Supreme Court lets stand ruling against jail Web images

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to consider whether jail cameras that transmit live video to the Internet are unconstitutional. Without comment, justices let stand a lower court ruling that stopped the cameras at an Arizona jail. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the practice “constitutes a level of humiliation that almost anyone would regard as profoundly undesirable.” Twenty-four former inmates, who had been held at a Maricopa County jail while awaiting trial, filed the lawsuit in May 2001 against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The former inmates protested three cameras that fed live video of a men’s holding cell, a booking area and an incoming inmate patdown area on the sheriff’s Web site, and later, a crime Web site, saying the cameras unconstitutionally punished people who had not been convicted of a crime. In recent years, Arpaio has gained notoriety for putting inmates on chain gangs and issuing them striped uniforms and pink underwear. U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll’s preliminary injunction in March 2003 prohibited the video feed until resolution of the lawsuit, which alleges the cameras violate 14th Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection. In upholding the preliminary injunction, the 9th Circuit reasoned that the Supreme Court has long recognized that inmates are “not like animals in a zoo to be filmed or photographed at will.” The plaintiffs now will seek a permanent injunction, said Donna Hamm of Middle Ground, an inmate-rights group. The case is Arpaio v. Demery, 04-983.