By Tom Chaves on October 11, 2012

A Manhattan Criminal Judge has ruled that seven pages of tweets by an Occupy Wall Street protestor must be turned over to prosecutors. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office subpoenaed the protestor's tweets arguing that they were relevant to his criminal case for disorderly conduct on the Brooklyn Bridge because they "might" contain information which contradicted the information he gave to the police.

Twitter and the protestor fought the subpoena arguing that the messages were deleted and no longer public on the site. The Judge did not buy this argument and ordered that the tweets be turned over to him so that he could review them and decide if any contained evidence that was relevant to the case. After he reviewed the tweets, he ordered that seven pages of them be turned over to prosecutors. The Judge's ruling is on appeal and he has stayed the criminal trial against the protestor until the appeals are decided.

This case is yet another example of how social media has entered the criminal justice system. To go into all the ways it has entered would take pages. Some examples, however, are jurors checking facebook and the internet to learn about criminal defendants and crimes (which they are specifically instructed not to do), the introduction of e.mails are evidence of guilt (people often assume incorrectly that e.mails are private and that after they are deleted they cannot be retrieved from the server) and even being charged with harrassment and/or hate crimes based on e.mails sent to people or blog posts.

I advice all my clients that they have to be careful how they use social media as the notion of privacy is increasingly disappearing. My advice: do not tweet, e.mail or post anything on social media which might at minimum embarrass you, which you would not say to someone face to face or which makes you look like a jerk.