It’s the newest thing…lawyers are turning to social networking sites for incriminating evidence against their “opponent” and it is working. Although sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem innocent enough, if you have a head on collision with the law and are due in court, stay clear of them. What seems like fun and games will be used against you in a court of law.

Case in point: Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that injured a 20-year-old college junior. Two weeks after the incident, photos of him in a “Jail Bird” costume for Halloween, holding a beer, were pasted on his Facebook page and later used as a slideshow to prove that Lipton didn’t deserve anything less than a prison sentence. Ouch!

One of the many images of Lipton in his jail costume had him standing beside a young woman in a sorority T-Shirt. Above it, prosecutor Jay Sullivan wrote: “Remorseful?”

Like I said…ouch!

Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini responded, “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.”

Therefore, the judge made the pictures become a reality and sentenced Lipton to two years in the big house.

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