Kobi
06-20-2011, 05:31 AM
Facebook wars are a growing headache for judges
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 19, 2011
By Tracy Breton
Journal Staff Writer
WARWICK –– The two women stood before the judge, their hatred for each other barely contained.
It all stemmed from an innocuous posting on Facebook, followed by a stream of text messages and, finally, a voicemail.
Despite their dislike for one another, the two women had “friended” each other. Now one woman was complaining that the other had used Facebook to turn her father against her.
The daughter, Beth Vartanian, said she’d called her father, from whom she’d been estranged, to tell him she was having gastric-bypass surgery. The call prompted the father’s longtime girlfriend, Dianne Gessner, to post the following message for all of her “friends” to see:
“I can’t stand hypocrites. I wonder how long it takes for money, cha-ching; money makes the phone ring. Cry me a river, boo freaking hoo.”
The day of her surgery, Vartanian complained, Gessner posted another Facebook message: “I’m putting another pin in my voodoo doll,” it read.
The war of words escalated. Once the anesthesia wore off, Vartanian fired back a text from her bed at Roger Williams Medical Center: “You are a money hungry ugly …..! Let me see you and I will smash your ugly dirty face.”
Now, Gessner was before Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Procaccini saying she feared for her safety. She’d paid $160 for a filing fee to the clerk of the Superior Court and was asking a judge to issue a restraining order against her boyfriend’s daughter, the mother of his young granddaughter.
“If you look at my record, I never done anything, never been arrested, never done anything....This all stemmed from me being friends with her on Facebook… ,” Vartanian told the court.
“I thought Facebook you invited friends, people you like and want to come in,” the judge said.
“She used it against me to tell my father everything,” Vartanian complained. Yes, she conceded, she’d sent that threatening text, but she’d been under the influence of drugs from her surgery which, according to the testimony, had left her on her “deathbed.”
The father, who’d come to court with his girlfriend, was sitting in the back row of the courtroom.
“Does it strike any of you how sad and sick this is?” asked Procaccini. “If I put an order in place, it puts a wedge down the middle of the family.” He called the father up to the bench and had his clerk swear him in.
“What do you think I should do in this case? Do you really think I should issue a [restraining] order? Do I need to do that between your girlfriend and your daughter?”
“Yes,” Paul Vartanian replied. “My daughter is very violent.”
The judge sighed and shook his head. He would issue the restraining order — but only until the end of July. Anything longer, he said, would be “crazy” because, as he told the daughter, “if you had one bad day and decided to say something to her, you could be in jeopardy of going to jail.”
“I don’t like issuing restraining orders and injunctions … in a family situation,” Procaccini explained. “I am hoping things settle down and maybe you can find a way to repair this whole situation and if not, fine.”
He peered down from the bench at the three adults standing before him. “You should sit here every day and listen to the disgusting, despicable, incredibly rude, obnoxious behavior that people engage in on both sides of these cases.
“Can you stop doing that? Get off the Internet, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter?”
Procaccini sits in his chambers talking about what he calls his “Jerry Springer/Judge Judy cases,” the ones spawned by new age technology.
“People cross lines I’m not used to seeing people cross,” he says. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text messages. “I think that’s just the manner by which people communicate now. … It’s a very impersonal manner of communication” but one that is having wide repercussions in courtrooms as well as interpersonal relationships.
“The amount of degrading, disgusting and shocking comments is troubling for me,” the judge says. And it’s not just young people who are engaging in it. “I’ve had plenty of people in their 40s and 50s, middle-aged adults, who come [for restraining orders] based on Facebook messages or e-mails they’ve received.”
While he sat in Providence County Superior Court, Procaccini says, he’d sometimes get 8 to 10 social networking cases per week in which at least one person was seeking a restraining order.
It’s busy in Kent County, too. On the day he issued the restraining order in the father/daughter/girlfriend case, the very next case also involved Facebook.
Next-door neighbors in Coventry came before the judge for a restraining order prompted by a handwritten love letter one woman sent to the other’s husband, followed by a text message about “meeting in the woods.”
The two women, Christine Dias and Andrea Correia, then engaged in a nasty torrent of Facebook exchanges.
“Is it not wronging me texting my husband to meet u in the woods and telling him he was the only thing missing,” Mrs. Correia wrote in one of the postings, all of which were exhibits in the case. “Yes MY HUSBAND! And telling him how much more fun my kid have with you then me. Was that not wronging me. How about inviting him for late night drinks with u and ur other friend. How about coming to my house begging him to go with u the minute after I left. … And the letter and stopping at his work. You’re a pathetic joke stay away from all of us.”
The wife claimed in court papers that her husband didn’t want an amorous relationship with Dias and never responded to her love letter.
Procaccini had the love letter in front of him.
“I held that letter in my back pocket for three years. I had to give it to him … ,” Dias blurted out in the courtroom. “My husband is dying. I had to put him in a long-term care facility. I had to quit my job … for my children, to take care of my three children who are devastated with my whole scenario.…” Procaccini’s mouth dropped open. Everyone in the courtroom was riveted by what was playing out before him.
“Every restraining order I have now involves Facebook insults being hurled back and forth, and it is the new school yard, so to speak, to battle it out,” the judge said. “It is a real eye-opener. I read things on this bench that I can’t believe could possibly exist in a forum where many people can see it,” he told the two neighbors. Kevin Correia, the man who was the object of both of their affections, stood next to his wife as the judge delivered his lecture.
“Stay away from each other. Leave each other alone,” Procaccini said in issuing a three-year restraining order against Dias. The order prevents her from going into the Correias’ house or yard or the fire station in West Warwick, the place where Kevin Correia works. It also prohibits the neighbors’ children, who were close friends, from playing with each other or having any contact with each other.
Courtrooms around the country are coming face to face with problems spawned by new social media, in adult courts as well as juvenile courts. Judges say that there has been a big increase in the number of cases involving messages and pictures sent over the Internet.
This spring, Superior Court Judge Brian P. Stern, along with Thomas Evans, a third-year law student at Roger Williams University School of Law, wrote an article for the Rhode Island Bar Journal in which they discuss how cyberbullying has created “new and unique challenges for the judiciary” as well as the legislative and executive branches of government.
“Most of these disputes arrive at the Superior Court through legal channels designed to handle more traditional forms of harassment; through a no-contact order or by an action for a civil temporary restraining order,” says Stern. Most “are a direct or indirect result of interpersonal relationships gone bad, mental-health issues or substance-abuse problems.”
“What I was seeing a lot of were neighbors, co-workers fighting with each other.”
The challenge for judges is to determine “when does the First Amendment end and harassment begin? You can post all sorts of things but when it crosses the line of when someone is in fear of their safety,” the court system is increasingly the venue that’s being asked to respond.
Stern says that cyberbullying “can be far worse than the traditional harassment that occurs when two co-workers call each other names, a former boyfriend or girlfriend refuses to accept the end of a relationship, or neighbors at an apartment complex get into an argument.”
“With the click of a mouse button and a few keystrokes, tormentors can reach their targets any time of the day or night from anywhere in the world. [They] are instantly able to spread lies and embarrassing information about their victims to hundreds and thousands of people at a time. This 24/7 widespread harassment can have a far more dangerous effect on the victim than traditional bullying,” he wrote in his law review article.
“This problem will continue and become more complex as technology evolves. The executive, legislative and judicial branches must continually evaluate current best practices to comprehensively address this issue.”
Educators say it is a pressing issue. Students are getting suspended and, worse, some are driven to suicide, as a result of it. A special commission chaired by Sen. John J. Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, submitted a report in March to the state Senate. The commission found that “cyberbullying, bullying and sexting affect students at all grade levels in Rhode Island schools,” that school administrators have varying policies when it comes to addressing the problems; and that “Rhode Island lacks adequate laws to address severe cyberthreats, cyberbullying, bullying and sexting infractions.”
Three bills are pending in the General Assembly to address cyber-bullying and “sexting” by schoolchildren. The bills make more Internet offenses crimes and would probably land more minors before the Family Court.
In a recent interview, Stern estimated that one-third to one-half of cases he handled while assigned to the busy civil motion calendar “had some involvement with instant messaging, Facebook, harassing e-mails and pictures. I felt like it was a higher percentage as time went on.”
“The speed with which online mediums, specifically online social networking sites, has developed over the years has far eclipsed the pace of the laws in place to protect against it,” he said. Online postings raise all sorts of “evidentiary challenges for judges. Sometimes it’s not easy to determine who posted [the actionable speech]. People use other people’s names; people can use Photoshop. Sometimes it’s hard to prove where the photos came from.”
“It’s like the Wild West to some extent. … There’s no easy answers,” the judge said. “Computers are a wonderful thing, but this is one of the ways they aren’t good. … Things like this can spin out of control and lead to physical violence.”
One of the cases that Stern cites in his bar journal article involved a dispute between two college-bound high school seniors at La Salle Academy. He referred to both girls by fictitious names even though the court case is a public record “out of respect for the parties.” The two young women, both 18, were “tormenting each other” with Facebook postings that included “provocative pictures and threats of harm. It was also clear from the evidence before the court that each feared for their safety.”
School administrators had ordered one of the girls, whom he referred to as Joan Thomas, to remove a photo of the other from her Facebook account and had suspended her from school for three days. But the photograph then appeared again on Thomas’ Facebook. Tammy Held, the name he gave the girl who was the target of the posting, went with her mother to the state police. They were advised to go to court to get a restraining order.
Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Lanphear issued orders prohibiting each of the students from “harassing, threatening, interfering or contacting each other directly or indirectly.” He warned them that violating the restraining orders could land them in prison with hefty fines.
But four weeks later, the two young women were back in court, before Judge Stern, asking that each other be held in contempt.
Stern called the evidence “very troubling.” Thomas had posted “more provocative pictures” of Held with derogatory captions “and forwarded them to hundreds of people.” Held was so afraid of Thomas she decided not to attend her own high school graduation. But she wasn’t an entirely innocent party. Stern said Held had posted “extensive derogatory comments about Ms. Thomas’ weight and underage drinking on Facebook. She also got into two physical altercations with Ms. Thomas at a local club and again at Scarborough Beach in Narragansett.”
Stern held both of the young women in contempt. He ordered them to serve time at the Adult Correctional Institutions, Held for one day and Thomas for three. Then, after pausing for a minute, he told the two students that he wouldn’t require them to actually serve the time but instead would have both perform community service at a homeless shelter or similar organization –– 10 hours for Held, 30 hours for Thomas.
The challenge, he said, was to fashion a sentence that would punish the students and offer them “some education as to how to behave in society.” In his article, Stern wrote that the girls’ parents said they hoped that by performing volunteer work for the less fortunate “it would make their daughters see the forest through the trees as they enter adulthood.”
Both students are in college now. Court records show that they have also completed their volunteer work.
tbreton@projo.com
http://www.projo.com/news/content/FACEBOOK_RESTRAINING_ORDERS_06-19-11_RLOGOC1_v64.5fde8.html
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 19, 2011
By Tracy Breton
Journal Staff Writer
WARWICK –– The two women stood before the judge, their hatred for each other barely contained.
It all stemmed from an innocuous posting on Facebook, followed by a stream of text messages and, finally, a voicemail.
Despite their dislike for one another, the two women had “friended” each other. Now one woman was complaining that the other had used Facebook to turn her father against her.
The daughter, Beth Vartanian, said she’d called her father, from whom she’d been estranged, to tell him she was having gastric-bypass surgery. The call prompted the father’s longtime girlfriend, Dianne Gessner, to post the following message for all of her “friends” to see:
“I can’t stand hypocrites. I wonder how long it takes for money, cha-ching; money makes the phone ring. Cry me a river, boo freaking hoo.”
The day of her surgery, Vartanian complained, Gessner posted another Facebook message: “I’m putting another pin in my voodoo doll,” it read.
The war of words escalated. Once the anesthesia wore off, Vartanian fired back a text from her bed at Roger Williams Medical Center: “You are a money hungry ugly …..! Let me see you and I will smash your ugly dirty face.”
Now, Gessner was before Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Procaccini saying she feared for her safety. She’d paid $160 for a filing fee to the clerk of the Superior Court and was asking a judge to issue a restraining order against her boyfriend’s daughter, the mother of his young granddaughter.
“If you look at my record, I never done anything, never been arrested, never done anything....This all stemmed from me being friends with her on Facebook… ,” Vartanian told the court.
“I thought Facebook you invited friends, people you like and want to come in,” the judge said.
“She used it against me to tell my father everything,” Vartanian complained. Yes, she conceded, she’d sent that threatening text, but she’d been under the influence of drugs from her surgery which, according to the testimony, had left her on her “deathbed.”
The father, who’d come to court with his girlfriend, was sitting in the back row of the courtroom.
“Does it strike any of you how sad and sick this is?” asked Procaccini. “If I put an order in place, it puts a wedge down the middle of the family.” He called the father up to the bench and had his clerk swear him in.
“What do you think I should do in this case? Do you really think I should issue a [restraining] order? Do I need to do that between your girlfriend and your daughter?”
“Yes,” Paul Vartanian replied. “My daughter is very violent.”
The judge sighed and shook his head. He would issue the restraining order — but only until the end of July. Anything longer, he said, would be “crazy” because, as he told the daughter, “if you had one bad day and decided to say something to her, you could be in jeopardy of going to jail.”
“I don’t like issuing restraining orders and injunctions … in a family situation,” Procaccini explained. “I am hoping things settle down and maybe you can find a way to repair this whole situation and if not, fine.”
He peered down from the bench at the three adults standing before him. “You should sit here every day and listen to the disgusting, despicable, incredibly rude, obnoxious behavior that people engage in on both sides of these cases.
“Can you stop doing that? Get off the Internet, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter?”
Procaccini sits in his chambers talking about what he calls his “Jerry Springer/Judge Judy cases,” the ones spawned by new age technology.
“People cross lines I’m not used to seeing people cross,” he says. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text messages. “I think that’s just the manner by which people communicate now. … It’s a very impersonal manner of communication” but one that is having wide repercussions in courtrooms as well as interpersonal relationships.
“The amount of degrading, disgusting and shocking comments is troubling for me,” the judge says. And it’s not just young people who are engaging in it. “I’ve had plenty of people in their 40s and 50s, middle-aged adults, who come [for restraining orders] based on Facebook messages or e-mails they’ve received.”
While he sat in Providence County Superior Court, Procaccini says, he’d sometimes get 8 to 10 social networking cases per week in which at least one person was seeking a restraining order.
It’s busy in Kent County, too. On the day he issued the restraining order in the father/daughter/girlfriend case, the very next case also involved Facebook.
Next-door neighbors in Coventry came before the judge for a restraining order prompted by a handwritten love letter one woman sent to the other’s husband, followed by a text message about “meeting in the woods.”
The two women, Christine Dias and Andrea Correia, then engaged in a nasty torrent of Facebook exchanges.
“Is it not wronging me texting my husband to meet u in the woods and telling him he was the only thing missing,” Mrs. Correia wrote in one of the postings, all of which were exhibits in the case. “Yes MY HUSBAND! And telling him how much more fun my kid have with you then me. Was that not wronging me. How about inviting him for late night drinks with u and ur other friend. How about coming to my house begging him to go with u the minute after I left. … And the letter and stopping at his work. You’re a pathetic joke stay away from all of us.”
The wife claimed in court papers that her husband didn’t want an amorous relationship with Dias and never responded to her love letter.
Procaccini had the love letter in front of him.
“I held that letter in my back pocket for three years. I had to give it to him … ,” Dias blurted out in the courtroom. “My husband is dying. I had to put him in a long-term care facility. I had to quit my job … for my children, to take care of my three children who are devastated with my whole scenario.…” Procaccini’s mouth dropped open. Everyone in the courtroom was riveted by what was playing out before him.
“Every restraining order I have now involves Facebook insults being hurled back and forth, and it is the new school yard, so to speak, to battle it out,” the judge said. “It is a real eye-opener. I read things on this bench that I can’t believe could possibly exist in a forum where many people can see it,” he told the two neighbors. Kevin Correia, the man who was the object of both of their affections, stood next to his wife as the judge delivered his lecture.
“Stay away from each other. Leave each other alone,” Procaccini said in issuing a three-year restraining order against Dias. The order prevents her from going into the Correias’ house or yard or the fire station in West Warwick, the place where Kevin Correia works. It also prohibits the neighbors’ children, who were close friends, from playing with each other or having any contact with each other.
Courtrooms around the country are coming face to face with problems spawned by new social media, in adult courts as well as juvenile courts. Judges say that there has been a big increase in the number of cases involving messages and pictures sent over the Internet.
This spring, Superior Court Judge Brian P. Stern, along with Thomas Evans, a third-year law student at Roger Williams University School of Law, wrote an article for the Rhode Island Bar Journal in which they discuss how cyberbullying has created “new and unique challenges for the judiciary” as well as the legislative and executive branches of government.
“Most of these disputes arrive at the Superior Court through legal channels designed to handle more traditional forms of harassment; through a no-contact order or by an action for a civil temporary restraining order,” says Stern. Most “are a direct or indirect result of interpersonal relationships gone bad, mental-health issues or substance-abuse problems.”
“What I was seeing a lot of were neighbors, co-workers fighting with each other.”
The challenge for judges is to determine “when does the First Amendment end and harassment begin? You can post all sorts of things but when it crosses the line of when someone is in fear of their safety,” the court system is increasingly the venue that’s being asked to respond.
Stern says that cyberbullying “can be far worse than the traditional harassment that occurs when two co-workers call each other names, a former boyfriend or girlfriend refuses to accept the end of a relationship, or neighbors at an apartment complex get into an argument.”
“With the click of a mouse button and a few keystrokes, tormentors can reach their targets any time of the day or night from anywhere in the world. [They] are instantly able to spread lies and embarrassing information about their victims to hundreds and thousands of people at a time. This 24/7 widespread harassment can have a far more dangerous effect on the victim than traditional bullying,” he wrote in his law review article.
“This problem will continue and become more complex as technology evolves. The executive, legislative and judicial branches must continually evaluate current best practices to comprehensively address this issue.”
Educators say it is a pressing issue. Students are getting suspended and, worse, some are driven to suicide, as a result of it. A special commission chaired by Sen. John J. Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, submitted a report in March to the state Senate. The commission found that “cyberbullying, bullying and sexting affect students at all grade levels in Rhode Island schools,” that school administrators have varying policies when it comes to addressing the problems; and that “Rhode Island lacks adequate laws to address severe cyberthreats, cyberbullying, bullying and sexting infractions.”
Three bills are pending in the General Assembly to address cyber-bullying and “sexting” by schoolchildren. The bills make more Internet offenses crimes and would probably land more minors before the Family Court.
In a recent interview, Stern estimated that one-third to one-half of cases he handled while assigned to the busy civil motion calendar “had some involvement with instant messaging, Facebook, harassing e-mails and pictures. I felt like it was a higher percentage as time went on.”
“The speed with which online mediums, specifically online social networking sites, has developed over the years has far eclipsed the pace of the laws in place to protect against it,” he said. Online postings raise all sorts of “evidentiary challenges for judges. Sometimes it’s not easy to determine who posted [the actionable speech]. People use other people’s names; people can use Photoshop. Sometimes it’s hard to prove where the photos came from.”
“It’s like the Wild West to some extent. … There’s no easy answers,” the judge said. “Computers are a wonderful thing, but this is one of the ways they aren’t good. … Things like this can spin out of control and lead to physical violence.”
One of the cases that Stern cites in his bar journal article involved a dispute between two college-bound high school seniors at La Salle Academy. He referred to both girls by fictitious names even though the court case is a public record “out of respect for the parties.” The two young women, both 18, were “tormenting each other” with Facebook postings that included “provocative pictures and threats of harm. It was also clear from the evidence before the court that each feared for their safety.”
School administrators had ordered one of the girls, whom he referred to as Joan Thomas, to remove a photo of the other from her Facebook account and had suspended her from school for three days. But the photograph then appeared again on Thomas’ Facebook. Tammy Held, the name he gave the girl who was the target of the posting, went with her mother to the state police. They were advised to go to court to get a restraining order.
Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Lanphear issued orders prohibiting each of the students from “harassing, threatening, interfering or contacting each other directly or indirectly.” He warned them that violating the restraining orders could land them in prison with hefty fines.
But four weeks later, the two young women were back in court, before Judge Stern, asking that each other be held in contempt.
Stern called the evidence “very troubling.” Thomas had posted “more provocative pictures” of Held with derogatory captions “and forwarded them to hundreds of people.” Held was so afraid of Thomas she decided not to attend her own high school graduation. But she wasn’t an entirely innocent party. Stern said Held had posted “extensive derogatory comments about Ms. Thomas’ weight and underage drinking on Facebook. She also got into two physical altercations with Ms. Thomas at a local club and again at Scarborough Beach in Narragansett.”
Stern held both of the young women in contempt. He ordered them to serve time at the Adult Correctional Institutions, Held for one day and Thomas for three. Then, after pausing for a minute, he told the two students that he wouldn’t require them to actually serve the time but instead would have both perform community service at a homeless shelter or similar organization –– 10 hours for Held, 30 hours for Thomas.
The challenge, he said, was to fashion a sentence that would punish the students and offer them “some education as to how to behave in society.” In his article, Stern wrote that the girls’ parents said they hoped that by performing volunteer work for the less fortunate “it would make their daughters see the forest through the trees as they enter adulthood.”
Both students are in college now. Court records show that they have also completed their volunteer work.
tbreton@projo.com
http://www.projo.com/news/content/FACEBOOK_RESTRAINING_ORDERS_06-19-11_RLOGOC1_v64.5fde8.html