Shame First, Convict Later

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi has come up with a great way to prove how he’s doing something about drunk driving.  After a county cop was seriously hurt after being struck by a drunk driver as he was stopped to ticket a drunk driver, the expected public outcry was that “somebody has to do something.”  The cops swore to nail a bunch, and they got 109 over the holiday weekend.

But that wasn’t good enough.  Per this Newsday article, Suozzi created his “Wall of Shame,” showing photographs and identifying the people arrested.  No doubt his constituents will love him dearly for his “doing something,” as they demanded.


And in what county officials called an unapologetic effort to shame those charged, the names and addresses of the suspects were itemized and distributed to the media; the mug shots of the 81 people charged with driving while intoxicated were to be posted on the county government’s Web site.

But, does anybody consider that this public shaming puts the cart before the horse?  Let’s see what the lawprofs have to say.


“Is it ethical to shame a person before they have been deemed guilty?” asked Hofstra University ethicist Professor Arthur Dobrin. “Whatever can be done should be in this fight [against drunken driving], provided it is both legal and ethical. Here it may very well cross the line of the latter.”

Thanks for the forceful view, Arthur.  Anyone else?


But Hofstra Law School professor Robin Charlow said in a recent interview that Suozzi was on the right track constitutionally.  “We want to use the criminal law to deter others from committing crimes. Shaming individuals — which Suozzi is attempting — serves the same function,” she said.

Robin Charlow, just so you know, teaches con law and crim law. 

Fortunately, someone has the guts to cut to the chase, popular opinion notwithstanding:


The outrage here is that the government is going out of its way to embarrass citizens who may or may not be guilty,” said Tara Keenan-Thomson, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Nassau County chapter. She said Suozzi’s policy of “naming and shaming” may run afoul of a United States Supreme Court decision barring governments from disgracing people before their guilt has been proved, on the grounds that such actions violate due process.

To their credit, there’s one more piece to the puzzle.  Not a single newspaper was willing to go along with Suozzi’s “naming and shaming” approach. 

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7 thoughts on “Shame First, Convict Later”

  2. Windypundit

    It makes sense that journalists wouldn’t touch this. The good ones don’t let other people tell them what is or is not a story, and the identities of individual drunk drivers are not a story.

    Frankly, this just isn’t something I want my police department doing. They should be patroling the streets, solving crimes, catching criminals, and putting them in jail. “Naming and shaming” is just unserious to the point of being juvenile.

    Here in Chicago, if you get busted for soliciting a prostitute, they post your name and photo on a web site. Strangely enough, however, they don’t post pictures of people arrested for more serious crimes. And if a citizen complains about a police officer, the department won’t even give that information to the city council.

  3. SHG

    I can’t help but think that if the news was slow enough today, they would have published it to fill up a few pages.  But, since they didn’t, the newspapers get to be the ethical guys today.  

    And what about the quote from Charlow, the crimlaw prof?  What a disgrace. 

  4. Joe

    The real question is how many of these DUI arrests were legit, and how many were rushed through by emotional officers responding to an emotional public outcry? A drunk driving accident is terrible, but if innocent people are arrested in a mass arrest movement, or if people’s names are run through the mud so that a formerly ineffectual politician can wash his hands of any fault. This is a silly reactionary tactic that won’t change long term behavior, but will rather frustrate the public further or corrupt justice.

  5. Ken

    Shaming always has been and (I suspect) always will be a major component of law enforcement. Hence the perp walk. The picture wall is simply another form of perp walk.

  6. SHG

    From Caldarola v. Westchester, 343 F.3d 570 (2d Cir. 2003),

    An earlier opinion, Lauro v. Charles, marked this Court’s first foray into the constitutional implications of the perp walk. 219 F.3d 202 (2d Cir.2000). In Lauro, the plaintiff brought a section 1983 suit against the New York City Police Department for violating his Fourth Amendment rights by subjecting him to a staged perp walk. Approximately two hours after Lauro was arrested and brought to the police station, a police detective staged a perp walk in response to media interest in the arrest. A detective handcuffed Lauro, escorted him outside of the police station, drove him around the block in a police car, and then escorted him from the car back into the station. A television crew filmed the staged walk from the car back into the station.

    This Court found that Lauro was seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, “[r]egardless of whether the seizure is viewed as (1) a separate seizure that occurred when Lauro was forcibly removed from the station and brought back in, or (2) a continuation and aggravation of the seizure that occurred when he was arrested….” Id. at 212. The staged perp walk implicated Lauro’s protected privacy interest in not being “displayed to the world, against his will, in handcuffs, and in a posture connoting guilt.” Id. at 212, n. 7. No government purpose was served by the staged perp walk. Id. at 213. This Court noted that any “legitimate state interest in accurate reporting of police activity . . . is not well served by an inherently fictional dramatization of an event that transpired hours earlier.”

     There’s a difference.

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