If you'd been clicking around Facebook on Oct. 17 at 11:49 a.m. and happened upon Rodney Bradford's status update, you probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. Who could have imagined "Where's my pancakes..." could end up being the key to Bradford's freedom?

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update -- words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams -- least of all Mr. Bradford -- could have imagined. They became his alibi. Source: His Facebook Status Now? 'Charges Dropped', The Local-Fort-Greene Blog - NY Times.com


Each and every time a case of false identification comes to light or an innocent person is exonerated, it's a reminder of how flawed and arbitrary our criminal justice system can be, especially, but not only, for black men.

How ironic it is that, in a free society, our electronic trail is a blessing for the falsely accused. I recall that it was an ATM receipt that first provided an alibi for at least one of the accused in the Duke rape scandal. Rodney Bradford had a close call, too.

His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery.

The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

"This is the first case that I'm aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence," said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. "We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become." Source: His Facebook Status Now? 'Charges Dropped', The Local-Fort-Greene Blog - NY Times.com

Although Bradford had other alibis, his attorney describes the Facebook entry "as icing on the cake". But don't go getting too happy. Until now, social media has been used far more by prosecutors than defense attorneys.