Who “owns” the rights to the sometimes gruesome photographs of murder and crime scenes? The opinion in Marsh v. County of San Diego by Chief Judge Kozinski and joined by Judges Paez and Wardlaw involves a claim by a mother that her Due Process rights were violated when a prosecutor investigating the death of her 2-year old son copied autopsy photographs of her son and then disclosed one of the photos to a newspaper. “Given the viral nature of the Internet,” the court concludes, the effort to publish the autopsy photo was an “intrusion into the grief of a mother over her dead son” that shocks the conscience and therefore violates the mother’s right to substantive due process.” “ The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was first reported by Howard Bashman in How Appealing.
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