AP:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”
In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton’s drunken-driving case.
Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.
Other versions of this story made the implication that this FB photo was used as evidence to convict Lipton. However, what really happened is that he was already convicted, and the prosecution used this in the sentencing phase. He went to this party during the trial, so the prosecutor demonstrated an insouciant lack of remorse on Lipton’s part.
As such, his life for the next two years will imitate art.
