I am becoming more and more concerned about young people incriminating themselves on Myspace. I have had several young clients who have posted material on their Myspace pages that led to probation violations or impeachment material. However, the silver lining for criminal defense lawyers is the investigatory potential of the site. As Skelly at Arbitrary and Capricious and Sanchovilla at Tales of a Public Defender Investigator point out, there are a lot of people posting a lot of things on these sites that can be helpful to us.
Myspace and other blogs can be searched using Google or Technorati or, best of all I think, Icerocket. It takes some creativity and perseverance, but you might be surprised at how many witnesses and alleged victims leave damaging information or photos out there.
June 26, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Never say anything on your site that you would not say in front of a crowd of people. Just because you are alone in your computer room does not mean you are alone, I mean this is the whole idea, you are hooked up with the world. It feels a little surreal but this comment will likely be read by someone in India, New York, London and Toronto. You are not in private when you are on the computer.