Alan O’Neill, bigamist busted when Facebook recommended the ‘two wives be friends’
A Seattle-area corrections officer has been charged with bigamy after his two wives learned about each other on Facebook, prosecutors say.
Alan O’Neill, 41, married his first wife in 2001, when he was known as Alan Fulk, according to The News Tribune of Tacoma. The couple split up eight years later, and Fulk moved out, but the pair never divorced, the newspaper reported.
Last December, he reportedly petitioned to have his name changed to O’Neill before marrying his second wife.
The first wife allegedly learned about the second wife when Facebook recommended the two women become “friends,” Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told The News Tribune.
O’Neill, who has worked as a Pierce County corrections officer for five years, has been placed on administrative leave and is scheduled to appear in court March 22 on the felony charge.
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Hell even if they were posted privately and another a second person presents them to the wife that isn’t illegal.
Subpoenaing the information from facebook isn’t hard either, there might be discovery fee to pay for the collection of evidence before it is submitted to the court but posting any evidence of illegal action to facebook is a stupid thing to do on any level. They are a business, who wants to use the information you post on their service in the best way possible. If that is charging a service fee for electronic document discovery then so be it.
Major email service providers have offered this service for a long time.
Is this legal? Is what legal?
Do you mean is it legal to use photos or text a person has posted in a way that’s accessible to the pubic as evidence against that person in a court case? If that’s your question then the answer is (in the Canada anyway, and almost certainly in the US), yes, you’re allowed to do it.
The main thing you have to deal with are the laws of evidence, and as long as you can demonstrate to the court’s satisfaction that your screenshots (or whatever you have) are genuine and that they were available to the public and you didn’t have to hack to get them, then you’re probably fine. This might be more challenging if the person has removed them or changed their privacy settings since you first recorded the material, but if you get advice from a lawyer on how to collect the information properly you should be fine. Better yet (if you can afford it) have the lawyer instruct someone else to collect the evidence (their assistant, paralegal, junior lawyer, or an investigator). Doing it that way makes it easier for the court to believe that it hasn’t been tampered with because the people who collected it aren’t going to risk their reputation and their livelihood just to win your case.
If you mean is it legal to marry more than one person, then no, as far as I know there isn’t a jurisdiction in North America where bigamy is legal, although I believe there is a court case going on in British Columbia, Canada at the moment where anti-bigamy laws are being challenged on a religious basis by a group whose faith permits it.