Consider:

• A burglar in West Virginia was recently caught when he left his Facebook page open on his victim’s computer. From the Martinburg Journal-News:

[The victim] told police that someone had broken into her home through a bedroom window.

There were open cabinets in her garage, and other signs of a burglar.

The victim later noticed that the intruder also used her computer to check his Facebook status, and his account was still open when she checked the computer.

• When a couple caught and grilled an endangered iguana and posted pictures of the crime onto Facebook, it wasn’t long before investigators arrested them and fined them $500 for violating the Wild Animal Protection Act. (h/t Switched)
• It’s too early to tell if any of it will stand up in court, but Facebook seems to have yielded some preliminary data points in the case of Raymond Clark, the suspect in the murder of Yale pharmacology student Annie Le.

But sometimes, information from Facebook bubbles up in overly aggressive or misleading ways:

• An advertising director was arrested after a shooting in April because he was Facebook friends with the victim’s ex-wife on Facebook. According to Adland, he was held for 18 hours on no other evidence — and was only friends with the woman in the first place because they had taken a few philosophy classes together in college. He’s now filing suit against a gossip site that publicized the connection.
• According to Discover, prosecutors who use Facebook photos of drinking, partying defendants in drunk driving cases are likely to be successful in getting harsher sentences from juries — even if the photos are old. Drunk driving is of course a serious crime, particularly if it results in anyone’s death, but out-of-context photos can provide a distorted view of a defendant’s character.

Though it’s great when it leads to the delivery of justice, it’s a little unsettling that there’s so much private information out there on a for-profit site. Then again, almost all of it comes from the users — or perps — themselves.

The most substantive evidence against Clark reported so far was gathered and reported the old-fashioned way: newspapers — mostly local newspapers — getting leaks from anonymous “police sources.” That’s how on the 14th, the New Haven Independent broke the fact that the main suspect “person of interest” was a lab tech who did animal testing, and on the 15th the Daily News found that he had flunked lie detector tests and had scratches on his body. That’s how the Hartford Courant reported that swipe card records showed that Clark was the last person to see Le alive. That’s how the New Haven Register found out that Clark’s DNA supposedly implicates him.

But the social Web has added information to the case that would have been unattainable just years ago. How admissible any of it will be in court is anybody’s guess, but it provides a fascinating, if circumstantial, new aspect to the case and its coverage.

This New York Post cover, which was clearly just pulled from a Facebook album: when, in the past, could a tabloid find a murder suspect in a devil costume, even if such a picture existed somewhere? Many of the photos of Clark in circulation came from online albums.

*Gawker’s Andrew Belonsky got the “scoop” on an old spoof MySpace page of Clark’s from 2006; despite bringing nothing new to the table besides inappropriate fart and porn jokes (and being several cuts below some of Gawker’s actual crack reporting on Clark), more than 22,000 people read the post.

*MySpace played a more substantive role when the New York Post got ahold of these messages from the MySpace page of Jennifer Hromadka, Raymond Clark’s fiancée, which mention rumors of a possible ‘fling’ with a girl at the lab:

“My boyfriend, Ray, if you don’t know him, has no interest in any of the other girls at [the university research center] as anything more than friends.

“This rumor of a ‘fling’ is probably the most stupid thing i have ever heard and really is not even worth going into detail about.

“Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I’m not perfect and I don’t live to be, but before you start pointing fingers make sure your hands are clean!!”

*Clark’s ex-girlfriend’s Facebook posts also became a part of the national news cycle. According to the New Haven Independent, the woman, who accused Clark of forcing her to have sex with him in a 2003 police report, wrote “I can’t believe this. “I feel like I’m 16 all over again . . . Its jsut [sic] bringing back everything.”

Finally, news just travels faster. Those who were following the story closely could get up-to-the-minute information on the latest development via aggregators like Google News, though the insatiable hunger for something big and new led to some big errors from the media. The premature report by Fox that a body had been found when one hadn’t falls squarely into this category, as does the unsubstantiated storyline that a professor, who was in fact one of many people questioned in regards to the case, was the main suspect.

Is there an even darker side to this saturation? If Clark’s case goes to trial, prosecutors could have a darned hard time finding jury members who are truly impartial; given the blanket coverage, who doesn’t walk into the courtroom knowing, or thinking they know, key details of the case. More importantly, someone will have to watch jurors like hawks to ensure that they don’t violate court procedure by bringing the wrong kind of information into, or out of, the courtroom.

As the New York Times reported in March, major civil and criminal cases this year have been declared mistrials thanks to jurors reading about the case online, doing research using reference sites like Wikipedia, and even Tweeting and updating Facebook statuses from the courtroom. If this past week’s coverage is any indication, whatever trial springs out of the Le case will be a media circus, and the temptations will be even greater.

Tweeting from the jury booth: clearly a bad idea. But the wealth of information available on the social Web is a fact of 21st century life, and it’s naive to expect it to be easily shut out.  Maybe it is the legal system, and not the Internet, that should be adjusting to the new order of things.