Photographer fights in court to protect rights
Mr Miller is a Miami-based multimedia journalist who has been caught in a dispute with the city’s police for almost two years now.
On February 20th 2007, he took a photo of five police officers. He was standing on a public road at the time. An altercation followed, and Mr Miller ended up on the ground, under arrest, and threatened with a taser.
What followed was 16 hours in jail, and 16 months (or more) of legal argument in court. Mr Miller was found not guilty of disobeying a police officer and of disorderly conduct, but guilty of resisting arrest without violence. Mr Miller has since appealed that conviction.
All this aside, Mr Miller is still taking photos of police officers and is defiant about one very important thing: he has not, he maintains, done anything illegal at any point. Taking photos of people in a public place is not a crime.
A judge criticized Mr Miller for his “lack of remorse”, but Miller’s response is well put:
“I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I will not show remorse for doing something that is 100 percent legal. And any judge worth his cloak should not expect a defendant to show remorse, especially when he had just been acquitted of most of the charges against him. I was not remorseful after my first arrest and I am not remorseful after my second arrest.”
The right to take photos is also in the news over in the UK, where a recent incident in London saw professional architecture photographer Grant Smith was reported to police by security guards at a bank – simply because he was taking pictures of the church next door.
Not all photographers are going to be as strident in their views as Carlos Miller, and not all photographers who get pulled up by police officers are going to have a portfolio like Smith’s to support their case. But all of us need to be aware that this problem is ongoing. All of us need to know the law, and calmly request what part of it we are breaking if and when we get stopped.
Image © © Antonis Papantoniou.
