Facebook Bandit: Profile Photos Lead to Two Years in Jail

CNN has a hard hitting piece that shows how prosecutors are increasingly using photos from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook during sentencing hearings to color the character of defendants and argue for increased jail time.

The article focuses on 20 year old college junior, Joshua Lipton, who, two weeks after being charged with drunk driving and seriously injuring a woman in a car crash, appeared at a costume party wearing a prisoner’s outfit.

Photographs appeared on Facebook of the accused partying it up in the orange jumpsuit and proved he was without remorse, a prosecutor argued. The judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved.

The story begins in October 2006 when prosecutors from Rhode Island say Lipton was drunk and speeding near his school, Bryant University in Smithfield. They argue that he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies hospitalized for weeks.

Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling the drunken-driving case, said a victim of the crash gave him copies of the photographs from the accused man’s Facebook page that were posted after the collision. Sullivan then took the pictures – which had been posted by someone else but were accessible on the accused man’s page – and put them into a PowerPoint presentation at sentencing.

The defense attorney, Kevin Bristow, tried to argue that the photos showed his client’s confusion after the accident and even noted that his client wrote apologetic letters to the crash victim and her family.

“The pictures showed a kid who didn’t know what to do two weeks after this accident,” Bristow said, adding that his client was so upset that he left college. “He didn’t know how to react.”

But Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini was unmoved and said the prosecutor’s slide show influenced his decision to sentence the Facebook bandit.

“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.

Other unrepentant defendants have received harsher sentences as a direct result of their online profiles.

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.