UPDATE (Aug. 24, 2023, 9:00 p.m. ET): The official mug shot of former President Donald Trump was made public Thursday evening after Trump was booked and released at the Fulton County Jail.
Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted last week by a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury that accuses him of committing 13 felonies in his attempt to overturn that state’s 2020 election, and on Thursday, Trump was expected to present himself at the Fulton County Jail where he will be fingerprinted. More significantly, we expect that, unlike when he surrendered after being indicted in Manhattan and when he surrendered after federal indictments in Florida and D.C., Trump will be made to stand for a mug shot in Atlanta.
Two weeks before the Fulton County grand jury charged Trump and 18 others with crimes related to a plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat said he wasn’t planning on treating anybody charged by that grand jury any differently from other defendants.
“Unless somebody tells me differently, we are following our normal practices, and so it doesn’t matter your status, we’ll have a mugshot ready for you,” the sheriff told an Atlanta television station.
In most of the United States, mug shots of people booked on suspicion of crimes are taken and released to the public, often proactively. New York passed a law in 2019 making it illegal for law enforcement to release most mug shots to the public, and in Trump’s Manhattan case, no mug shot of him was taken. Reportedly, there were logistical concerns and worries that, despite the law, such a photo would be leaked.
Before Trump was booked on federal charges in Miami, a law enforcement source told NBC News that his hand would be scanned digitally, that is without ink, and that an existing photo of him would be uploaded into an internal booking system unavailable to the public. Before he was booked in Washington, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals service said the booking process there would be the same as Miami.
There are, of course, questions about mug shots specific to Trump: Will being photographed like the typical criminal suspect hurt him or benefit him politically; what’s the point of taking a mug shot of a former president who, as his attorney said this year, has “the most recognized face in the world, let alone the country, right now?” There are also questions about how he might try to monetize the photo taken of him. Even though there was no mug shot of him taken in Manhattan, before he made it to the courthouse that day, his campaign sent out a fundraising email of a fake mug shot of Trump holding a sign reading “Not Guilty.”
The most salient question about mug shots does not involve Trump, who is likely to disseminate his mug shot and try to make hay of it.
If other criminal suspects have mug shots taken in Fulton County, I agree with the sheriff that Trump should not receive special treatment because he’s a former president. That wouldn’t be fair. But the most salient question about mug shots does not involve Trump, who is likely to portray himself as a political prisoner, proudly disseminate his mug shot and try to make hay of it. That question involves everybody else: Is it ethical to humiliate someone by releasing a photo of them suggesting criminality before they have ever been convicted?
My answer is no.
Soon after photography’s invention in 1839, police reached for the camera as a potentially powerful tool for tracking down lawbreakers. Police in Paris began collecting daguerreotypes of suspects as early as 1841, and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded in the United States in 1850, claimed to be the first organization to photograph people it apprehended, and in England a regular system of prison photography was introduced that decade. San Francisco police detective Isaiah Lees began photographing prisoners in the 1850s, too — creating the original “rogues’ gallery” — and police in New York and Chicago eventually followed.
In 1889 French police officer Alphonse Bertillon, extending the work of a prison inspector who’d introduced a biometric system for recording convicts, launched what’s now called the standard Bertillon shot: face and profile. It was picked up by police worldwide, and has served as a tool of the modern state. Thousands of prisoners who were working at Auschwitz, for example were made to pose for three shots standard in prison photography: a profile shot, a facial shot and a head-covering shot (a headscarf for women and a cap for men).
In practice, it was — and always has been — quite difficult to use photographs to help identify and catch suspects. The main function of the mug shot, a 1930s term, was to mark the photographed person as a criminal. By itself, the photo was spectacle, shame and punishment.
The opposition to mugshots isn’t really new: From the start, prison photography had its critics.
But the opposition to mugshots isn’t really new: From the start, prison photography had its critics. The London Daily Telegraph expressed the view of many when it held that: “The prison authorities have no more right to compel a man who is simply awaiting his trail to sit for a photograph than they have to hang him.” Even so, the popular press — which was exploding in circulation in the late 19th century — increasingly carried photos of criminals and crime scenes.
U.S. courts have long recognized the prejudicial nature of submitting a defendant’s mug shot into evidence during trial. In Barnes v. the U.S. 365 F.2d 509 (1966), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stated that the mug shot-style photo was so commonly used on wanted posters in the post office and on TV shows and in movies that using them as evidence in court would imply that a defendant had a prior criminal record.
If mug shot photos are presumed to have that effect on people inside the courtroom, why wouldn’t they have the same effect in the court of public opinion?
In the late 19th century, authorities had only a limited ability to establish the identity of suspects and prisoners. But times have changed, and the utility of mug shots and the ethics of prison photographs are questionable. With the pervasive use of passports, driver’s licenses and credit cards, it is far easier to establish a person’s identity. And unlike the old rogues’ galleries, which relatively few people could see, the internet makes mug shots available to anybody in the world and they can stay up long after a person has served a sentence or, even worse, been acquitted.
Trump rose to fame by using the media to boost his standing as a celebrity. He has always been acutely sensitive about how he is visually portrayed. It’s all the more ironic then, that in this moment, the approach of his latest surrender is raising questions about a widespread police practice that much of the public has accepted as not just appropriate but necessary.
But there’s nothing necessary about it. Notwithstanding the likelihood of Trump trying to flip his to his advantage, the purpose of today’s mug shot is to show the accused in a humiliating and powerless position.
Become a member to join the discussion