EMT Faces Criminal Charges for Posting Picture of Corpse to Facebook

In New York City, an emergency medical technician is on trial for misdemeanor charges of official misconduct after posting pictures of a young woman’s murdered corpse to the popular social networking website, Facebook. The EMT claims that he took the picture instinctively due to his years of experience as a detective and posted it to Facebook accidentally when he uploaded a number of pictures from his cell phone.

While it is probable the EMT did not intend to post the picture, the fact of the matter is that he did, causing one family’s painful loss to be exposed to the world. Even if Facebook were to quickly remove the image in question, there is no guarantee that it could not be copied and saved somewhere else only to pop back up again later and spread throughout the Internet.

This unfortunate scenario became all too real for Christos and Lesli Catsouras, who have spent the last two years trying to remove pictures of their daughter Nikki’s fatal car accident from hundreds of thousands of websites online. In the Catsouras family’s case, it was an officer of the California Highway Patrol who was responsible for taking the pictures and posting them online. The story of the Catsouras family’s efforts to remove the grisly photos and gain a sense of closure over Nikki’s death was recently profiled at Newsweek.

While it can be argued that morbid curiousity is an inherent component of the human condition, the vitriol with which individuals circulate and share disturbing images online defies the limits of acceptable behavior. If everyone took a proactive stance to help make the Internet a safer and more decent place, people like the Catsouras family would not have to fear opening their e-mails. To learn more about how you can help the Catsouras family, visit the website Support Nikki.