C. Ryan Barber writes:
Famed civil rights activists. Notorious gangsters and the Kennedy assassins. A former football star whose murder trial continues to transfix the country. An ex-Stanford swimmer whose six-month sentence for sexual assault drew nationwide attention.
As a whole, the group shares little in common. But this week, lawyers for some of the nation’s leading news organizations found a common thread connecting Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the likes of John Dillinger and Al Capone, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, O.J. Simpson and Brock Turner.
Each was arrested—a shared experience memorialized in a mug shot—at least once.
In an amicus brief filed Wednesday in the U.S. Supreme Court, these booking photographs were juxtaposed to prove a point: That the images have a historical value, building an understanding of the context behind arrests, and should be widely available to the public.
Read more on Law.com.
Related: SCOTUSblog’s page on Detroit Free Press v. Department of Justice.