A New York man has been released from New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail after a court agreed with his Facebook alibi that he couldn’t have been robbing two people at gunpoint while at the same time posting a status update to Facebook from his father’s house, twelve miles away from the scene of the crime.
Nineteen-year-old Rodney Bradford was identified in a lineup as the robber, charged with first degree robbery, and sent to Rikers Island.
Not long after, Rodney’s father noticed that a status updated that had been posted to Rodney’s Facebook account had posted at almost precisely the same moment as when the crime had been committed. That status update was posted from Rodney’s father’s house, which is where Rodney had claimed he had been at the time of the crime.
Records subpoenaed from Facebook by the District Attorney proved that the status update had, in fact, come from a computer within Rodney’s father’s house.
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To suggestions that Rodney could have set this up – someone else could have posted the update for him – Rodney’s attorney, Robert Reuland, counters that it is unlikely. “This is a 19-year-old kid. He’s not a criminal genius setting up an elaborate alibi for himself. This is not the kind of thing someone would fake,” said Reuland.
The exculpating update read “On the phone with this fat chick… wherer my IHOP.”
According to Reuland, that was reference to Bradford’s girlfriend, who is pregnant, and who was annoyed that Rodney and his family had gone out the night before to the International House of Pancakes without her.
“He was just kind of taunting her playfully about having been to IHOP,” says Reuland. “I know it sounds not very nice but it’s sort of a reference to her because she’s pregnant. But they actually have a very good relationship. She’s cute as a button.”
According to reports, Facebook is pleased as punch to be “able to serve as a constructive part of the judicial process.”
For Bradford’s part, he’s contemplating a civil law suit over the wrongful arrest and imprisonment, which his newly-hired civil lawyer says he is “99.9% sure he will file.”
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“i wasn’t there, i didn’t do it and you can’t prove it!”