Family Has Right of Privacy In Decapitation Photos

big6joe sends in an update to a morbid story we discussed last year: a California appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, granting the family of an 18-year-old woman who was killed in a traffic accident in 2006 privacy rights and recourse against the California Highway Patrol. "In a case that highlights how the ease of online communication can overthrow both common sense and basic decency, a California appeals court has ruled that families have a right of privacy in the death images of their loved ones. In 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman was decapitated in a traffic accident. Two of the police officers who reported to the scene emailed photos of the woman's body to their friends and family one Halloween."

Comments

Re:So...

[DirtyCanuck]

My friend was recently run over (Age 20), crossing a highway drunk.

I thought it sucked when we found out and turned into the news to see his dead body, bloody on the highway. At the same time a select few saw the aftermath up close ("Cleaned up")These are things people see and have to clean up.

These images remind us all of our fragile mortality. I ride my motorcycle much more conservative since my friends passing.

If people saw reality more often, I think reality would become less grim as people realize how eggshell life really is.

The difference

[bonch]

The pictures ended up on sites like 4chan, and idiots even found the email addresses of the family and sent trick emails containing the images. They also made harassing prank calls. So the difference in this case is that the officers who distributed the photos directly caused pain and suffering to the family by leaking the pictures to the rest of the world. There are some very cruel people out there who think being callous makes them funny.

Re:The difference

[linzeal]

My friend down in California knows a cop who got sued in the 1990's for releasing the information a man with a restraining order needed to find his ex-wife and beat the crap out of her to the point she has brain injuries. The police department, the county and he himself got sued and her family won against them all, they refused to take a settlement for fear it would happen to someone else. The county paid out, the police department did too, but he himself can never afford to buy a house, a car or even groceries some months because he still has 100's of thousands of dollars more to pay. That to me is justice and a similar judgement would be proper in this case.

Re:It's different because the officers...

[MrKaos]

Speaking as a father, the bad guys in this story are the officers on the scene. How they could think it was OK to use those photos for their own sick little joke on Halloween is beyond me. How they could think they had the authority to release those photos to the public at large is beyond me. Has law enforcement become so craven in this country they don't understand what we mean by "respect for the dead?"

In one way it just demonstrates we still have a long way to go before we can expect *all* police to be professional, some are, some aren't.

Re:problem with the officers

[severoon]

National security is already covered by laws granting the government rights to control that material.

The general rule in the US is, if public money pays for it, the public owns it. Crime scene photos absolutely should be accessible for most purposes. I think that judges ought to be able to bar particular uses, but in general public information should be publicly available.

Say, for example, I'm a graduate student in forensics writing a paper on crime scene photography techniques. The results of my paper could make sure more guilty people are convicted and, more importantly, innocent people are not. I can't have access to crime scene photos? I have to beg a judge for access to information that was taxpayer-funded?

I want to respect the rights of families, but in this case it's not really their rights being infringed...it's the deceased. And dead people don't have a whole lot of rights. (Rightly so, I think.)