Court of Public Opinion: A Juror is Judged

Bizarro Castle Rock, Maine (BP)- Maurice Lee unwinds every day after and usually during work by heading over to the Channel 7 News Facebook page and cutting lose on the latest arrest reports.

"KILL IT My TAX DOLLARS should NOT pay to feed and house this scum!"

"Arrest, execute, and mulch them up. The greenies should support that!"

It might seem like Maurice is directing his ire at convicted murderers. In fact, the vast majority of these comments are made on arrest reports. The individuals featured in the stories and mugshots have been arrested, but in many cases they had not been formally charged or arraigned. Out of all the stories Maurice opined on, absolutely none of them featured a person who had been convicted of the crimes that they had been accused of.

But none of that mattered to Maurice, who used the comment function as a way to foist his self-loathing and persistent depression on people he perceived as criminals that lived lives that ran parallel to his righteous (though incredibly unremarkable and miserable) lifestyle.

 Then came the day that would change everything. On November 2, 2013, Maurice Lee arrived at work to find that his employer's elderly office building had burned down. Investigators quickly found evidence of accelerants, and began their search for an arsonist. The long arm of the law swung its damning finger towards Maurice mere hours after the witness statements and affidavits began to roll in. Maurice had been seen heatedly disputing office dress code with his department manager recently. Camouflage clothing had been banned, and there was talk of prohibiting jeans in the administrative offices of the construction company that Maurice had worked in for five years.

"As soon as the memo hit his inbox, he was in the manager's face," said coworker Charlene May. "He was shouting about 'fascism' this and 'socialism' that. And then he said he would 'show them' what happens you 'violate' the rights of real Americans. Very creepy."

Maurice recalled the event, and rubbed his bleary eyes. His orange county jail jumpsuit was baggy, even on his hefty frame. "That's not what I meant," he muttered. "I'd never burn down a man's business over some stupid argument. That's not me. That's not who I am."

But on Facebook, as always, none of that mattered.

"CREEP. CHUMMUNATE him for crab bait!" wrote Randy Quinn on the News Channel 7 Facebook story.

"Set HIM on fire. Hope he likes rape because bubba in prison sure does lmao!" Thelma Johnson added.

His scowling, defeated face appeared in mugshot magazines, news websites, and countless professional extortion websites across the internet. He could pay them all off, but his name and face would be forever bound to the word "ARSON".

When Maurice was able to produce a solid alibi that placed him at home at the time the fire began, he was released immediately. He may have been a free man, but Maurice was now shackled to a crime he had demonstrably nothing to do with. For all the stories about him being cleared and released, there were even more active, archived, and cached that all but convicted and sentenced him.

Maurice doesn't do much posting on Facebook anymore. He had to remove it to slow down the deluge of death threats from strangers. Most of the time, you can find him applying to countless jobs online. The vast majority of them feature poverty level wages, and have no interest in Maurice's education or certifications.

"A background check would probably tell them that the police let me go," Maurice sighed. "But a Google search is so much cheaper. And according to Google, I'm a walking fire hazard. Let's face it, if you were a hiring manager and caught a whiff of criminal history against your employer, you're tossing that application in a hurry. I guess I've got to find the guy willing to read the next page down where they let me go and find my boss' bookie laying low up in Canada."

He hasn't found that person yet, but he's still looking. And he's still approaching life from a new perspective, one that he had to experience first-hand to truly understand. Facebook users want a death sentence for any and every crime, shaking their fist at a justice system that refuses to give them the executions they crave. But in the digital age, an accusation invariably leads to the miserable death of a man's reputation. And the man that Maurice Lee used to be, along with all of his cohorts online, are more than happy to tie the nooses before the first gavel falls.