Thursday, November 12, 2009

Facebook Got Man Out Of Jail

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Apparently, if Facebook can get you into jail, it can also get you out of it.

According to New York Times, Rodney Bradford, a 19 year old teenager was arrested for robbery. The twist is, he had an alibi.

Rodney typed in a message at the time the crime was committed on his Facebook page, from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

The message read, “Where’s my pancakes”.

If there was anything he was grateful for, it should be the random urge of typing these 3 words into Facebook.

“The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.”

Whether the charges should be dropped so quickly is debatable. Anyone could have helped him type in those words with his username and password. But that’s not the point anymore, soon we will see more and more cases of social sites used as alibis.

I bet no one knew Facebook status updates could ever be used that way.