Posted on 12/16/2002 11:41:20 PM PST by JohnHuang2
SALINA, Kan. – Family snapshots of a 3-year-old daughter playing in a back-yard kiddie pool and in a living room prompted Wal-Mart photo clerks in this Midwestern town to call police, according to the Salina Journal.
The crime? Frequent shopper Tamie Dragone said one picture shows her little girl in the pool without a shirt and the other shows her naked bottom as she lay on the floor.
After paying for the prints at the one-hour processing desk Sept. 3, Dragone was shopping in another area of the store when a uniformed police officer approached. She and her children were escorted past other customers to the manager's office where she was detained and questioned for about 45 minutes. Dragone eventually was allowed to leave but without the pictures.
Now she is suing Wal-Mart for humiliation and invasion of privacy, asking for more than $75,000 in actual damages, plus an unspecified amount of punitive damages.
Dragone insists there was nothing inappropriate about the photos.
"This was a child being a child," she said. "This is not like taking nude pictures of a 10-year-old. They totally invaded my privacy, and they made me feel like a criminal."
After reviewing the case and the photographs, Saline County Attorney Ellen Mitchell said she declined to file criminal charges.
Wal-Mart's company policy, which is stricter than state law on child exploitation, does not allow print pictures of any male or female in a state of undress that would be forbidden on a public street, the Journal reported. Kansas bans possession of photos or other visual media that depict sexually explicit conduct by children under 18 years old.
"In a case where child pornography or abuse is suspected, the photos are brought to the attention of the store management and a determination is made to contact law enforcement," said Cynthia Illick, corporate spokeswoman for Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Ark. "We always err on the side of safety when it comes to children."
A spokesman for the Walgreen drug store chain in Deerfield, Ill., said photo clerks are told to bring suspicious photos to the attention of the store manager. Several people must come to the same conclusion before the police are called, said Michael Polzin.
Photo labs also say they have strict rules governing customer privacy, but as the San Francisco Chronicle noted in a Feb. 11, 2001, story, not all photo clerks are trustworthy.
Wal-Mart was sued a few years ago by two female Moorehead State University students in Minnesota who were photographed joking around in the shower while on vacation. The local Wal-Mart refused to develop the picture, but the women later learned that it had been processed anyway and passed around campus.
The Minnesota Supreme Court issued a landmark 1998 ruling allowing the women to sue for privacy violation. The next year a jury ruled their privacy had been violated but it did not award damages against Wal-Mart because the photo clerk was never named in the suit.
The case, however, was seen as a moral victory by some legal experts because it recognized a claim for invasion of privacy. Others thought it went too far.
"The law protects a reasonable expectation of privacy," said privacy expert Eric Jorstad, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. "But the question is raised whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy" when you drop your film off to be developed.
The Chronicle also recounted the 1993 case of a Phoenix woman whose sexually explicit photos of herself were circulated at a local bar where her ex-boyfriend happened to be a bartender. Kathleen Harmon sued for privacy invasion and her case was settled out of court.
Harmon's attorney, Richard Groves, who has handled another similar case, said it is common for rogue photo clerks to pass around photos and even collect them in scrapbooks. The clerks who view every picture that comes in for developing often are transient high school and college students earning pocket money, the Chronicle said.
Wal-Mart also was sued in 1999 when a 21-year-old nursing student and aspiring model discovered that a photo clerk had passed topless photos of her around the Southern University campus in Baton Rouge. A judge ruled that Wal-Mart had to pay $7,500 to Leah Coleman Mouton.
Mouton's attorney, Jack Dampf, said he thinks many more photo clerks dip into the prints than ever show up in court.
"My guess is that a lot of these cases are settled out of court because people are embarrassed," he said. "They don't want people to know what was in the pictures."
I suspect thats an inaccurate statement as NYS law allows women to be top free.
Good for her! My parents had "blackmail" photos of me as a toddler in our backyard pool. It did keep me in-line, for a while...well, until I met Mulder. lol ;-)
Puerto Rico: Yauco man held on rape, exploitation charges
He must have had a customer real anxious to receive these photos.
LOL!
Speaking of "blackmail photos", you did burn the ones you took of me, right? ;-)
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