Robbery Suspect Cleared By Facebook Alibi

postermmxvicom writes "Rodney Bradford has been cleared of robbery charges because of a Facebook update. The defense was able to prove that the update was made from his father's house, 13 miles away from the crime committed one minute earlier. Lawyer John G. Browning said, 'This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence. We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.' Surely, this must be media hype, since it would not be a difficult alibi to fake."

Re:Probably wasn't the case here..

[sopssa]

Seems his facebook status update alibi is in connection with what witnesses said too;

Bradford and witnesses insisted he was innocent. They said he was at his father's Harlem apartment when the crime occurred.

So it's not only about the status update. Also, I would think a murder case would get more investigation than a robbery too.

Re:HTTP Proxy? VPN Tunnel?

[Manip]

You must be new to /. if you think people read the articles before responding...

Re:Probably wasn't the case here..

[Zerth]

Epic Fail, dude. SSH into your home linux box and do the update there. There are many remote desktop apps for the iPhone, and you could use Lynx on a Linux box in a pinch.

And you'll have pre-scouted the area for an open wifi node, I assume? Because if your iphone's cell connection isn't off, the cops will wonder why your phone handshaked with a tower 13 miles from your house.

Re:Legal pad salesmen

[iminanalog]

Your case is the exception. Most doctors don't have the luxury of keeping up with, much less contributing to, medical journals or attend conferences. Especially Primary Care physicians.

Re:Legal pad salesmen

[Anonymous Coward]

Most doctors are required to make a certain number of Continuing Medical Education hours each year in order to be re-certified.

Crime of Opportunity

[pgn674]

There are a lot of posts saying it'd be pretty easy to fake the Facebook post. It wouldn't even have to be technical: Just call your father and ask him to log on to Facebook under your account and post what you tell him to.

The article doesn't say, but what if this was a crime of opportunity? What if the evidence at the scene and witness's testimonies painted a motive that indicated it was a crime of opportunity, and not a pre-planned crime? If that was a case, then accepting a Facebook posting made at the time of the crime seems pretty reasonable. Maybe he called his father just after the crime, but one minute after an unplanned crime? That feels unlikely to me, too. And anyways, the court had testimonies and other evidence hinting that he wasn't the guy, so I don't think this will set a precedent that Facebook postings should be accepted without question in court.

Re:HTTP Proxy? VPN Tunnel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even look at this guy's picture on the article? He's "Rell - Deuce Boys what up" Hardcore rapper. There isn't much of a chance that he knows what a VPN is, and a very unlikely chance that he would even know someone capable of doing it, while he went and "robbed" two people for $3.50 or whatever they had in their wallets.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Awesome!

[broken_chaos]

In thirty minutes, post the status "lol watching tv" to Facebook. It's not complete (due to logins and cookies not being utilised by curl in most cases), but it explains the idea pretty clearly if you know a bit about at and curl.