The Steubenville rape trial (described by some as the “Instagram, YouTube-Fueled high school rape trial”) has reached an end, likely not “the” end, but an end nonetheless. The defendants – Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, were found guilty (actually delinquent, the juvenile equivalent of guilty) on all three counts as charged, charges stemming from the assault of a 16-year-old West Virginia girl the night of August 11, 2012.
The case and the events surrounding it got my attention, for two reasons in particular. One, I can see the town I grew up in reflected in Steubenville – blue collar (switch farms for the mill), rural, live and die by the local high school football team. Second, the role digital and social media evidence played in the run-up to the trial (arrests, charges), in the trial itself and (as it turns out) after the trial.
That’s what we’re going to explore a bit more.
It has been established in multiple accounts how the events of that August night played out over text messages, tweets, pictures and videos. In fact, the victim really only learned what had happened to her because of the digital residue left by her assailants and those who witnessed the assault.
As someone who examines digital and interactive media for a living (hopefully soon a paid living), what intrigues me is how people continue to use – rather misuse – digital and social media this way.
The culture of allshare that’s how.
Millennials and those generations around them know nothing but a world with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube. For them, sharing nearly every aspect of their lives publicly online is something they do without a second thought.
Passages from the New York Times piece on the case hits on this point:
“… [Reno] Saccoccia [the head coach], a 63-year-old who brims with bravado, was the sole person in charge of determining whether any players would be punished.
Saccoccia, pronounced SOCK-otch, told the principal and school superintendent that the players who posted online photographs and comments about the girl the night of the parties said they did not think they had done anything wrong. Because of that, he said, he had no basis for benching those players. …” (emphasis added mine)
That is a key piece of allshare right there – those involved in the sharing did not think they had done anything wrong. Sharing nearly every aspect of their lives, even the questionable aspects, is second nature.
“The case is not the first time a high school football team has been entangled in accusations of sexual assault. But the situation in Steubenville has another layer to it that separates it from many others: It is a sexual assault accusation in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones — even repugnant, possibly criminal behavior, as they did in Steubenville in August — and then posting it on the Web, like a graphic, public diary.”
That last piece – “… in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones — even repugnant, possibly criminal behavior, as they did in Steubenville in August — and then posting it on the Web, like a graphic, public diary” – is as close to a dictionary definition of allshare as you’ll find.
We’re going to try to parse out a few points of question/discussion, relating events in Steubenville into a larger iMedia/social media context.
- First up, the flash drive of evidence. Again, from the NYT piece:
“The parents then notified the police and took their daughter to a hospital. At 1:38 a.m. on Aug. 14, the girl’s parents walked into the Steubenville police station with a flash drive with photographs from online, Twitter posts and the video on it. It was all the evidence the girl’s parents had, leaving the police with the task of filling in the details of what had happened that night. …”
Given the era of allshare that we are in, is this the start of a new requirement? Will police have to patrol the side streets of the information superhighway, looking for evidence of criminal activity? Will investigators, even victims, have to rummage though the trash bins for deleted evidence?
Or has this been something that has been a part of law enforcement all along, just in a different form? Witnesses have always been sought in criminal investigations, preservation of physical evidence has been an integral part of cases long before Twitter and cell phones. Do text messages and social media posts play the role of ‘digital witness,’ recording and preserving what has happened at the moment of an alleged crime?
Imagine this case without the social evidence. With the lack of physical/forensic evidence (no CSI/DNA evidence), it devolves into a he said/she said battle — blame the victim vs. painting the accused — and no one wins.
So, we have to ask ourselves, can social evidence be the 3rd party witness, objectively observing and recording what happens without bias? As continue to live in this era of allshare, will social evidence become more prevalent? Or does the anonymity and fluid nature of social evidence — and the uncertainty and mistrust some have of it — raise too much of a possibility of the waters being muddied enough for reasonable doubt.
- Next, the statements made by police that they were unable to recover deleted videos/pictures. Again, from the NYT piece:
“In several instances, the police seized cellphones so they could look for photographs or videos related to the case.
Eventually, 15 phones and 2 iPads were confiscated and analyzed by a cybercrime expert at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That expert could not retrieve deleted photographs and videos on most of the phones.
In the end, the expert recovered two naked photographs of the girl. One photograph showed the girl face down on the floor at one party, naked with her arms tucked beneath her, according to testimony given at a hearing in October. The other photograph was not described. Both photographs were found on Mays’s iPhone. No photograph or video showed anyone involved in a sexual act with the girl.”
Really? Sometimes I end up with three copies of the same picture on my phone – the one I took, the one I posted to Instagram and the one I put on foursquare. And, anything I record or any picture I take is automatically uploaded and backed-up to my Google+ account. The evidence in question was shared on social media platforms, shared with others. My point is the files are somewhere – in a cache, on a server, somewhere in some form. It is incredibly difficult to delete something completely and totally, leaving no ability to recover it, especially once it gets shared or posted.
Will we see a growth in the area of computer forensics? Will law enforcement agencies have to increasingly look toward tech professionals for their assistance in digital dumpster diving, looking for evidence criminals have chucked into the metaphorical river alongside the information superhighway.
“In this case, accusations spread as quickly as did the photos of the unconscious girl, thanks in large part to blogger Alexandria Goddard, who covered the story on Prinniefied.com. She was on the story months ago:
Before many of the partygoers could delete their posts, photographs or videos, she took screen shots of them, posting them on her site, Prinniefied.com. On Aug. 24, just after the arrests, she wrote on her site that it was “a slam dunk case” because, she said, Mays and Richmond videotaped and photographed their crime and then posted those images on the Web. Goddard pressed her case.
“What normal person would even consider that posting the brutal rape of a young girl is something that should be shared with their peers?” she wrote. “Do they think because they are Big Red players that the rules don’t apply to them?”
She cited by name several current and former Steubenville athletes, accusing them of having a criminal role in the suspected assault by failing to stop it and then disseminating photographs of it. According to court documents, Goddard responded to a comment that read, “Students by day …gang rape participants by night” by writing that the football coach should be ashamed of letting players linked to the incident remain on the field. In another post, she added, “Why aren’t more kids in jail. They all knew.”
Now, she’s being sued (along with people who commented on her blog) by a Steubenville football player and his parents for defamation. The Times said she exacerbated the hype surrounding the case by “injecting” herself in the story, “complicating it and igniting ire in the community.”
Would the Times have covered the story if she hadn’t? Probably not. …”
The $64,000 question – Where is the line between covering and simply reporting the story and injecting yourself into and becoming part of the story? This is an important question, one that existed before the age of the journalist-blogger, but has increased in importance with the rise of citizen journalism. Particularly in the Steubenville case, did Goddard and Prinniefied.com play the role of reckless vigilante or freedom fighter, standing up for what is right? In the pursuit of the story, does it become more about the jouralist-blogger seeking their own publicity and driving up page views or rallying others to the victim’s cause by acting on behalf of the ignored, the taken advantage of, the down-trodden? Are they victim advocate, acting as a check and balance against the establishment or have they appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner for the court of public opinion?
So where does that leave us? Calling back to the title, in an effort to come full-circle on this and wrap it up, it’s the expression from when someone asks you “where did you hear that?” or “how do you know that?” and the reply is “a little birdie told me” — except now the bird is small, blue, sings only 140 characters at a time and lives in your hand, pocket and/or purse.
As for the social evidence legal discussion, are we reaching a point where this will be how Miranda Rights will have to be worded?
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say … tweet, post, retweet, text, photograph, record and/or update can and will be used against you in a court of law …”
Green-White-Checkered 