Facebook photos judges of character

PROVIDENCE, R.I. | Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken-driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner.

Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case.

Mr. Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partyer who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A 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 cyber-law clinic at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The things that people say online or leave online are pretty permanent.”

The pictures, when shown at sentencing, not only embarrass defendants, but also can make it harder for them to convince a judge that they’re remorseful or that their drunken behavior was an aberration. (Of course, the sites are also valuable for defense lawyers looking to dig up dirt to undercut the credibility of a star prosecution witness.)

Prosecutors do not appear to be scouring networking sites while preparing for every sentencing, even though telling photos of criminal defendants are sometimes available in plain sight and accessible under a person’s real name.

But in cases 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 yielded critical character evidence.

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.

Mr. 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

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