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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On trial in Los Angeles for distributing videos of sexual fetishes, including acts of bestiality and defecation is porn filmmaker Ira Isaacs. However, that’s not where the story lies. Are you ready for this one? Alex Kozinski, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals chief judge overseeing the case is the real one under the courtroom’s microscope.

And why is that?

Well, it turns out that Judge Kozinski isn’t unfamiliar with the porn industry. In fact, he’s got it all over his personal site. Ooh, la, la! Kozinski is in the X-rated house! Due to this recent discovery, Kozinski has granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial after prosecutors requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a…sexually explicit [web site] with similar material.”

While Kozinski admitted to posting some of the graphic content on his site, he threw his son Yale under the bus, stating that he must have downloaded the majority of it. Sure, we believe you! Wink, wink.

“Yale called and said he’s pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it,” Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to Abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. “I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don’t remember putting some of that stuff there.”

The moral of today’s Pop Legal story is based on that old, cliché saying: Never throw stones if you live in a glass house full of porn.

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