One of the first and earliest lessons for reporters covering things like law enforcement and the courts is to ensure you’re correctly identifying the subject of a story.
The more egregious the accusation, the more important it is to make certain the person you’re identifying as involved is actually the right person.
We’ve been publishing mugshots in The Record-Courier for decades.
One of the reasons we do that is to ensure that someone is who we’re claiming they are. In the last 35 years, there haven’t been many instances where people have been arrested with similar names to upstanding citizens. But there have been some. There are also instances where usually upstanding citizens are arrested and sometimes we include their mugshot, so folks know we’re not just making something up.
Last week, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that posting mugshots of arrestees online amounted to punishment in a case brought against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona.
One of the arguments was that online mugshot websites scrape the sites to post them. Those sites often charge money to take down the photo, which is the antithesis of journalism.
A better argument in our opinion was that charges weren’t pursued against the person who sued the county. We’ve heard that the case will be appealed.
But at what point does the freedom of speech and the press conflict with someone’s presumption of innocence?
At what point does the guarantee for a public trial become something people want to avoid instead of embrace?
There is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
People’s names and addresses are listed in a variety of accessible government databases, including voter rolls and property records, and yes, arrests.
Like so many things that seemed like a good idea in the days before we started carrying computers around, time and technology have come along to perhaps render them problematic to say the least.
