Thursday, August 19, 2010

Jailed for friending ex-wife

FoxNews reports:
It's not a crime to make friends on Facebook, but one Florida man found that the rules are a bit different when the person you're trying to "friend" has a protective order against you.

The man, 54-year-old Harry Bruder, was arrested for allegedly sending his soon to be ex-wife requests to "friend" him on Facebook, which police said violated the protective order, MyFoxOrlando.com reported.

A police report posted on thesmokinggun.com shows Bruder admitting he contacted his wife twice last month on the popular social networking site ...
I get spammers from around the world sending me email for making Facebook friend requests. Facebook makes it very easy to block someone that you want to avoid.

No court order should ever forbid a Facebook friend request, when it is so trivial for any user to restrict to whomever she likes. And no one should be jailed for anything so completely harmless.

This is another example of how the courts create problems, instead of solve them. Most of these restraining orders serve no useful function except to satisfy some bitter woman's craving to punish her ex.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

the restraining orders do a little more than that, they add leverage to make sure the kids are separated completely from the father, usually under the guise of "abusive behavior". Many times they're non-existent, but courts being courts, they have to cover their rear-ends, "better safe than sorry" since there are indeed some thugs out there that do physically harm their ex. Would really like to get some data on the number of restraining orders issued vs actually assault and battery incidents in these situations. My guess it would be quite a small number of actual incidents. Remember, child support is tax-free income to the recipient, so there's ample incentive to get as much as possible since it can be spent any which way they choose.

Anonymous said...

Of course the courts are solving a major problem with this ruling. They need to put more men in jail for bullshit reasons so that the jails can remain full.

George said...

I do not think that restraining orders have much to do with thugs doing physical harm. If so, they would have some supporting data, and not bother restraining Facebook friend requests.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you, but tell that to the hysterical fools at the Walnut St Women's Shelter here in town. They get a fair amount of press in the local paper as you no doubt have seen. Their thinking is that every man suffers from testosterone poisoning and is therefore automatically guilty of the abuse of women. How do I know? Simple, my ex used them to bolster her case to get a restraining order against me and I had a chance to talk with the "case worker" assigned to her that shadowed her in our umpteen court hearings a couple of years ago. All the world's a stage, but there's no stage quite like Family Court.....