What shows up online may show up in court

BEIJING, July 21 (Chinese medianet) -- Two weeks after

Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a

woman, photos of the 20-year-old college junior showing him in a black-and-white

striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird" showed up on

Facebook.

Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor in Lipton's case, used

the photos -- taken at a Halloween party -- to illustrate to the judge that

Lipton was an unrepentant partier who was out having a good time while his

victim recovered in the hospital. The judge agreed, calling the pictures

depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have

offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers

vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who

have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their

character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.

"Social networking sites are just another way that

people say things or do things that come back and haunt them," said Phil Malone,

director of the cyberlaw clinic at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for

Internet Society. "The things that people say online or leave online are

pretty permanent."

Rhode Island prosecutors say Lipton was drunk and

speeding near his school, Bryant University in Smithfield, in October 2006 when

he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies

hospitalized for weeks.

Sullivan, the prosecutor, said another victim of the

crash gave him copies of photographs from Lipton's Facebook page that were

posted after the collision. Sullivan assembled the pictures — which were posted

by someone else but accessible on Lipton's page — into a PowerPoint presentation

at sentencing.

One image 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 rhetorically wrote,

"Remorseful?"

Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said the

prosecutor's slide show influenced his decision to sentence Lipton. "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," the judge said in an interview.

(Agencies)