14 DAY TRIAL // "Now this is a story all about how/ My life got twisted upside down." These were the starting two lines from Will Smith's "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" theme song. The following is also a story about how Officer John Nohelj's life went awry, and all that because of one of his friends on MySpace.
Like the majority of the people accessing the Internet, John had a profile on one of the social networks in fashion nowadays. And, probably as it is the case with most people, he randomly added "friends," just because the invitation was sent to him. That's where it all started. And the way it continued is one of the silliest cases I've ever heard of: one of the people in his friends list had a link to an adult site and the officer is currently under investigation because of it.
Somebody tipped the New Port Richey PD and the Florida attorney general about it and now he stands accused for making adult content available to underage persons. His profile was at first set up with the school's support and with the PD's approval in an attempt to make communication with students a lot easier. The principal of the school is enraged with what happened and thundered on the matter for quite a while, that it cannot be admissible for a police officer to not check every link that children might click. We'll see how that ends, but for now, let's just mention that John had nigh 170 friends, whose pages he would have been expected to check every day.
People for Internet Responsibility's Laura Weinstein decided to show principal Stan Trapp that he was running a witch hunt and how the very site of the school was "three clicks away" from a gay porn site. The answer? The site was taken down. Now, that's either being hardheaded or just not wanting to admit that he's making a mistake.
Meanwhile, poor John Nohelj stands accused, while the principal, who had approved of his school's site, stands free. And on the same basis, at that.