By Kate Linderman
It’s common to see someone’s mugshot during the crime report on the local evening news. Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, I have distinct memories of watching KOLN’s crime reports as a young child — mugshots always displayed. Today I went to KOLN’s website, and it didn’t take long to find another mugshot on their website published just a few hours earlier.
In the last couple years, journalists have asked whether or not it is ethical to publish someone’s mugshot, especially after arrest and prior to conviction. The criminal justice system in the United States uses the presumption of innocence principle, meaning a person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty, however, the common news consumer is most likely to associate guilt with the mugshot, depicting the pictured in a more humiliating matter compared to sharing other identifying characteristics such as name, age, physical description, location of alleged offense and/or arrest and any past offenses.
It can be argued that removing mugshots from the media closes a door on transparency and that the public has the right to know who the arrested person is and if they recognize them. While removing a photo provides less context compared to a description, the arrested person is either still detained or, if released, is not considered a threat to the general public.
And these mugshots, whether or not the person is eventually deemed innocent or guilty by the system, have a lasting effect years later. The Marshall Project published an article discussing this issue back in 2020. The author, Keri Blakinger, had a personal connection.
“In 2010, I was arrested with heroin and still sitting in jail when my own “faces of meth”-style mugshot began spreading across the internet, from the Huffington Post to Gawker to the Ithaca Journal,” she wrote. “I didn’t like it; I was struggling with drug addiction and the entire internet seemed to be making fun of my appearance. But I didn’t fault the news organizations. I knew I’d screwed up, and mugshots seemed like an unchangeable part of the media landscape.”
Since Blakinger’s arrest in 2010, the then “unchangeable” standard for publishing mugshots has changed at some publications including The Houston Chronicle during Blakinger’s time as an employee. The Associated Press did not entirely stop publishing mugshots, but they no longer release mugshots and suspect names in minor crime stories.
The practice of publishing mugshots is old, yet the ethical discussion around them is new and more media outlets may change this once-traditional standard. It is something Blakinger, once the subject of a published mug shot, would applaud.
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