A New York City appeals court has refused to free a man charged with robbing a bank due to a Googled piece of evidence.
Inmate Anthony Bari was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 13 years for robbing a bank in New York, but after being released in 2008 for just 4 months, Bari was arrested again for allegedly holding up another bank.
At the revocation hearing, they showed Federal Judge Denny Chin surveillance video of a robber decked out in a yellow rain hat similar to one found in the garage at Bari’s address.
Before sending Bari back to jail for 36 months, Chin said he thought that convicting Bari on the mere matching yellow hat, would be too much of a coincidence and went to the Internet for confirmation.
“We did a Google search, and you can find…yellow hats like this. But there are also lots of different rain hats, many different kinds of rain hats that one could buy,” Chin said.
With the mountain of evidence against Bari and the Google search showing that there were a multitude of yellow rain hats and that the exact hat being in Bari’s garage was not a coincidence, federal judges sentenced Bari to serve his 3 years behind bars.
Bari’s lawyer later argued that Chin violated federal evidence rules by tooling around on Google.
But the appeals panel said using a Web search to confirm a common sense supposition didn’t violate any rules.
“Twenty years ago, to confirm an intuition about a variety of rain hats, a trial judge may have needed to travel to a local department store to survey the rain hats on offer,” the panel noted. “Today, a judge need only take a few moments to confirm his intuition by conducting a basic Internet search.”
