Could you provide a cite as well if you have one?
If you read the rules of this board you will find …
IANAL but posting an admission of a crime on a “public” message board may very be viewed as a public admission of committing the crime
Proving that the words that appear here, under my username are a valid confession in a legal sense is a non trivial exercise for the prosecution, but if that is done, it is certainly evidence that can be used against me.
Convincing the jury that the words are mine would be fairly tedious, but not impossible.
Tris
I’ll bite: what’d ya do?
-Tofer
So whadya do suporama?
Come on, you can tell us. We’re all cool here. 
OOps, sorry tofergregg.
I haven’t done anything. Seriously. There’s actually another message board I go to where a fellow poster made a comment that he may have to spend time in jail for something or another. He made the comment that he may get off for lack of evidence, but not necessarily because he didn’t do it. I made the comment for him to be careful because I thought anything he posted could be used in court. Someone there didn’t believe me. Now I am looking for a cite (if it is indeed even true).
I really didn’t do anything though.
That’s what they aaaaaaaallllllll say … 
Yeah, that did sound like one of those “I have a friend who…” but really this is true. 
A word to the wise, dude - advising this guy on what he can or cannot say and get away with is probably not a very good idea. I don’t know whether there’s a legal problem, but it certainly looks “shady” - and if this were to come up in court, your name could be involved in a way you wouldn’t want it to be.
My point being - don’t bother with the cite. Don’t go back to this thread, and don’t talk to this guy on the board - no good can come of it.
MHO, of course.
If you admit to a serious crime on a message board, or a non-serious crime, or a tort, or a breach of contract, or that you hate your mother, it can be used against you in court, just as if you made such a statement in a letter, in person, on a voice mail, in an email, etc. There is no qualitative difference between an internet message board and any of those other modes of communication.
Anything you say is not hearsay if it is used against you. Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2)(A).
To admit that statement against you, opposing counsel must prove that the internet message is authentic – i.e., it is what the lawyer claims it is. Fed. R. Evid. 901(a)
There are likely hundreds of ways to authenticate the message, including getting records from your ISP, and while it would be time consuming, it wouldn’t be difficult.
superoma, simply tell your friend that if he thinks that stuff he posts on a message board won’t come back to haunt him, there are a few people whose (PDF) experiences tell otherwise.
On preview, Mr. Excellent is right – no need to educate this fella if he thinks that he can admit stuff online.
Thanks guys!
The radio talk show I listen to, which is popular with local police officers, gets calls from time to time from people confessing to serious crimes. Most are just BS but once or twice callers gave details that were checked against unsolved cases and station and/or show hosts were served subpoenas for tapes or testimony when it turned out the confessions were authentic.
I am most emphatically not a lawyer but your friend might want to consider another point. Perhaps the message might not be admissible in court. So? Unless that is the only possible way to tie him to the offense the message could still come back to haunt him, by providing a lead to the police and making them suddenly very interested in his activities. Information suggesting that police should check out person A instead of person B doesn’t have to be of a sort that prosecutors are able to make use of.
Exactly - be careful what you say.
There isa local radio DJ who jokingly admitted that he hasn’t paid taxes in years “over the air”. This was enough for the IRS to start an investigation and the poor schmuck went to court and may do time.
I’ve seen interviews with rock stars who admit to current/recent drug use., How is that any different.
This one has always confused me as well. How come such admissions aren’t equally dangerous to the interviewee. Would the contents of a autobiography be hearsay or evidence?
Well, I believe that in most cases drug USE is not illegal. Drug POSSESSION is what is illegal. This is for the obvious reason that once someone has used the drug it is difficult to prove that they have in fact used the drug. But it is very easy to prove that someone has drugs in their possession, just get a search warrant and find them. Now, if you admit you used drugs it is likely that you at one point possessed the drugs that you used. But the cops can’t use that admission to prove that you possessed drugs, they need to prove that you possessed a particular batch of drugs at a particular time and place.
Certainly, cops could use that admission of drug use as a basis for investigating a person more closely. “Hmmm. That Tommy Chong sure makes a lot of references to drug use in his movies and comedy. Could it be that he is not just JOKING about using marijuana, or portraying characters that smoke marijuana, could it be that he actually smokes the stuff himself?” I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think the bare admission of past drug use would be enough to get a judge to issue a search warrant.
I suppose they are dangerous, but only in the sense that it may make the police take a closer look at the person to catch them in the act later. Kind of like admitting you’re a habitual speeder. Illegal, but they’re better off catching you.
I hesitate to get into hearsay, because it’s enough to make a grown man cry. Hearsay is any out-of-court statement offered in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement. Hearsay is evidence, just generally not admissible evidence unless it meets an exception or exclusion. See Fed. R. Evid. 801(d) for exclusions from hearsay, and Fed. R. Evid. 803 for exceptions to hearsay.
The contents of an autobiography would be excluded from hearsay and would be admissible. For example, a statement of a party-opponent, offered against that person, is excluded from hearsay – it’s admissible. And an autobiography would be a statement of a party opponent or a statement as to which the defendant has manifested a belief in its truth or has adopted it.
I suspect this is just muddying the waters. But in case it helps, there you go.
Does it matter if the message board is outside the jurisdiction of the prosecution?