Some NC lawmakers want to limit mug shot websites, allow for photos’ removal
A proposal that would require some websites to remove people’s booking mug shots has a future in the General Assembly even as a legislation deadline passes, according to the lawmaker who filed it.
Thursday is North Carolina’s crossover deadline, the day when legislation has to move from one chamber to the next. House Bill 446 went to the rules committee on March 20, where it has stayed since.
Even though lawmakers in the Republican General Assembly majority aren’t advancing the bill, one Democratic lawmaker said he’ll keep pushing for the idea.
“We’ve been having very positive discussions about moving this forward outside the crossover structure,” said Rep. Terry Brown, a Democrat from Mecklenburg County who co-sponsored the bill.
There could be a study done, for example, he said.
The bill would require “publish-for-pay” websites that make money off mug shots to remove them when someone requests it. Failure to take them down would make the publisher liable in civil court.
Police could not give a mug shot of someone before a trial to those websites either. They could still post mug shots on their own websites and apps.
State senators — three Republicans and a Democrat — filed a similar bill in their chamber in February, but it also stopped at the rules committee.
Reasons for the bill
“Everybody is innocent until proven guilty, but there are a lot of companies that make a lot of money by charging people to remove those mug shots from websites,” Brown said.
Someone might be arrested, have their mug shot taken, see that mug shot published online and struggle to get a job years later, he said. They might have to pay a website to take it down.
Some of those people were never convicted, he noted.
Law enforcement agencies take mug shots when booking suspects into jail, hence why they are more formally called booking photographs. For decades, tabloids, newspapers and television news websites have published them. WCCB in Charlotte still publishes them regularly, for example.
But the ethics around mug shots have been questioned in journalism circles more recently. The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer rarely publish them, making exceptions when a government employee is arrested for a notable crime, for example, or when there’s a public safety threat.
Prison photographs and those taken for sex offender registries serve a different kind of purpose, said Kristie Puckett, a lobbyist and senior project manager for Durham-based Forward Justice. Mug shots being published pre-trial is the source of the concern, she said.
“Why would we want to impact people’s lives in such negative ways when we’re not even sure if what they’ve been accused of is what they’ve actually done?”
Lawmakers considered a similar bill in 2021 but didn’t pass it.
Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.