Meet Officer Vaughan Ettienne, the bodybuilder who learned the hard way you shouldn't write like a thug online, or a jury might just suspect you of mistreating a suspect.

Ettienne (not pictured above, that's Herc from The Wire) once posted the following under a video clip of a cop punching a handcuffed man, according to a New York Times metro article:

If he wanted to tune him up some, he should have delayed cuffing him... If you were going to hit a cuffed suspect, at least get your money’s worth ’cause now he’s going to get disciplined for a fagg-t-ass love tap!

(The Times omitted those last three words; we found the original and put them back in because, wow, he wrote like a thug and a homophobe?)

The officer later set his MySpace status to "devious." The next day, he affected the arrest of a man who claims Ettienne broke three of his ribs and then planted a gun on him to justify the use of excessive force.

Then, just before the trial over that incident, Ettienne wrote set his Facebook status to "Vaughan is watching Training Day to brush up on proper police procedure," referring to the movie about a brutal, dirty LA cop.

That was maybe not so bright. Ettienne, a champion bodybuilder and onetime steroid user (legally, he claims), told the Times he thinks of the internet as macho locker room, all about posing and braggadocio. "You want to run your mouth with the best of them," he told the paper.

And he knows he was stupid to write what he did, but insists "there were hundreds of comments I made that were positive."

The jury acquitted his suspect on the weapons charge, presumably on the strength of the defense's argument that the gun was planted. See? Sometimes dumb internet overshares can benefit society, provided the oversharer is both stupid and in a position of power.

(Pic: Herc from The Wire via)