or do things that come back and haunt them."
 
He said, "The things that people say online or leave online are pretty permanent."
 
During the sentencing, prosecutors show the pictures, not only to embarrass defendants but to make it harder for them to convince a judge that they're remorseful or that their drunken behavior was an accident.
 
Prosecutors do not always immediately turn to networking sites while preparing for sentencing, despite embarrassing photos of criminal defendants that are sometimes available in plain sight and accessible under a person's real name.
 
However, in circumstances where they've had reason to suspect incriminating pictures online, or have been tipped off to a particular person's MySpace or Facebook page, the sites have produced critical character evidence.
 
Darryl Perlin, a senior prosecutor in Santa Barbara County, California said, "It's not possible to do it in every case."
 
He said,  "But certain cases, it does become relevant."
 
Perlin said in one case, he was considering probation for Lara Buys until he checked her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing. Buys was charged in connection with a 2006 drunken driving crash that killed her passenger.
 
The Myspace page featured pictures of Buys that were taken after the crash but before sentencing. She was caught- holding a glass of wine, and added joking comments about drinking.
 
Perlin used the pictures to up her punishment to a jail sentence instead of probation. Buys got two years in prison.

"Pending sentencing, you should be going to (Alcoholics Anonymous), you should be in therapy, you should be in a program to learn to deal with drinking and driving," Perlin said. "She was doing nothing other than having a good old time."

Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met his client Jessica Binkerd, he automatically asked if she had a MySpace page. Binkerd was a recent college graduate charged with a fatal drunken driving crash.  When she said yes, he told her to remove it, because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light.

But, Binkerd failed to remove the page, and right before she was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney was "blindsided" by a prosecutors report that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash.

In one, Binkerd was shown holding a beer bottle. Others revealed her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses.

Balash said, Binkerd wasn't doing anything illegal, but the photos hurt her credibility anyway. She was sentenced to five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.

"When you take those pictures like that, it's a hell of an impact," he said.

Rhode Island prosecutors say Lipton was drunk and speeding near his school, when he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies hospitalized for weeks. The accident happened near Bryant University in Smithfield, in October 2006. 
 
Sullivan, the prosecutor, said a victim involved in the accident supplied him with copies of photographs from Lipton's Facebook page that were posted after the collision.
 
Sullivan used the pictures, which were posted by someone else but viewable on Lipton's page, into a PowerPoint presentation.

He showed the pictures during sentencing; one image that shows a smiling Lipton at the Halloween party, clutching cans of the energy drink Red Bull with his arm draped around a young woman in a sorority T-shirt. Above it, Sullivan wrote, "Remorseful?"

Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said Sullivan's slide show changed his decision to sentence Lipton.

The judge said, "I did feel that gave me some indication of how that young man was feeling a short time after a near-fatal accident, that he thought it was appropriate to joke and mock about the possibility of going to prison."

Lipton's attorney, Kevin Bristow, said the photos didn't accurately portray Lipton's character or level of remorse.

"The pictures showed a kid who didn't know what to do two weeks after this accident," Bristow said, adding that Lipton took the initiative to write apologetic letters to the victim and her family. He also dropped out of college because he was so upset.

Still, Bristow used the incident as an example to his own teenage children. He tells them to be careful about what they post online.

"If it shows up under your name you own it," he said, "and you better understand that people look for that stuff."

Source: redOrbit staff and wire reports

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