Facebook alibi: charges dropped thanks to status update

LUCKY: An image from Rodney Bradford's Facebook page.

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A 19-year old man in search of some pancakes has Facebook to thank for criminal charges being dropped against him.

Rodney Bradford was arrested on October 18 as a suspect in a gun-point mugging in New York, but a Facebook entry he made the previous day asking for pancakes became his alibi, The New York Times reported.

Bradford's lawyer told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney involved in the case about the Facebook entry, which read "Where's my pancakes".

Because the timing of the post coincided with the time the crime was committed and Facebook verified the Harlem address where the status update was made, the charges were dropped.

While Facebook entries have been used to establish guilt in criminal cases and employment cases, this is the first known time one has been used to assert innocence, legal experts say.

John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law told The New York Times: "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."

But Joseph Pollini, who teaches in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The New York Times that prosecutors were too quick to drop the charges.

"With a username and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page," he said.

"Some of the brightest people on the internet are teenagers," he said. "They know the internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.

"So they could develop an alibi," he said. "They watch television, the movies, there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that."

- © Fairfax NZ News