Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts

Friday, November 16, 2007

The first case of digital public guilty verdict?

A teenage girl killed herself after being bullied online. A newspaper wrote about it, but didn't mention the names of the presumed guilty -adult- individuals. Later, anonyomoys people tracked these individuals down and published their details online.
This case -that was overlooked by many of us- can and should have profound implications for our justice system. Only a few of the questions that quickly come to mind are:
  1. What's the role of the courts when regular citizens take decisions that were previously relegated to the courts?
  2. What's the value of police investigations if they cannot find the people guilty of crimes but a "common internet jury" can?
  3. When should this public jury/investigation panel be called into action?
  4. How can anybody stop it from springing into action by itself and publishing online private individual's details?
  5. What if the information collected by this "public commitee" is wrong and the innocent are accused?
  6. How and when would the publicly accused know that their information is being posted online, and wht they're being accused of?
  7. When will the first death penalty be applied to a regular citizen by strangers on the streets and how could this be avoided?
And you thought crowdsourcing would never get to the justice and investigative professions...

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007