The dangers of social networking sites
New York police officer Vaughan Etienne recently learned a valuable and expensive lesson about posting personal information on MySpace, a social networking site, which boasts 30 million active users.
Etienne’s story is a sobering lesson for anyone using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter – especially police officers and others likely to be in the public eye.
As Etienne was to discover to his horror, his credibility was called in to question after he posted comments about using the film Training Day “to brush up on proper police procedure.”
Etienne had also changed his MySpace page ‘mood” to read “devious”. Training Day was a 2001 movie about police brutality and corruption and starred Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke.
Washington plays the character of Alonzo Harris, a highly-decorated but bent Los Angeles police narcotics officer.
‘Mood’ setting
The MySpace ‘mood’ setting is one of 122 moods ranging from “annoyed” and “bitchy” to “quixotic” and “weird”. The “devious” setting comes with an angry, red emoticon - a graphic representation of a facial expression - which is being licked by flames.
A few weeks later, Etienne appeared as the informant in a criminal trial in the New York Supreme Court.
The defendant, Gary Waters, was facing charges of carrying a loaded firearm and resisting a police officer.
Etienne claimed that when he arrested Waters in 2006, the accused had been carrying a fully loaded 9mm Beretta pistol, an extra 15-bullet magazine, 27 loose rounds, and a pair of handcuffs.
Accusations
But Waters’ lawyer argued that the gun had been planted on his client as an excuse for breaking his ribs during the arrest.
Originally, the police case looked straightforward until the defence focused on Etienne’s MySpace posting and called his credibility into question.
The defence also turned up incriminating comments made by Etienne on the UselessJunk video sharing site under the name “Blakryno”, Etienne’s online moniker.
One of the comments attributed to Blakryno under the video read: “Cop slugs handcuffed suspect.”
While Etienne has never been accused of brutality, he was suspended along with six other officers in 2007 after testing positive for steroids, according to a report in the Village Voice newspaper.
Steroid angle
Initially, the defence had sought to use the steroid taking as evidence that the injuries inflicted on the accused were as a result of “roid rage”.
Etienne subsequently complained that the defence had engaged in “a masterful piece of fantasy” in which he was portrayed as trying to emulate Denzel Washington’s character in the film.
The problem for Etienne was that the jury bought it and the felony charge of carrying a loaded firearm was thrown out.
Waters was convicted on the lesser misdemeanour charge of resisting a police officer.
Etienne said he is especially careful about what he posts on the Internet now.
“I feel it is partially my fault,” he said. “It paints a picture of a person who could be overly aggressive.
You put that together, it’s reasonable doubt, in anybody’s mind.”
Etienne argued that his “online persona” did not reflect his actions as a police officer.
NSW case
In New South Wales recently Constable Robert Hogan’s private online life via Facebook was also used in court to try to discredit him after he was involvedin a nightclub incident with an off-duty military commando who bit him.
The judge convicted his assailant and gave him a suspended jail sentence but not before Constable Hogan’s private life was provided to the court as evidence, courtesy of his Facebook site.
Constable Hogan’s cyber life saved the defence lawyers a lot of work. They tendered as evidence Facebook pictures and groups he had joined online, according to a report in The Age.
Despite Mr Hogan’s lawyer’s objections, the judge allowed the jury to read captions like “getting trashed” and “getting drunk”.
They also learned that Constable Hogan was a member of two groups: “I secretly want to punch slowwalking people in the back of the head” and “God created police so firefighters could have heroes”.
Dangers for court cases
These digital collections are so convincing to a jury, fed a constant diet of television forensics, that a Sydney University law professor, Mark Findlay, believes it is leading to cases being increasingly won on circumstantial evidence.
“You are going to see a trend in trials away from oral evidence to documentary trials,” Professor Findlay told The Age newspaper.
Such a trend was concerning because documentary evidence was easier to fabricate than that provided by a witness, he said.
Juries were also less likely to doubt the quality of the information. For example, they do not doubt that a text belongs to the owner of the mobile phone.
“The power of the visual image and the power of the text is that you take it for granted,” he said.
Clear message
The message from the Etienne and Hogan cases is clear. Be very careful about what you post in public forums in cyberspace. It may come back to haunt you in court, at a selection panel hearing or in a disciplinary investigation.
Law enforcement agencies in the USA and Europe are now looking at Facebook as a tool for catching criminals but also to check on employees’ postings.
Facebook has established formal procedures to comply with law enforcement agency requests.
Nick Abrahams, a partner at the Sydney office of law firm Deacons which specialises in technology and media law, said the case reminded him about a famous New Yorker magazine cartoon which shows a dog at a computer accompanied by the words “on the
Everyone is accountable for their actions online now,” he said. “The Internet has come of age and the anonymity has gone.”
