Mugshots.com Operators Arrested For Letting Money Influence Editorial Decisions

Legal Issues

from the using-poor-inferences-to-unconstitutionally-prevent-other-poor-inferences dept

Earlier this month Ars Technica reported on the arrest of the alleged operators of Mugshots.com, a website that does what it says on the tin: hosts mugshots. The issue is, the site operators didn’t just host mugshots; they also charged people to have their mugshots removed from the site through a companion site, Unpublisharrest.com.

Assuming the arrest warrant is fairly stating things, the site’s operators may not have had the best of intentions in running their site the way they did. According to the facts alleged they were more interested in making money by charging people to have their pictures removed from their site than in serving as any sort of public records archive.

But it shouldn’t matter why they pursued the editorial policy that they did. First of all, mugshots are generally public records, and for good reason. As South Dakota’s attorney general Mark Jackley noted last year, when South Dakota declared them to be public records:

“The release of criminal booking photographs to the public will result in greater transparency in the criminal process, enhance public safety, and will further assist the media and the public in the proper identification of individuals in the criminal process.”

People are ordinarily allowed to share public records on their websites, just as they may share any other lawful information. People are also free to be arbitrary and capricious in how they choose what information to share. They are even free to be financially motivated in making those decisions.

But according to authorities in California, if the decision on what information to share is linked to a profit incentive (from the arrest warrant: “The motive behind posting the damaging material is financial gain.”), and that information is a mugshot, you go to jail. In the case of the Mugshots.com operators, authorities have predicated their arrest on some alarming statutory language:

As of January 1, 2015, California Civil Code Section 1798.91 .1, Subdivision makes it unlawful for any person engaged in publishing or otherwise disseminating a booking photograph through a print or electronic medium to solicit, require, or accept the payment of a fee or other consideration from a subject individual to remove, correct, modify, or to refrain from publishing or otherwise disseminating that booking photograph. By posting the booking photograph online, and requiring a fee to have it removed, the owners and operators of Mugshots.com and Unpublisharrest.com are operating their websites for an unlawful purpose.

In addition, the authorities construed what the operators of Mugshots.com did as identity theft:

California Penal Code Section 530.5 defines identify theft, stating: “Every person who willfully obtains personal identifying information . . . of another person, and uses that information for any unlawful purpose. . . without the consent of that person, is guilty of a public offense. Section 530.55 identifies a ‘person’ as a natural person, firm, company, corporation or any other legal entity. The section defines ‘personal identifying information’ as any ‘name, address . . . or other unique physical representation.’ Because Mugshots.com and Unpublisharrest.com have used, and continue to use, the booking photographs and PII of individuals for purposes of selling the service of removing the photographs and information, the owners are in violation of California Penal Code Section 530.5, identity theft, a felony.”

Taken together, the arrest warrant concludes, the site operators are guilty of extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion. But to prove extortion prosecutors must show that the accused threatened a victim either with violence, the accusation of a crime, or the exposure of a secret, if they didn’t pay the accused. Yet the defendants are accused of none of these things. Not only is there no issue of threatened violence, but what the site operators are alleged to have done in no way involves revealing a secret or accusing another of a crime. Instead it is the state that has already accused the site operators’ purported “victims” of a crime, and its having done so is no secret. The state’s accusation against these people became public when it originally released the mugshots, meaning there is nothing that the site operators could have been threatening to reveal that wasn’t already revealed.

This apparently sloppy reading of the extortion statute, compounded with the 2015 statutory language giving mugshots a sort of magical status that prevents them from being treated as an ordinary public record, represents a chilling incursion on protected First Amendment activity. It’s one thing to impose liability for publishing content that isn’t lawful, perhaps because it’s defamatory, infringing, or somehow intrinsically wrongful unto itself. But it’s another thing entirely to impose liability for publishing content that is entirely lawful – especially, as in this case, when it is not only lawful but a public record.

California authorities would likely argue that the prosecution is not about liability for speech, but liability arising from the decisions about what speech got spoken. (Or, more particular to this case, remained spoken, for the state is not prosecuting the site operators for having posted the mugshots in the first place.) But this is a distinction without a difference. Indeed, decisions about what we choose to say can be as expressive as anything we actually do say. The government ordinarily does not get to come in and force us to make those decisions in any particular way. Freedom of expression means that we are at liberty to decide what to say, and then what not to say, for whatever reason we might decide. Even when these expressive choices are guided by a profit motive.

Were that not the case, think of how chilling it would be to profit-driven news media if their editorial decisions had to be free from any financial concern in order to retain First Amendment protection. Even in terms of mugshots themselves, think about how chilling it would be if others could not freely use them to tell us about the world around us, if there was money to be made in the process. As case in point, the very same week the arrest warrant was used to extradite the site operators back to California, the New York Times ran a story about the efforts of journalist and photographer Eric Etheridge to document the lives of Freedom Riders.

Among the important artifacts of this historic campaign are more than 300 mug shots taken of the Freedom Riders in Jackson, now the subject of “Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders” (Vanderbilt University Press). In it, the journalist and photographer Eric Etheridge provides visual and oral histories of these courageous men and women, juxtaposing vintage mug shots with short biographies, interviews and contemporary portraits. Originally published in 2008, this expanded edition, with updated profiles and additional portraits…

It is a book that is for sale, so it would seem there is a profit motive somewhere. But consider whether this important historical work could be released if authorities in California – or, perhaps more saliently, in Mississippi, where the mugshots are from – could scrutinize the expressive decisions that went into the book’s use of the pictures because it profited from that use.

Yet that’s what the California authorities have decided they are entitled to do with the Mugshots.com site. The arrest warrant is dismissive towards the free speech interests of the site’s operators, accusing them of “using freedom of speech theories in justifying the activity.” Of course, that’s what the First Amendment is for, to protect expressive activities that authorities do not like. And authorities really don’t like what happened here.

As noted above, the optics in this case are not great. People felt desperate to have their mugshots removed from the Internet, and the site operators profited from that desperation. It feels criminal, but just because they may have had nefarious intent does not mean that they committed a crime. Just reading about the arrest brought to mind the Monty Python sketch where a bunch of gangsters connived a devious plot to go to a jeweler’s to obtain an expensive watch – that they paid for.

Sure, it looks like they are up to no good, but to determine whether a crime has been committed we can’t just consider how it looks. We have to look closely at the underlying lawfulness of the activity, not the optics surrounding it, and for the very same reason that California authorities are now interested in policing the use of mugshots: to prevent unwarranted inferences of criminal culpability. As the New York Times wrote about the Freedom Riders book:

If these mug shots inadvertently captured the humanity and special qualities of their principled subjects, as Mr. Etheridge observed, their intention was nefarious: to publicly impugn and humiliate people whose only crime was to advocate equality through peaceful protest. No matter their purpose, mug shots inevitably imply aberrance or delinquency, whether or not the people they depict are eventually found to be guilty.

But that’s what the California prosecutors have done: impute “aberrance or delinquency” to draw unwarranted inferences about criminal culpability from an act that the law cannot constitutionally criminalize. This inference has already been used to strip the site operators of their constitutional right to express themselves anonymously due to at least three search warrants that were served on their service providers. These warrants were issued upon probable cause, but the only probable cause that can be construed here is that the site operators engaged in expressive activity authorities did not like. Efforts by these authorities to now extradite, further prosecute, and potentially leave the site operators vulnerable to civil damages should not be cheered by anyone who might prefer not to experience the same as a result of their own lawful expression.

Filed Under: california, editorial choices, extortion, first amendment, free speech, mugshots, public records
Companies: mugshots.com