Much discussion around Trump’s indictment focused on Whether The former president’s mug photo will be taken and released to the public. Such attention to a relatively routine part of criminal procedure reflects the extent to which Americans appreciate the cup, a contemporary digital artifact that causes intense embarrassment to most people. , but for Trump, could serve his agenda. What often leaves others powerless in the digital sanctions ecosystem could actually help Trump regain control of his indictment.
We love the cup shots. Those images are symbols of sinful people in society, law breakers, and arouse our hearts. voyeuristic trend by providing a glimpse into the often opaque workings of the criminal justice system—and once published, they are often used to make a profit through extortion and clickbait.
The mug shots are cheap to get through basic web search or Freedom of Information Act requirements, but can be hugely profitable for third parties to source and repost them. .
Several decades of digitization—and the next bend of the law of transparency for instant mass disclosure and instant availability of mug shots—created a new source of revenue for newspaper websites Post mug shot galleryand even promoted an online extortion scheme in which shady websites charge objects for money exorbitant fees to take down.
Cup photos in the US are released so often that they have become a Data sourcesused to train facial recognition software or stored in vast databases to locate potential suspects caught on camera (although this has proven to fail disastrous—with dire consequences). Cup shots are used to fill the void on the local police department Facebook page to show the public exactly how well their tax dollars are spent and carelessly indexed by Google image search results that people have to explain over and over again to the user. employers, landlords, family members and friends. Study estimate that local law enforcement directly publishes more than 4 million mug shots a year to the internet, where they are collected and reposted over and over again.
For the individual person caught in the image, the consequences can be devastating and lifelong. And remember, cupping is done well before sentencing. They only reflect the accusations of the state. In this sense, cupping represents another abuse of state power—the ability to convict someone of guilt before they face a jury of their peers. There’s good reason to prevent mug shots from being published so often on the internet, especially since they don’t tell us reliable information about the person in the photo; instead, they tell us more about who the police have decided to arrest, which is fundamentally shaped by race, social class, and neighborhood. The permanence of a digital mug photograph violates the principle of presumption of innocence and can even overshadow the legal penalties associated with conviction, like around 80 percent of arrests are for low-level incidents.
That said, we still don’t know if a photo of a Trump mug exists. NY doesn’t necessarily release mug shots. New York state law 160.10 stipulates that a person is required to be fingerprinted, but does not require a cupping. In fact, one cup shooting is impossible because, as Trump’s lawyers have noted, he’s already a pretty recognizable person.
