Fat chick will set you free

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Facebook Defense gets robbery suspect off the hook

Posted by John Murrell on November 12th, 2009 at 4:07 am | Categorized as Uncategorized | Tagged as Facebook

We’ve noted a couple of recent cases in which crime suspects have been brought low by their devotion to Facebook (see “Now he can post the mug shots to his profile page” and “Facebook folly foils fraud fugitive“), but it can work the other way, too. Just ask 19-year-old New Yorker Rodney Bradford, whose timely status update turned into an alibi that cleared him of an armed robbery charge.

Last month, Bradford was arrested as a suspect in a mugging in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Wrong guy, said his attorney — at the time of the crime, Bradford was on the computer at his father’s apartment in Harlem, as evidenced by his status entry. (Curious sidelight: The New York Times reports Bradford’s post as reading “Where’s my pancakes?” and describes it as “indecipherable street slang,” while the direct quote from Bradford’s Facebook page reads, “ON THE PHONE WITH THIS FAT CHICK……WHERER MY I HOP.”) After verifying the time and origin of the post with Facebook, the district attorney dropped the charges. Ah, you say, but someone with Bradford’s log-in could have posted the update from that location. True enough, said defense attorney Robert Reuland, but “this implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil.” Anyway, he said, the alibi was also bolstered by several witnesses. As relieved as Bradford must be, he’s not out of the woods yet; he’s still facing an early robbery charge in which there is no social-networking evidence.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/...-the-hook.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/ny...book.html?_r=1