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Last September, Laura Buys was driving drunk down Highway 101 near Santa Barbara, Calif., when she lost control of the vehicle and crashed, killing her passenger.

During the criminal trial, Buys expressed deep remorse and pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter. It looked as if the 22-year-old would serve no more than a long probation.

But Santa Barbara prosecutor Darryl Perlin had other ideas.

With help from an office investigator, he did an Internet search on Buys and stumbled upon her Myspace page, which included a photo of Buys at a party during the sentencing phase of her trial, sipping a glass of wine and smiling. Her page also included several entries about drinking and partying.

"At that point, I knew," said Perlin. "This person doesn't get it. You've killed someone as a result of drinking and driving, yet you're acting like nothing happened."

Perlin submitted the page at the sentencing hearing and Buys' sentence ballooned to two years in prison.

In the past year, the prosecutor has used Facebook and Myspace to provide evidence against two other defendants, both in drunk driving cases.

Perlin's use of Internet social sites is part of a national trend. For example, in early July a 20-year-old student in Providence, R.I. was sentenced to two years in a drunken driving case after prosecutors found his Facebook profile. Joshua Lipton had several pictures of himself posted on the site drinking at a Halloween party while wearing prison garb labeled "Jail Bird."

Useful in civil cases

Nor is this phenomenon confined to criminal trials.

On July 15, a Houston jury awarded $4.2 million to the family of Jack Phoummarath, a University of Texas student who died of alcohol poisoning during a fraternity initiation in 2005.

After Phoummarath was found dead, the fraternity acted swiftly to destroy pictures and video taken that night.

But Houston attorney Chelsie Garza, who represented the family, located Phoummarath's Facebook page, which contained hundreds of pictures from the party, as well as a link to the frat's Myspace page, which contained more photos and one girl's 15-second video of the fraternity members dragging the incapacitated Phoummarath upstairs to bed, where he would eventually die.

"Whenever we took a deposition, we would show them a picture of them that we found on Facebook," she said. "One kid said [fraternity members] never drank under-aged. So we showed a picture of them chugging liquor when they were 18. We would catch them on the little things, showed them we had done our homework."

Garza said the site was particularly useful because so many of the frat members had been unidentifiable since many used nicknames and their actual names were unknown to partygoers.

According to Garza, the case started out with just 20 defendants, but once she began rooting through the tangled web of Facebook profiles, 99 students were named in the lawsuit. Several individuals found on the site even offered up their profiles and passwords to assist the plaintiffs.

In another case, described by Los Angeles attorney Carole Levitt, a teenager who was sued for causing a fatal car accident claimed to have no assets. But the attorney in the case located the defendant's MySpace page and found photographs of him standing alongside a collection of classic cars he had restored.

Levitt learned of the case during a seminar she gave as president of Internet for Lawyers, which provides web training for attorneys on everything from legal research to marketing opportunities.

These sites can also be a huge boon for attorneys who are trying to locate a missing witness or, in the case of an estate planning case, a missing heir.

Privacy issue

Levitt has conducted ABA seminars on proper ways for attorneys to search through social networks.

She notes that both Facebook and Myspace contain features that allow users to make their pages private; only those who have requested permission from the user will be granted access.

This can pose a difficult hurdle for attorneys. While both sites can be subpoenaed in criminal cases under certain circumstances, Facebook will not cooperate with a civil subpoena.

It's an issue that has raised some ethical concerns for attorneys. For awhile, Levitt said she heard of lawyers paying off Facebook users in order to get access and inspect another network user's profile.

While she deems that unethical, she said there is a way to get around the MySpace blocks. When using a traditional MySpace search, a person must know the actual user name to find the person's page. For example, if the person you are searching for is named Robert Gardiner and his MySpace user name is RGardiner21, typing in Robert Gardiner will not bring up his page.

But if the attorney performs a "People Search" on MySpace, typing in the name Robert Gardiner used to register, it will bring up both his name and his user name. So if you type in Robert Gardiner and get nothing, but then try Bob Gardiner – which was the name he used to register – his registration name comes up with the user name he chose to use on Myspace: BGardiner21. Now you can access his page.

Few options for defendants

From the defense perspective, the best response to incriminating MySpace evidence is to object on the grounds of that the evidence is irrelevant or misleading.

Rick Horowitz, a solo in Fresno, Calif., said defense attorneys in his state can argue that Facebook or Myspace photos are irrelevant because they are seen out of context and may be misleading to the jury.

In the Joshua Lipton drunk driving case, for example, a defense attorney could have argued that while wearing a "Jail Bird" costume when facing a possible prison sentence may be deemed insensitive, it could also be interpreted differently.

"Maybe he's having difficulty coming to grips with what he did, and just like some people laugh at inappropriate circumstances, he did the same by wearing that costume," said Horowitz. "One of the things we argue is that the evidence being offered is more prejudicial than probative. If evidence inflames the passions so much, you risk the possibility that jurors will be swayed to convict someone inappropriately."

Still, the best advice a defense attorney can give to his client is to take the page down immediately or at least make it private.

While attorneys agree the trend use of social networking sites will continue, some say it is also possible that users will begin to wise up and remove their pages to avoid further trouble.

But Leavitt doesn't think that's likely.

"Most people are not that wise," he said. "When we're looking for people, more times than not, their profiles are public, and we find them because they commented on another friend's profile. They feel anonymous on the Internet."

Questions or comments may be directed to the writer at: justin.rebello@lawyersusaonline.com