Musing about how people who don’t know anything about law think they can mystify and intimidate with law words.
One of the things that was made clear in the Barisone threads was that if the police are investigating criminal charges such as assault with a deadly weapon (or a beverage) they keep the focus quite narrow. They want to know if and how the assault happened. They want to know if there were injuries. They want to know if the defendent was provoked or acting in self defense. They want to know if the defendent caused the incident by intention, negligence, or accident. If the defendent is the sort of idiot teenager who posts videos of him and his buddies kicking a person to death the police will be very very interested.
But they don’t care about how the incident got talked about on SM by people who were entirely uninvolved.
If you aren’t happy with the outcome of the criminal trial you can try a civil lawsuit claiming the defendent caused you a loss of income or reputation or long term physical injuries. But there’s quite a high bar here. And if you go a bit nuts online and make it clear you are your own worst enemy then your suit will likely tank.
And you can do absolutely nothing about people discussing you in a chat group. COTH is mild compared to YouTube or Twitter.
If you do want to try a civil suit for libel or slander, you have to prove what was said was not true. And in the process the defendent can subpoena all your SM and police records and text messages on these things. It’s not enough to just make your FB posts friends only and claim you never said certain things.
My feeling is that if you don’t understand these basics, it will be hard to pass the bar exam.