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Caroline Wimmer was brutally murdered by Calvin Lawson on March 28, 2009, “over allegations that she’d told his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, that he was cheating on her with another woman.”  She was beaten and then strangled with a hair dryer cord.  When the EMT, Mark Musarella, showed up at the scene, he used his Blackberry to take a photo of Ms. Wimmer’s corpse.  He later posted that photo to Facebook (he claims accidentally).  The family is distraught, even two years after their daughter was murdered.

“I’m just very upset and traumatized over all this,” said Mrs. Wimmer, of Rosebank, fighting back tears on the steps of state Supreme Court, St. George. “I haven’t had a chance to heal yet. This is the second anniversary. We really need to improve our laws in New York. … My daughter’s picture was on the Internet and I can’t get it back.”

“To know those pictures are on Facebook for anyone to see kills me,” said Christina Criscitiello, the victim’s older sister, her voice cracking. “She was brutally beaten. I feel like Mark Musarella took the last shred of dignity she had left. I can’t get those images out of my head. and I don’t want anybody else to see them.”

Musarella was later fired and charged with official misconduct and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.  He pled guilty and performed 200 hours of community service and had his EMT license taken away.  His official misconduct charge was vacated, so only his disorderly conduct charge is on his permanent record.

The family is now suing pretty much everyone involved, which brings up some very interesting legal issues.  The family’s attorney believes that Facebook does not have any financial liability:

The Wimmers’ lawyer, Ravi Batra of Manhattan, said federal law provides Facebook “absolute immunity” as a “supposed … nonprofit community bulletin board” from being sued for cash compensation.

This law was created to prevent website owners from being sued for content their members post, as the bulletin boards are simply methods for individuals to release information.  One can sue the poster, but not the medium.  I fully support this part of the law, assuming there are exceptions that revoke this immunity if a company willfully continues to host an image that should be taken down.

The family also wants Facebook to delete all of the images and provide them with a list of all of the users who accessed the photos while they were online.  They also want Facebook to change it’s policies.  Says their attorney:

Batra, the lawyer, said Facebook needs to more closely monitor the images users post and that stricter laws must be crafted regarding photo postings. The Wimmers contend the social networking giant is valued at $50 billion and has more than 600 million active users.

“If they’re uploading 10 million pictures a month, they need more screeners,” he said. “We need future victims, if there are any, to [be able to] hold Facebook accountable.”

The problem with the attorney’s argument is that over 2.5 BILLION images are uploaded to Facebook each month, not the 10 million he claims.  In fact, there are 960 photos uploaded to Facebook every single second.  The attorney’s figure is reached in 3 hours, not an entire month.  And those are stats from 2009!  It’s likely even higher today, as Facebook has grown by about 200m people since 2009.  It’s physically impossible for Facebook to manually screen the images that are uploaded to their servers.

They could implement some sort of “dead body recognition algorithm” but I don’t think that’s feasible either.  Facebook’s current system of asking users to flag pictures that are inappropriate works fairly well.  I do agree it could be improved upon, but it’s not reasonable to ask Facebook to monitor every single image that’s uploaded.

The case also raised the issue of how someone charged with official misconduct for posting a photo of a dead person on Facebook should be punished:

Tomorrow, [the family] will join state Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D-Mid-Island) and the rest of the borough’s Albany delegation to announce the introduction of a bill that would raise the criminal classification of official misconduct to a Class E felony.

Currently, official misconduct is a misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. A Class E felony is punishable by up to one and a third to four years in prison.

“It’s sad we have to do this, but the law has to catch up with modern technology,” Ms. Savino said yesterday in a telephone interview. “We don’t want families victimized twice.”

I think that we need to take a step back before changing the law just for official misconduct and see if we should make a law making posting a photo of a deceased person on the Internet, without the family’s permission, illegal.  There are laws against mutilating a corpse and I’d argue that posting a photo online is the digital equivalent.  States should pass laws that set a standard for how this behavior will be punished, and hopefully raise awareness that posting photos of deceased people is extremely hurtful to the family.  I can see a nursing home worker posting a picture of a deceased person on Facebook (in fact, I bet it’s already happened).

As our society moves forward and technology becomes an even bigger part, we need to create rules and social norms that show what is acceptable and what is not.  Clearly posting photos of a murder victim crosses the line completely.  I’d make posting the photo of a murder victim online punishable by 30 days in jail and a big fine, with escalators for longer jail terms if it’s done maliciously.

It’s sad that we need to cross this bridge, but in the age of social media and instant sharing, it’s a needed step forward.

Tags:

caroline wimmer · dead body on facebook · digital death · digital death laws · facebook corpse · facebook death · mark musarella · social networking death · social networking issues