The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office’s practice of posting mug shots online is unconstitutional. The ruling stemmed from a case involving an Arizona man, Brian Houston, who was arrested for assault in 2022. His mug shot was posted online for three days, as was the department’s practice. But, the charges against him were dropped. He never went to trial.
Houston's lawyers argued in court that the posting of his mug shot — including his name, birthdate, sex, weight, height — even hair and eye color — caused him public humiliation. The appeals court said that posting the mug shot violated Houston’s right to due process. Detainees are supposed to be presumed innocent until they’re found guilty.
The decision is about the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, but, it could have far-reaching implications for departments across the country. In Arizona, the Arizona Republic reported, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and some other Arizona counties have already stopped the practice.
Keri Blakinger, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, has written about the debate over mug shots before, and is the author of "Corrections in Ink," a memoir about her own time in prison and what led her there.
Full conversation
KERI BLAKINGER: I think that a lot of the reason we're seeing some of this change is that people have started in recent years, just rethinking the role of journalism. But also I think rethinking how we view the legal system. I think there's been a lot of sort of progressive changes in recent years that have caused a sort of broader rethinking. And I think some of this is the result of Black Lives Matter and the impact of that is had. And I think that some of it is just, you know, sort of large-scale sea changes.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So let's talk about mug shots in particular and posting them online. The argument for releasing mug shots, like, seems pretty obvious, like if you need to find a suspect or a missing person, something like that. But other than that, like, what is the public safety interest in releasing mug shots?
BLAKINGER: Well, I mean, it's really hard to sort of pin down what safety interests there would be other than those specific situations that you mentioned. I mean, I think law enforcement frequently pivot to, "Oh, well, we might need them if there's a dangerous suspect on the loose." And typically in states where they have or municipalities where they have regulated or tried to dial back when they're releasing these, they've often still allowed exceptions for that specific scenario.
But other than that, there typically isn't an easy to define clear public safety purpose. Sometimes I've seen law enforcement say that this is a deterrent, but there's no real evidence that posting mug shots is any kind of deterrent.
GILGER: So talk about then the other side of this, which is what it can do to people's lives and what we've seen it do to people's lives in several cases, like the one you wrote about years ago and like the one happening in Arizona now.
BLAKINGER: I mean, I think that people still inherently sort of view mug shots as some sort of implied presumption of guilt. You know, you don't look at a mug shot and think, "Oh, that person's innocent." So I think that they end up being stigmatizing and they end up being stigmatizing for a very long time.
You know, even if you are eventually found guilty and you are punished to some amount of time in jail or prison, that ends. The mug shot continues forever, and people can use that against you. It can end up making it harder to restart your life, to reintegrate with society, to go to school, to get a job.
It can make all of these things that we should actually want people to be doing if they've been involved in the legal system, like all the things that we should want people to be doing, it makes it harder for them to do those things.
GILGER: So tell us about your own experience with this, right? Because you've written about that before. You wrote a book about your experience in prison. But tell us about, you know, when you saw your own mug shot and what that was like.
BLAKINGER: I mean, I got arrested in 2010 on a drug charge, and I was extremely high at the time. I looked like someone on drugs. I looked like a faces-of-meth-type mug shot. And this mug shot, you know, was very broadly distributed. And at the time, it was such a gut punch to see it to see that as the way that the world would know me.
And eventually I did my time, I got out, I became a journalist. I went down a different path, and I managed to do that. Despite my mug shot being public, I've been very lucky in being able to start over in a way that a lot of people who have had brushes with the legal system don't.
But I still know when I look at a mug shot like that, that is a very stigmatizing effect. I mean, I think when you spread in my instance, the sort of faces-of-meth-type, image that is stigmatizing to lots of people that are struggling with addiction. Not just me, the person shown in that mug shot.
GILGER: Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. So I want to talk a little bit about the way this is changing. Like you mentioned in your reporting, lots of jurisdictions around the country, including some federal agencies that do not release mug shots, may some who maybe never have and others who, who have stopped for kind of these exact reasons without legal action. You say this is part of sort of a broader change in how we view the legal system and policy changes within it. But talk a little bit about why some of those law enforcement agencies don't do this.
BLAKINGER: So in some cases, we don't know, they don't always specify. But in a lot of cases, I think as they've started to pay attention to the broader discussions about this, some have simply just changed policies on their own. Like in Houston, the Harris County Sheriff's Office had decided they were not going to just routinely make them available. And I think Newark, New Jersey, also had decided they were not going to publish them and, and there's several places that have done this voluntarily.
There's also a few states that have started to regulate the ways in which law enforcement can publicly post these things. Like California had a law take effect recently that agencies can't post them on social media anymore. And Florida already had a law that would require these sort of mug shot sites to take them down if asked. Louisiana had banned them, though that law has been challenged some, and I don't know what the status of that is at the moment. And then I think New York had made some restrictions. West Virginia has considered it. New Jersey has at least considered it.
So it's kind of interesting in that it's across — those are some blue states and some red states that have considered taking action to rein this in. But it is still across the country, mostly in individual agencies making this decision based on, you know, realizing that maybe there isn't a specific public safety goal or a specific public safety value, unless you're talking about those rare situations where there's a dangerous suspect on the loose.
GILGER: Is there a racial bias aspect to this as well?
BLAKINGER: Yeah, I think this has been part of why this has been an issue that has gotten more traction in recent years. And we started thinking and talking more about racial bias that is baked into the system. And, you know, we know by a lot of metrics that communities of color are often more heavily policed and, you know, people in communities of color end up more likely to be involved in the system and more likely to be having mug shots taken. Because of the ways that we've already mentioned in which mug shots can be sort of inherently stigmatizing, and it can make it really hard to start over or to get a job, go to school, make a good life for yourself, publishing mug shots making them extremely can have a very disproportionate racial impact.
GILGER: Let me ask you lastly about this appeals court decision which affects, you know, Arizona agencies. We've already seen several here in the state say, OK, we're going to stop doing this, at least for the time being. Do you think a decision like that could have broader implications around the country? It is first of its kind.
BLAKINGER: Yeah, I think it will be interesting to see if lawyers in other parts of the country start trying to bring similar cases with similar arguments to see if they can convince courts elsewhere to, you know, come to similar conclusions. I mean, this is in the 9th Circuit, which I think is going to be much more friendly to some of these issues than if somebody tries this in say the 5th Circuit, which is Texas, Louisiana and part of Mississippi.
So, I mean, I don't know that it would be possible to see this sort of successful outcome on a case like this across the country, but there's probably some jurisdictions where they could. And there's probably some agencies that are going to see the writing on the wall and change their behavior even if they're not in the same state.
