11/30/2023 0 Comments Up skirt pictureOne saw a 12-year-old girl convicted and sentenced to a year’s probation for taking a surreptitious photograph of a classmate in a school dressing-room, though the image did not show nudity and was swiftly deleted. After another appeals court declared the statute unconstitutional last year, the Bexar County district attorney’s office issued a press release titled “Cover up while we appeal!”Īt least 151 inappropriate photography cases have been filed in the Houston area alone since the law’s introduction in 2001, the Houston Chronicle reported. Thompson was indicted by a grand jury on 26 felony counts of improper photography. Presiding judge Sharon Keller wrote in the court’s opinion published on Wednesday: “Protecting someone who appears in public from being the object of sexual thoughts seems to be the sort of ‘paternalistic interest in regulating the defendant’s mind’ that the First Amendment was designed to guard against.” The judges said that photographs were “inherently expressive”, like other artistic mediums such as films or books, and so the process of creating them, as well as the images themselves, was part of an American’s right to free speech because “thought is intertwined with expression”.ĭebjani Roy, deputy director of Hollaback!, a New York-based anti-street harassment group, told the Guardian it is “a huge violation and absolutely appalling that the rights of predators are being valued over the rights of women and girls.” The appeals judges appeared to agree, stating that although “upskirt” type-images are intolerable invasions of privacy, the wording of the law is too broad. Prosecuting lawyers argued that the constitutional right to free speech, which includes taking public photographs, should not be a factor because photography is essentially a technical recording process and that attempted lawbreakers should not be able to hide behind free-speech protections.Īttorneys for Thompson said that the statute was “the stuff of Orwellian thought-crime” and that it did not distinguish “upskirt” or “peeping Tom” photography from “merely photographing a girl in a skirt walking down the street”, so in theory it could criminalise the likes of paparazzi journalists. The local district attorney’s office said that he tried to delete the photographs before his camera was seized and a police examination of it revealed 73 images of children in swimsuits “with most of the photographs targeting the children’s breast and buttocks areas”. The case stemmed from the arrest of a man in his early 50s named Ronald Thompson who was stopped in 2011 at Sea World in San Antonio after parents reported him swimming with and taking pictures of children aged 3-11.
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