Family Has Right of Privacy In Decapitation Photos 262
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."
Re:lol (Score:1, Interesting)
I think it's sad. Just because these people had their feelings hurt does not mean that they should be able to censor pictures that were taken IN PUBLIC of an 18 YEAR OLD ADULT. There was no expectation of privacy and if I recall correctly, the woman was a drug addict who died because she stole her father's Porsche and proceeded to drive it in a very reckless manner.
Fuck that.
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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: Your brains (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's different because the officers... (Score:4, Interesting)
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:The difference (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:problem with the officers (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like they have a problem with immature police officers as well. Hopefully the officers got reprimanded for doing that.
I believe it has been reported that the reason they sent the photos out was as an cautionary example of why one should not text and drive at the same time,
It isn't like they did it out of a sick sense of humor.
Re:It's different because the officers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as a father, the bad guys in this story are the officers on the scene.
Everyone in this family is a "bad guy". The girl was driving coked out. The cops sent her picture to people as a gag. The parents raised a spoiled, irresponsible girl. Nobody needs to see the pictures to know she was decapitated; we have a word for it in our language. But nobody needs to be driving under the influence, either. And double-extra nobody needs to blame the death of a cokehead on a brain tumor to make themselves seem less pathetic. It's all bad.
Re:So... (Score:1, Interesting)
My condolences too, when I was a kid we were traveling in a car, and we got passed by a motorcycle at something like 200km/hr(for you americans very fast).
The road had a lot of curves because it was near the mountains. Two minutes later, he(20 something) was dead with a big pool of blood under his neck. What I saw that day I will never forget, his girlfriend, his motorized friends...
But he asked for it, he was taking curves in a suicial way.
I think kids love to risk their lives, only when you get hurt you really learn. I risked my live several times on my childhood with my bike, as my friends did, but we learn what was dangerous.
We had a friend that his mother wanted to "protect", so he never went with us with his bike. When he got older enought, he got almost killed with his car doing stupid dangerous stuff.
Re:My tax dollars produced the photos. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:problem with the officers (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't work if the cops are chummy with one of the judges who in turn is more than happy to fire off an instant search warrant.
Seems like there's regulatory capture in the legal system itself even.
Re:problem with the officers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)