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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."
Werd.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
And no, you don't have a right to view the result unless you're a complete fucked-up ghoul.
Unfortunately, the ghouls DO have the right to view. Nobody said free speech was always pretty.
As GP said, the real problem here is that it was police who sent the info out - abusing their positions to do so.
This wasn't about freedom of speech. That BS argument was dispensed with very well by the court. It was about the abuse of privileged information that should not have been released without a court order justifying its release.
And no, ghouls don't have some extra legal rights that trump everyone else's.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
And that they were intentionally mailed to the family.
This means that they will be haunted by this for the rest of their lives - as if it wasn't bad enough already.
Journalists and police officers shall always take into consideration if their actions can be harmful on a level where it does more bad than good. If they aren't able to have that kind of empathy then they should change job to something else - like dead animal collection along the roads/railroads.
People in public service that lacks empathy are the most dangerous persons around since they can cause massive amounts of suffering.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Agree, 20,000 percent.
It's amazing how quick people who never do anything are to judge people who actually DO THINGS.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br