We live in an age of information. A whole world of knowledge, visuals and even the occasional YouTube wait for us on the web. We are a connected society, hurtling ever more towards a society that is always on. Is it even possible to go a day without once looking at our phones? I know I can’t because I am actually yell at by my father if my phone is not on and charged at all times, but when I need time to myself I can turn off the phone and throw it into the laundry basket, forgetting for a few blissful hours that it’s my only link to the would outside of my apartment.
But what if you couldn’t turn those images or information off, or how about the most embarrassing or saddening moment of your entire life? Within today’s society our privacy is no longer just ours to guard. We must hope that the ethics of others hold up and that their better judgment will happen before they decided to hit the “post” button, but in one tragic case, the moral compass on what is acceptable to share went into a tailspin.
For the Nikki Catsouras family, there is no time when they are not reminded of the day their daughter died in a car accident. It’s even harder to forget when images of the aftermath of the crash were splashed all over the Internet. These are the types of photos that no family should ever have to spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid and to have them taken down from sites. Their privacy was violated as soon as two California High Patrol shared photos of the crash investigation with other officers by email. A normal person would say they had questionable morals, but a judge recently declared that the two officers were guilty of negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The court stated: “We rely upon the CHP to protect and serve the public. It is antithetical to that expectation for the CHP to inflict harm upon us by making the ravaged remains of our loved ones the subject of Internet sensationalism. . . . O’Donnell and Reich owed the plaintiffs a duty not to exploit CHP-acquired evidence in such a manner as to place them at foreseeable risk of grave emotional distress.”
These men were in charge of keeping the family’s privacy so they would not become what they have today. Their daughter is the butt of sick jokes and the fantasies of morally questionable individuals. Even though they are fighting to have the pictures taken down, I do not believe they will ever be rid of them. The Internet is the size of the universe and when things are removed from one location, they inevitably pop up in another. In some ways I admit that this blog post is even a slight against the family’s privacy. People will search for Nikki’s name after reading it here and continue the never-ending cycle.
If our privacy cannot be protected even after our deaths, how can we even hope to think we can remain private in life when we have the ability to speak out?
There might be a small ray of hope in this dark tale of caution. On January 7, 2008, Meredith Emerson’s dismembered and unclothed body was found in the north Georgia mountains six days after she suddenly disappeared. It has taken two years, but the family of Meredith was finally giving the ruling that would spare the anguish felt by the Catsouras family. A Georgia Superior Court Judge issued a temporary restraining order barring Hustler magazine from acquiring the gruesome crime scene photos and not a day later the Georgia House Government Affairs Committee passed “The Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act”. The passage of this law prohibits gruesome crime scene photos from being releases or disseminated.
Now, the bill does allow official members of the press to go to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to view the photos, but under no circumstances are they allowed to make copies. Why Hustler magazine would even want to print the photos is beyond me, but they are adamant that they should have the right to view and copy the images. I guess no one at the magazine has ever been on the receiving end of an Internet meme depicting the decapitated body of a family member.
What we have to look at concerning these two cases is the effects that will carry on after. Journalists that is will cause a chilling effect and no one will even want to cover the stories, which in turn will not provide their readers with adequate information, but do we really need to see such photos to learn that there is a sick individual out there who has already done this to one girl? The press has printed such photos before, most notably of “The Black Dahlia” a.k.a. Elizabeth Short. Short’s naked, dismembered and mutilated body was photographed and printed in papers for the world to see, but there is one key difference: there was no Internet at the time.
While it was still a shameless invasion of privacy on behalf of the press, those photos could not be shared around the world in less than a day and most likely not less than a month if they deemed it necessary to share the story across the country. I will be the first to agree that our society has become overly censored and politically correct, but I draw the line way before the belief that crime scene and autopsy photos should be shared openly in the Sunday paper.
