Facebook Update Clears Teen of Robbery Charges

Image via New York Times

We’ve seen how social media websites can help nab criminals, but there haven’t been too many stories where innocent people have been set free because of them. There’s always a first time for everything though.

According to the New York Times, 19-year-old Rodney Bradford was facing up to 25 years in prison for robbing two people in a Brooklyn housing project. The only thing was, while the robbery was taking place, Bradford was at his father’s home in Queens. The proof? A status update Bradford left on his Facebook page.

From the New York Times article:

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the words had been typed from a computer at an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mr. Bradford’s father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John G. Browning, a lawyer in Dallas who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”

The article goes on to cite how social media has been used in criminal trials to help prosecutors prove their case and in divorce cases to help prove infidelity or other marital misadventures.

As the web continues to evolve, it is interesting to see how social media is becoming a standard part of law enforcement investigations. While there are plenty of reasons why you might not want to use Twitter or Facebook to share your daily life with the world, Rodney Bradford’s case makes a compelling argument for why you might want to.

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