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.

Our collective public mind has been molded by the movies and television to accept the notion that the common good permits, indeed, encourages cops and prosecutors to violate the law in order to protect us. We see the police battering down doors of suspects to illegally obtain evidence. We witness the cops bugging phones and forcing confessions. We want the police to win, because they are the heroes of the drama and such crimes are serious and threaten our security. But this sort of lawless bludgeoning of the law does terminal damage to our system of justice. By destroying the rights of any accused none of us are ever safe from the law that once stood to protect us.

Mr. Fitzgerald has selected and then dumped out pages of unsworn, untested, evidence before governor has even been charged. We already know that what the prosecutor provides is only part of the story, only the juiciest excerpts that will cause the governor the most harm. The grand jury has not yet met. Every potential member of the grand jury and later every trial juror who will sit in judgment of the governor has already been stained with prejudice against him. The presumption of innocence has been reduced to a cruel joke. Why have a trial? Mr. Fitzgerald has already convicted the governor in the media. One wonders if the government’s case is so legally flimsy that the prosecutor must revert to these tactics in order to assure a conviction.

. . . What we witness without a whimper from the media, the courts, or the bar is a prosecutor charged with the highest professional duty to see that every accused, no matter how guilty, obtains a fair trial, and who, instead, in this historical instant, has voluntarily taken steps to see that such a right becomes little more than a sad, distant echo of a justice system that once set the standard for the world.

Infringement without profit motive is far more common in cases of Internet-based copyright infringement than it is in the physical world. Until recently, the prosecution was required to prove that copyright infringement was done willfully and for commercial advantage or private financial gain. Now the law provides for prosecution in the absence of these monetary considerations.