Presuming anything you upload to Facebook as private is a mistake.

Ralph, my apologies, but I don’t know how the comments came to light. Doe was represented by a public defender, and it’s possible the PD did a good job asking the right questions and getting Lynch to disclose the posts in discovery. Unfortunately, the opinion didn’t address how it happened, so I can only guess.

Thanks for the reply. It’s too bad the decision isn’t clear about how the comments came to light. As I’m planning to launch an online service involving user-generated content, I’m in the process of educating myself about the kinds of interactions my lawyer and I can expect to have with the legal system. Cases like this one are potentially educational.

What I meant about “not giving any one person so much power over other people’s lives” was as follows. Doe was able to make his case on the basis of Lynch’s Facebook posts. But unless we imagine attitudes like Lynch’s are rare, which I think would be naive, it seems likely some other hearing examiners harbor such attitudes without expressing them on Facebook or in other contexts from which such expressions could make their way into court. Accordingly, I’d prefer all such decisions be made by panels of at least three officials. (Of course, panels wouldn’t wholly solve the problem, which is why I said “for starters.”)

The decision says the comments were posted “on a public ‘Facebook’ social networking page”. It’s not completely clear to me whether that means it was really completely public (accessible over the web without logging into Facebook, and therefore likely to be indexed by search engines), or public to all registered Facebook users, or what.

As for “not giving any one person so much power over other people’s lives”, I’m not sure what change you’re suggesting. It seems to me that this case demonstrates that that principle has already been incorporated into the system. Since the Sex Offender Registry Board initially ruled against the defendant, he’s so far had his case considered by two different hearing examiners, two Superior Court judges, and a three-judge panel of the appeals court.