By Justin Silverman
I read through hundreds of headlines each day, browsing through stories on First Amendment fights and battles to maintain a free press. Most of these share the same storyline of a town refusing to disclose records to a newspaper, a large company bullying a critical website or a reporter refusing to disclose an anonymous source.
These types of stories are easy to rally around; the lines seem clear, the teams easily defined. My reaction is nearly visceral: Hand over the records, mind your own business and this is why we need a legitimate federal shield law.
But in the case of Nikki Catsouras, my gut betrayed me.
Nikki is an 18-year-old California woman who died in 2006, crashing her father’s Porsche into a cement toll booth at 100 mph. Newsweek recently published a story on her death and the legal battles her family began trying to prevent the spread of their daughter’s grisly accident photos.
They’re woefully late. A simple search of “Nikki Catsouras” yields at least one site featuring the horrific photos of Nikki, nearly decapitated, with little to no content otherwise. These are the images the town coroners found too disturbing for Nikki’s parents to view. Two police officers leaked them anyway and they now proliferate the web, showing up on sites like the latter.
My first reaction? Straight from the gut: They need to be taken down. What the hell are they doing showing these photos; showing them like this? No warning, no disclaimer, just click and instant gore. No other information, no education provided. Just shock. Take them down.
But as difficult as it is to defend a website that seemingly has such bad intentions, I now realize my first reaction was the wrong one. Unlike most stories, the lines here are blurred and emotion can trick you into thinking you are advocating the right thing. The right thing, in this case, is not what it first seems. It is to defend that website’s right to show the photos, however disrespectfully it chooses to do so.
According to the Newsweek story, the Catsouras family considers itself out of legal options. The photos are public record after all, released by the police and made fair game to all whom seek to publish them. The dead can claim no privacy rights and the photos are of only Nikki. These are the realities of firm legal principles that protect the public’s right to know and make it easier for information to be distributed.
Still, unlike in most cases, I can’t comfortably rise to the website’s defense. I just can’t see the value in posting the photos online solely to appease a morbid curiosity. But I can understand why that right exists and I will continue to defend that right.
It’s not a change in the law I advocate. It’s just a reminder that in some cases our rights come at a high cost to others. Though we are free to exercise our rights, we should do so with purpose, for a greater good.
And that being able to publish photos doesn’t mean that we should.
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 8, 2009 at 11:09 am
marcorandazza
Nice work, Justin. As usual, your writing gets to the heart of the matter and you recognize that emotions and ethics must sometimes be in opposition to one another.
June 5, 2009 at 6:00 am
The Catsouras Photos, Privacy, and Privilege « The Legal Satyricon
[...] services, those voices are out there. Suffolk University Law Student, Justin Silverman provides a thought-provoking uncomfortable defense of those who publish the Nikki Catsouras photos — embracing the “hate the speech, but [...]
June 29, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Ralph Kane
My question is: Why is it necessary to take pictures like this in the first palce. Can’t the police just write “head trauma” or something like that on the report. Thirty or fourt years ago, the first policeman on the scene would have simply placed a sheet over an obvious fatality like this.
June 29, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Justin Silverman
ralph, thanks for writing.
i couldn’t find the specific california highway patrol policies that would have obligated the officers to take photos of the catsouras crash. i assume most law enforcement agencies are committed to documenting as much as possible when there is a potential crime, ongoing investigation, etc. those photos, as graphic as they are, could be needed to determine the cause of the crash, resolve any claims that may arise from the accident and so forth. in these terms, the more information that can be collected and recorded, the better.
because this information — even that found within a photo — is of public concern and collected by a public agency, it is and should be available to the public. from what i understand, the police can withhold this information while an investigation is still underway, for example, but once it’s released, it’s fair game.
like i mentioned in my post, it’s a terribly difficult concept to digest in cases such as this one. but it’s important that we recognize the value in such freedom of information policies, despite the rare occasion when our heart tells us to do otherwise.
September 10, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Anger Over AP Photo Misplaced « Media and Communications Law Society
[...] the injury itself. It captures a battleground and an environment that words cannot. This is not a sterile accident photo with gory closeups that had been published for shock value alone. This photo is a story in itself and it’s [...]
February 11, 2010 at 8:34 am
The Catsouras Photos: Will a Family’s Privacy Interest Impede Press Access? «
[...] 2006 can catch up here. I previously wrote about the ethical concerns over publishing the photos here. Clearly the case is ripe with moral and legal debate. Because the photos are so gruesome, the [...]