You can keep repeating that the dead have no expectation of privacy, but it doesn’t make it the law. Again, persuasive authority from the Supreme Court disagrees with that.

Finally, of course, you keep acting like the police weren’t at fault here, that anonymous internet people did all the wrong here. It doesn’t help your position to fail to acknowledge that the cops in question were scumbags. Also, of course, it doesn’t help that you don’t acknowledge the copyright issues that exist and also hurt the cops position.

The cops are scumbags, and this case sets zero bad precedence, and when scumbags get sued for being scumbags, I’m generally in favor of that.

So I don’t understand how the court can rule that it was an invasion of privacy in this case.

The dead do not have an expectation of privacy. And neither do the living while they are in public.

It is obvious the court ruled this way because of the way the anonymous assholes on the internet responded to the photos.

Those assholes began to harass and torment the family.

But that is not the fault of the cops, even though they did commit a departmental violation by releasing the photos.

This ruling is along the lines of a heavy metal band being accused of murder because some teenager listened to lyrics and decided to kill people.

We need to go back to what the law considers “an expectation of privacy.”

There is no expectation of privacy in a traffic fatality on a public road in broad daylight.

While the family may have an expectation of privacy, the cops did not publish their address or phone number or email or any other personal information.

That information was obtained by those anonymous assholes in some other manner.

The cops have no control of their actions, just as they have no control over me in writing this blog.

What the cops did was distribute photos of subject matter that was visible to anybody in the area.

And now they are being faulted because of it.

That is why this is a First Amendment issue.

I say this again, i don’t have a problem with police in general; we have to have them around, currently, and they try their best most of the time. I certainly wish they HADN’T done what they did, but i don’t think it’s a criminal issue, merely a “well, you’re fired” issue. And the family can try and get redress from them, but i doubt they will be able to – and not because of the BS first amendment argument the defense is claiming.

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/092009/09052009/491779/index_html

did not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and “lacked possession, control, and dominion” over their own private property. The Fourth Amendment means nothing, even though these particular photos were essentially stolen and had absolutely nothing to do with the arrest!?? If this judge thinks it’s ok that the “officer then shared the pictures…[and] alerted several additional law enforcement officers and members of the public “that the private pictures were available for their viewing and enjoyment” I have to wonder if your honor is siding with the cops only because he enjoys some “toe tapping” with a few of them in the court house mens room. Is it just me, or does this one provoke ire and provide yet another example of laws being interpreted in favor of wrongdoing cops?

This is not a First Amendment case, and the officers had no legitimate use of these photos, that were also copyright owned by the State. I notice that there’s no real anger here over the violation of copyright by these officers, why is that?

This just isn’t so, and I’m baffled by this idea of “property of the state … public record.” There are many kinds of documents possessed by the State (for whichever jurisdiction you’d like to consider) that are not available to the public.

If they were, neither of us would ever have to file another FOIA request again. My FOIA denial rate only increased over the last decade, though Obama’s made moves to tone it down.

Notionally, yes, We The People own the State, but our representatives have erected many barriers against public access to state information over the last 233+ years, from Top Secret to medical records all the way down to juvenile offender name redaction.

Anyways, this is certainly one of the more contentious AND interesting arguments I’ve seen PINAC – some clarity from an attorney would be nice. I’m out of my depth.

If a newspaper had made the request and published the photos. Or say maybe a magazine such as Hustler which would probably publish such photos, would that request be denied under “an invasion of privacy” law?

If so, then it becomes a First Amendment issue.

These were never published because newspapers just don’t do that, but they were made available to me as part of a public records request.

So it’s not that police departments have a policy in place that forbids them from releasing these types of photos.

In this case, the photos were released without authorization, which is an internal matter and should be handled within the department.

When you say the photos are property of the state, you are acknowledging that they are public record.

Whether they were distributed to a journalist under a public records request or released to friends through email should not make a difference in the eyes of the court.