Those naive little innocents may be a lot smarter than you, Mr. Prosecutor.

The range between online fluency and online ignorance is remarkable these days. It is largely, though certainly not entirely, generational. One example of this gap in fluency was the discovery by one of my more technically proficient students in a case we read in my Contracts course of ignorance regarding the technical implications of an online transaction. The ignorance, in my student’s opinion, undermined entirely the judge’s reasoning.

Ars Technica brings up another example, this one perhaps disclosing the naivety of a prosecutor:

Rodney Bradford, a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident, was arrested last month for allegedly robbing a man at gunpoint. This, in itself, was not a very newsworthy event—until his defense lawyer discovered that Bradford had made an update to his Facebook profile at the time of the robbery. Bradford had insisted that he was at his father’s Harlem apartment at the time, and that the update was made from there. When the district attorney verified the claims with Bradford’s father and stepmother and the IP information with Facebook, the charges against Bradford were dropped.

But, of course, “it’s obvious to everyone . . . that the Facebook posting could have been made by someone else, and there would be no way to truly verify who was sitting in front of the computer at the time.” As John Jay College of Criminal Justice law instructor Joseph Pollini points out, it might not be sufficient for the prosecutor to shrug off the possibility simply because the alibi is a teenager’s — teenagers likely know better than anyone how to construct such alibis (and that older people often fail to see through them):

Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.