Source: lakeconews.com 9/19/24
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — A federal court ruling handed down earlier this month has resulted in changes to inmate and arrest information posted on the Lake County Sheriff’s Office website.
The Houston V. Maricopa County ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court led to the sheriff’s office temporarily disabling its “recent arrests” and “in custody” online tools on its website at www.lakesheriff.com.
The Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously that Maricopa County, Arizona’s practice of posting photographs of arrestees — which is common across the United States — is not constitutionally permissible because it amounts to punishment.
“The state may not punish pretrial detainees without an adjudication of guilt,” said the decision, which overturned a lower court’s dismissal of the case.
The federal Houston case is now having a ripple effect across the country, including here in Lake County.
“County counsel gave us direction on making the decision to disable the current system due to the fact that we can’t share compliant information without displaying booking photos,” said Lauren Berlinn, the Lake County Sheriff’s public information officer.
For about 20 years, the Lake County Sheriff’s website has featured mugshots and detailed arrest logs.
Berlinn said the agency has launched a new tool called Citizen RIMS to display recent arrests and in custody information that remains under compliance with all regulations resulting from the court decision.
On Tuesday morning, the in-custody information was once more live at https://www.lakecountyca.gov/953/In-Custody. At that point the arrests page was still disabled. However, by Wednesday it was reestablished with the Citizen RIMS format.
The Citizen RIMS tool includes full names, ages, genders, race, height and weight, hair and eye color, build, complexion, booking numbers and booking dates. It includes the arresting agency, date, location and bail, and the counts for which they were arrested.
Information that is no longer offered includes birthdates, birth place and current city of residence, arresting officer and the arrestee’s next date in court.
Most notably, the website now does not show mugshots.
“The State may not punish pretrial detainees without an adjudication of guilt.”
Questions: How is this “Punishment” and why? What specific reality comes into being that transforms the State’s “Attempt to inform” into Punishment? How does an “Adjudication of guilt” modify this?
An Adjudication transforms the “punishment” back into “information”? How? If exposing their arrest to the general public is punishment, how is exposing their conviction not? The above statement suggests that it remains punishment, but the adjudication makes the punishment acceptable.
The answers to these questions do not apply to the ML Website, how and why? How is the ML Website’s implication that all on it are “frightening and High Risks” of future crimes for which they have neither been adjudicated, nor arrested for, not punishment? How is the State’s suggestion that all should presume they will be guilty of a crimes that has not even occurred, not punishment?
Another question: Why after decades of LE doing this all over the country, is this now popping up in Federal Courts? Can’t say for sure, but it smells like J6 to me.
So mugshots = unconstitutional violation of privacy
Megan’s Law = constitutional
despite all the information on the mugshots are also available on the Megan’s Law website and the Megan’s Law website includes a lot more information not found on the mugshots. The cognitive dissonance of the government is breath taking and dizzying.
Another hurdle jumped by ACSOL…Thank you.
So this is deeming mugshots as punishment, where historically they’ve insisted the public registry is administrative. At minimum this should give ammunition for the public registry to be considered punishment and therefore unconstitutional at least for everyone who has completed their sentence.
Anyone think the court would rule the same if what was posted was an copy/paste of a erroneous record by mugshots.com? There would be no “Adjudication of guilt” if the publishing by a citizen was error prone due to a mistake in the record. How would the extortionists get around that?