Do you have a Facebook?  Probably.  Have we all spent multiple hours searching our friends, playing games, and doing whatever else that the wonderful world of Facebook allows us to do?  Definitely.   While at work?  Well, you do not have to answer that one.

The popular social networking site, Facebook has exploded in popularity since its first inception in February of 2004.  From “Farmville” to “Mafia Wars,” the amount of games and applications on Facebook has become borderline maddening.

But how does Facebook relate to the law?

Earlier this year, a man made headlines when his Facebook status update successfully acted as an alibi to a crime committed on the other side of town.  The man’s status update was made from his computer at the time of the crime, too far away from where the crime actually took place for him to feasibly have been involved.

Now, a mother finds her estranged children of over fifteen years by entering their names into the networking site.  According to the Associated Press, a woman’s husband took the children when they were toddlers and fled to Mexico.  Since then, the woman has been searching for her lost children to no avail; until she searched their names in Facebook.  Now her husband is arrested for kidnapping and she has been reunited with her children.  But it unfortunately is not happy ending; custody battles ensue as the children do not want anything to do with their estranged mother.

It is astonishing that such a simple social networking site can have such a drastic affect on people’s lives.  But society’s increasing reliance and acceptance of Facebook and similar sites have people wondering, “How far is too far?”  Is it possible that law-makers will need to add more specific rules for collecting evidence on such sites?  How does one know if evidence and alibis have been planted?

Excuse me, until these questions are answered, I believe I need to go water my Farmville carrots.

While I was coming home, this girl asked the man next to me if he knew where she could find a copy of The New York Times. Dressed in casual sweatpants, she’d apparently been shuffling all around upper Manhattan in search of a copy of the elusive newspaper with its bold headline: OBAMA.

The man told her that he had looked for it himself and couldn’t find a copy from three different news stands. It was sold out everywhere.

Across the nation, throughout the whole world, everyone knows that we are witnesses to a new page in history. Generations later, we will probably look back at this time and pull out these very same newspaper clippings to reminisce on this day, the day the United States chose change.

What are your views on this?

A Texas man was released from jail after new DNA evidence is presented in court on Thursday. Charles Chatman spent nearly 27 years in jail after being convicted of rape in 1981. The now 47 year old Chatman had been picked out of a lineup by a woman who lived down the street from him and was given a 99 year sentence for aggravated sexual assault. He was the 15th inmate in Dallas freed using DNA testing since 2001, more than any other county in the United States. He is also the longest-serving wrongly convicted man in the state, serving almost 27 years before being released.

What actions, if any, should state and county governments take to “right” the wrong of sending someone to prison for a crime they did not commit? What rights should these people now have against the government? Is there any possible way to make up for more than half a life wasted serving time for a crime Charles Chatman did not commit?