Meredith Emerson’s Case Ignites Debate
Emerson’s case proved not only a tragic one of a hiker who was abducted and murdered, but in March 2010, it began to gain attention in a national debate pitting freedom of the press against victims’ rights when a reporter from Hustler magazine requested crime scene photos of Emerson’s decapitated nude body.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) refused the magazine’s open-records request, but Hustler appealed. In March 2010, a judge with the Georgia Superior Court granted Emerson’s family a temporary restraining order preventing the GBI from releasing any images that showed Emerson unclothed or dismembered. DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Dan Coursey said at the time that turning over the photos to Hustler would cause "irreparable harm." Then-Senator Bill Hamrick deemed releasing the images “an unquestionable offense to Meredith and to her family.”
The Georgia bill, known as The Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act, exempts specific types of graphic images from inclusion in the state’s open records law, yet allows law enforcement officers, attorneys and credentialed reporters to view the crime scene photos and videos at GBI headquarters, though they are not allowed to duplicate them.
“There’s a constant push and pull between freedom of the press and victims’ rights,” John Acevedo, professor of practice at Emory University's law school, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “This is not a new controversy, but the Supreme Court has for years erred in favor of newspapers.”
Acevedo believes the proliferation of TV shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted, wall-to-wall coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and access to the internet ignited public interest in true crime—and crime scene photos—while social media, TikTok videos and even police body cam footage have fanned the flame and raised privacy issues. “This Georgia law is really giving the power to the victims’ families on what can and cannot be released,” he says.
Historically speaking, Acevedo notes that newspaper photos have tended to be grainy and blurry, but today, people get their news online or on television more frequently than they do from a newspaper. Even cell phone photos have more clarity and detail than one might find in a newspaper. “The proliferation of graphic imagery has always been there, but now it's much easier to transmit and harder to avoid,” he says.
The Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act stands out because it gives victims and their families the power to decide where crime scene and autopsy photos can be seen. In recent years, Acevedo notes, some survivors of school shootings—or victims’ families—have advocated to have crime scene photos released to shock the public into understanding how violent and gruesome mass shootings truly are. These instances are akin to when Emmett Till’s mom, Mamie, had images of her ravaged 14-year-old son printed in Jet magazine in 1955 so the public could see the damage of his alleged lynching.
However, others in similar situations prefer the images are kept private. In 2013, Connecticut passed a similar bill to Emerson’s to bar the release of photos of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. These acts makes it possible for victims and victims’ families in Georgia to take control of those images.
“What we see in the new laws is this power being given to the families,” says Acevedo, who is also a legal historian. “We are in a moment where societal standards are in massive flux, but if we go way back to the medieval Europe, or even early modern North America and Europe, the family was the one responsible for prosecuting the crime. Then we swung the pendulum all the way to the state. I think what we're seeing now is a slight readjustment back to allow victims some say, once again, to the process.”
Support for Victims’ Rights
Acevedo points out that the modern notion of victims’ rights only dates back to the late 20th century. “Before that period, cases were between the state and the defendant and victims had really little to no say. They didn't usually appear in court unless they were alive,” he says, adding that families of murder victims, like Emerson’s family, wouldn’t have any voice in the most cases.
The idea of victim impact statements didn’t arise until the late 1970s.
“There’s been a very rapid change in society on several fronts,” Acevedo explains. “One is victims' rights—from them having no say and not being allowed to appear to giving victim impact statements, to being allowed to appear at parole hearings or send in written statements for parole hearings. And now have a say, in some states, about releasing photographs of loved ones to the media.”
Still, First Amendment lawyers will argue that censoring crime scene photos like Emerson’s infringes on free speech. “If you look at a picture of a Sudanese kid starving to death, or people dying in Haiti, those are invasions of privacy. Pictures of people alive in tortuous situations in some other country are just as bad as pictures of disfigured corpses in the United States," New York attorney Martin Garbus told CNN in 2010. He stated that while the photo of Emerson “are awful,” so are images of “people in wars, soldiers fighting or the victims of wars.” "I don't think there should be any kind of censorship because of awfulness," Garbus concluded.
How well the Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act will stand up against arguments promoting freedom of the press has yet to be seen.
“It will be interesting to see how the court balances the First Amendment interests of newspapers and the public with the privacy interests of victims' families,” Acevedo says. “Very likely, what we'll probably see is a compromise like as long as the person’s face is obscured, or it’s requested for a legitimate news source, it will be allowed. It's hard to tell since the courts are in flux right now and our ideas of what counts as speech are a bit in flux, too.”
