Prosecutors Using Facebook and MySpace in Prison Sentencing
It’s generally good advice not to go to a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner when you’ve just put someone in the hospital while driving drunk. In fact, it’s rather ghoulish and makes Steve Irwin stingray costumes seem positively highbrow.
Joshua Lipton, a huge tool from Rhode Island, drove drunk and put an unfortunate 20 year-old woman in the hospital for weeks. Before sentencing, Lipton decided it would be funny to dress up in stripes and an orange jumpsuit for Halloween. The problem is: he posed for some pictures, and they ended up on his own Facebook page. These pictures were used in sentencing, and he got two years. Hope he kept the costume.
In another example from the Associated Press story, a 22 year-old California woman was drunk and a passenger in her car was killed. Her MySpace page featured pictures of her drinking and joking about booze. The prosecutor brought these out and made the case for prison instead of probation. She got two years in the can. Another woman who was responsible for a drunk driving death had pictures of herself drinking on MySpace and got five years.
In my opinion, the moral of the story isn’t “watch what you put online.” After all, anybody can take pictures of you and post them on their own social networking pages.
The moral of the story is: don’t be a ghoulish, sorry excuse for a human being. A lot of tools like Lipton have gotten away with being hideous for a long while. I’m glad they’re being exposed.
Thank you Facebook and MySpace, for fleshing out the idiots. Now maybe they’ll think twice about their actions.
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