I, too, once made some kid stop saying he was going to become vegan by reminding him of the consequences of such a commitment - by reminding him that commitments HAVE consequences in fact. As it turns out, he was just saying he was going to be vegan to get attention and never had any intention of doing so. So my story isn't nearly as cool as I think it is, and neither am I.
good thing i'm lookin' at movin' there meself, eh? I mean, it's the responsible thing to do, what with there not being any vegan strip clubs in the bay area.
... go to vegan strip clubs... the better question is what will you do without me. I suppose you'll probably go to some diesel spewing non-eco and non-animal friendly strip show on a boat.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush's years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.
The measure certified Thursday would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
Supporters say the idea is to commemorate the mess they claim Bush has left behind by actions such as the war in Iraq.
Local Republicans say the plan stinks and they will oppose it.
I don't know about this. I understand the sentiment, that it would associate Bush's name with sewage, but sewage treatment plants are good things that take filth coming in and puts clean and pure out. Bush does the opposite.
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) -- 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.
Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier 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 cyberlaw 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 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.
"It's not possible to do it in every case," said Darryl Perlin, a senior prosecutor in Santa Barbara County, California. "But certain cases, it does become relevant."
Perlin said he was willing to recommend probation for Lara Buys for a drunken driving crash that killed her passenger last year, until he thought to check her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing.
The page featured photos of Buys, taken after the crash but before sentencing, holding a glass of wine as well as joking comments about drinking. Perlin used the photos to argue for a jail sentence instead of probation, and Buys, then 22, got two years in prison.
"Pending sentencing, you should be going to [Alcoholics Anonymous]; you should be in therapy; you should be in a program to learn to deal with drinking and driving," Perlin said. "She was doing nothing other than having a good old time."
Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met client Jessica Binkerd, a recent college graduate charged in a fatal drunken driving crash, he asked whether she had a MySpace page. When she said yes, he told her to take it down because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light.
But she didn't remove the page. And right before Binkerd was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney said, he was "blindsided" by a presentencing report from prosecutors that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash.
One showed Binkerd holding a beer bottle. Others had her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses.
Binkerd wasn't doing anything illegal, but Balash said the photos hurt her anyway. She was given more than five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.
"When you take those pictures like that, it's a hell of an impact," he said.
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.
Kevin Bristow, Lipton's attorney, said the photos didn't accurately reflect his client's character or level of remorse and made it more likely he'd get prison over probation.
"The pictures showed a kid who didn't know what to do two weeks after this accident," Bristow said, adding that Lipton wrote apologetic letters to the victim and her family and was so upset that he left college. "He didn't know how to react."
Still, he uses the incident as an example to his own teenage children to watch what they post online.
"If it shows up under your name, you own it," he said, "and you better understand that people look for that stuff."
I think judges shouldn't allow for Facebook pictures to be presented as evidence unless they are related to the crime itself, otherwise it's just taking stuff out of context to harm a proceeding that should be seeking for justice. Really, I think that a judge that allows this is severely failing at his/her job.
If you check the link, there's a picture of the kid wearing a jail outfit. If he's going to be wearing something like that two weeks after seriously injuring an innocent woman while drunk driving, then he obviously has no remorse for his actions.
People like that have no regard for others, and they are disgusting and evil in the worst kind of way. Fuck him, he deserves to go to jail.
Our law system is not cut and dry, there is room for interpretation, especially in sentencing. That's why the entire concept of probation works. They don't give probation to people who don't deserve it. It's meant to apply leniency to people who had made a mistake in life and truly regret it.
Which he doesn't. Any regret he displays in the courtroom is obviously contradicted by those photos. As I said. Fuck him.
On a legal note, Facebook is open to the public. Facebook profile pages and photos are posted with the express purpose of being viewed by other people. They are public domain, and attorneys are fully within their rights to utilize it. You can't invade someone's privacy when they make it public.
I feel guilty enough when I make someone sad. If I hurt someone in a car accident like that, I'd be catatonic.
Also, it seems like this picture was used in the sentencing hearing. The court had already decided that this kid was guilty - or perhaps he pled guilty, I don't know - and was trying to determine the appropriate punishment. I think 2 years wasn't enough.
Honestly the prison outfit could've very easily been already planned, he could've already bought it, and even if he hadn't already bought it and he got it afterward it doesn't indicate anything like a lack of remorse to me.
I think everything can be laughed about, no matter how insensitive the joke is it will still be funny to some people, to teens that dark irony is pretty funny from what I've seen, and yes it's mean, yes it's insensitive, but it doesn't mean he didn't care, it has no definite meaning at all. If I was the judge I would've dismissed the pictures as unimportant.
And if it was your family member in the ICU I'm sure you'd find it just as hilarious.
EDIT: Just to clarify, when someone is on the docket in a DUI case with a person seriously injured, you think that dressing up as a prisoner demonstrates that he is remorseful? The sentencing face of a trial is different from the rest - remember, at this point he was already found guilty. And it is the defendants impetus to demonstrate that he/she does not need a harsh jail time to warrant returning to society. Certainly this sort of character examination is not very relevant if determining if this person actually was driving drunk and hit another car. But it means a whole lot in determining how best to deal with a person who breaks our society's laws. That's what short-term jail sentences are supposed to do.
Now, if you're a judge, and evidence is produced that the defendant is making light of the possibility of time in jail, how can you ignore that? How would throwing that out be just not only to the woman in the hospital, but to society at large?
Comments
Actually, I'm going to ride around on my polluting motorcycle and eat a kebab. Made from ANIMALS.
Whatever, I'm pretty sure that YOU'RE gonna be on that boat at the same time I am.
you're just jealous that i'm gonna get to be all hippy at strip clubs, and you'll have not but your chocolate covered bacon to keep you company.
mmm, it was the 'goldmember-esque' afro that kinda tipped me off.
Original Article (AP)
Unrepetent on Facebook? Expect jail time.
If you check the link, there's a picture of the kid wearing a jail outfit. If he's going to be wearing something like that two weeks after seriously injuring an innocent woman while drunk driving, then he obviously has no remorse for his actions.
People like that have no regard for others, and they are disgusting and evil in the worst kind of way. Fuck him, he deserves to go to jail.
Our law system is not cut and dry, there is room for interpretation, especially in sentencing. That's why the entire concept of probation works. They don't give probation to people who don't deserve it. It's meant to apply leniency to people who had made a mistake in life and truly regret it.
Which he doesn't. Any regret he displays in the courtroom is obviously contradicted by those photos. As I said. Fuck him.
On a legal note, Facebook is open to the public. Facebook profile pages and photos are posted with the express purpose of being viewed by other people. They are public domain, and attorneys are fully within their rights to utilize it. You can't invade someone's privacy when they make it public.
I feel guilty enough when I make someone sad. If I hurt someone in a car accident like that, I'd be catatonic.
I think everything can be laughed about, no matter how insensitive the joke is it will still be funny to some people, to teens that dark irony is pretty funny from what I've seen, and yes it's mean, yes it's insensitive, but it doesn't mean he didn't care, it has no definite meaning at all. If I was the judge I would've dismissed the pictures as unimportant.
EDIT: Just to clarify, when someone is on the docket in a DUI case with a person seriously injured, you think that dressing up as a prisoner demonstrates that he is remorseful? The sentencing face of a trial is different from the rest - remember, at this point he was already found guilty. And it is the defendants impetus to demonstrate that he/she does not need a harsh jail time to warrant returning to society. Certainly this sort of character examination is not very relevant if determining if this person actually was driving drunk and hit another car. But it means a whole lot in determining how best to deal with a person who breaks our society's laws. That's what short-term jail sentences are supposed to do.
Now, if you're a judge, and evidence is produced that the defendant is making light of the possibility of time in jail, how can you ignore that? How would throwing that out be just not only to the woman in the hospital, but to society at large?