Blogfession

TAVARES, Fla. --An 18-year-old passenger who caused a fatal crash by pulling on the steering wheel pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter after prosecutors discovered a confession on his online blog. Ok, that’s just stupidity in action. But can we count on blogs to be factual? Wait until I jump into the “Frey” on that one in a future post!

Blake Ranking wrote "I did it" on his blurty.com journal three days after the October 2004 crash that caused a friend's death and left another seriously injured. He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its aftermath.
Disclaimer: This Blog is for Entertainment Purposes Only. As Al Franken said, parody is protected speech, whether the object of that parody gets it or not.

Blake was sitting in the back seat as he and then-17-year-old friends Jason Coker and Nicole Robinette left a party when he pulled the steering wheel as a prank, causing the car to somersault off the road. Ho Ho Ho. What a stitch. Let’s party with him!

His blood alcohol content after the crash measured 0.185, more than double the legal limit.
Robinette, who was driving and had no traces of drugs or alcohol in her system, was seriously injured. Coker lay in a coma at Orlando Regional Medical Center until he died Jan. 11
That’s refreshing, the driver was clean and trying to get her junky friend home safe. Nice to know no good deed goes unpunished.
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"It was me who caused it. I turned the wheel. I turned the wheel that sent us off the road, into the concrete drain ..." Ranking wrote in the blog. "How can I be fine when everyone else is so messed up?" The universe has a heck of a sense of humor

Ranking later retracted his words, deleting them from the blog and penning an explanation.
"People say I 'contradict' myself since I 'already admitting pulling the wheel.' I didn't 'ADMIT' anything. I went on a guilt trip, and I posted the story that I WAS TOLD . . . Nicole told me I pulled the wheel, I believed her," he wrote. Peer pressure and not thinking for yourself seems to be a theme here, eh?

Still, the confession forced him to lead guilty Monday to manslaughter charges. He could have gotten 15 years in prison, but defense lawyer John Spivey and Assistant State Attorney Julie Greenberg recommended five years in prison, 10 years of probation and a permanent license suspension. This is nothing compared to the pain and suffering (heck, death) of his friends

Circuit Judge Mark Hill agreed to impose the sentence Dec. 28.

Greenberg said she had planned to use the blog as evidence, a first for the office covering Lake, Citrus, Hernando, Marion and Sumter counties, but almost certainly not the last.

"Anytime a defendant confesses, that is very relevant and important," she said.
But I’m still not comfortable with this whole ‘go after the blog’ line of thinking. Little that is posted on personal websites is true. Just ask a few of those poor guys who thought they were meeting a hot fourteen year old girl only to find a police officer had been emailing them for months. At what point is it entrapment? No underage sex took place, only the promise of a meeting. I predict we will see some very different laws enacted when today’s tweens are the law-makers. They are growing up in an environment of fantasy video games and chat rooms that allow them to pose as anyone they wish. Would an online confession hold up in the courtroom of the future? I say no.

Ranking posted the lyrics to Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" the day of Coker's funeral, but prosecutors said his remorse was not always apparent in his blogs, which included entries railing at Coker's mother because she asked him to stop calling and coming to the hospital.

"He lost the best friend he ever had," Spivey said in Ranking's defense.

Ken Coker, Jason's father, said his family never wanted prison time for Ranking, but they wished Ranking would stop writing about them because they felt the blog was insensitive.
He said Ranking would benefit more from psychiatric counseling.

"There's not enough forgiveness in the world," he said.


There’s so much talk now of employers checking out employee blogs and warning college students of the repercussions of having their on-line retellings of beer party exploits come back to haunt them.

Well, wild partying and mediocre college performance sure didn’t hurt the president, now did it? As for the employer checks, it is just one more example of Big Brother with nothing more productive to do. I’m not speaking of anyone who gives away the secret spices from their fast food job online, but getting fired for (without naming corporations or people) complaining about the boss and the perks they accept. Can you really hunt down and fire everyone critical of your organization? How bad of an employer are you? What of verbal comments? You’ve got the resources to hunt down an IP address but Sally complaining in the break room to a captive audience is OK?

I really take issue with pre-employment searches. Why? Because really, what are they searching for? Nothing positive. Just a reason to not hire a candidate. Can a company fire an employee for their religion? If they come to work and preach, disrupt the work environment, etc. you can certainly argue it is not conducive to business and should be stopped, and I’d be right there with you. However, should they fire you because someone saw you go into a certain church and told the boss? That would be discrimination, if you could ever prove it. Would they look the other way if you were a productive employee, even if you had some little “undesirable” points against you? Possibly.

But to run a background check on you (easy as Google) and decide not to hire, well, there’s a line that is very thin indeed. Pre-emptive discrimination. All those questions it’s illegal to ask during an interview could be easily on display. Candidate A writes about how busy she is with three children in ballet, soccer and karate. Don’t hire her, pick B who writes about every Star Trek episode. He has time on his hands.

Oh, so don’t put it in writing. Well if you’re an anarchist, that’s good advice. Or is it? Should it matter what you do outside of work? What if you’re running a website critical of community policy regarding swimming pool ordinances? Think an employer would see that as a real positive? Look how erudite and organized that person is! What web design! What community involvement? No, of course not. You’d be seen as a malcontent that doesn’t shirk from a fight. Someone who might know their legal rights and invoke them! Don’t hire that loose cannon!

Some halls of academia consider blogs a drain on time that should be spent on scholarship. Well, a family or a passion for golf could be considered such as well. Why the discrimination against we who like to type? Is every waking moment owed to your employer?

So here we sit, a few bloggers on the fringes of anonymity, typing away against injustice and not using our real names. Not that it matters. The government already knows my computer ID, listens to my calls and tracks how many sinus headaches I get a year. What next?