People accused of crimes make for interesting photo subjects

You can sometimes get some interesting reactions when you are taking pictures of people who are accused of crimes.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

“What did you do, kill somebody?” one perplexed prisoner asked the other prisoner he was handcuffed to about 20 years ago as the press was snapping pictures of them being walked from the jail over to the courthouse about a block and a half away.

After a long, pregnant pause and a deafening silence as nobody answered the question, the perplexed prisoner then said, “Ohhh!” as he realized the man he was handcuffed too was in fact charged with murder.

Nowadays, if you are looking at a crime story in the newspaper or seeing one on television, then chances are you have seen the proverbial jail mug shot where someone arrested for a crime is standing next to height markers painted on the wall at the jail and has their mug shot taken.

Some look sad. Some look mad. Some of them look like they are high on more than just life and for good reason in many cases if you look at their charges.

Then you have some where the suspect is making goofy faces. Every so often, you will see someone wearing a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) T-shirt, who has been arrested for DUI or on drug charges. When that happens, you usually have to laugh at the irony of it, if nothing else.

While jail mug shots are everywhere today, this wasn’t the case when I first started in journalism nearly 30 years ago.

Back then Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet (sarcasm intended…LOL), or at the very least most of us had barely heard of the Internet and no one even dreamed about jail’s having websites. Locally many of our court rooms didn’t allow cameras back then either.

So how did we get pictures of criminal suspects back then? For the most part, we waited on the jail walk.

Back in those days, most of the county jails here locally at least were located one or two blocks from the courthouse, and deputy jailers walked the suspects over from the jail to the courthouse for court with two of them usually handcuffed together to keep them from running off.

For years, it wasn’t uncommon for Judy Brimm or Greg Petrey or any number of other folks working over at the Whitley County Jail to get a call from me asking when they thought they would be walking the prisoners over for court.

Taking pictures of people charged with crimes has resulted in some interesting situations over the years.

I’ll never forget the time after I ordered lunch at a local fast food restaurant, and cashier says to me, “I’ve been trying to get you to take my picture at the last few drug round-ups.”

I assured him that I thought he would have many chances.

Suffice it to say that I didn’t go back to that restaurant for quite a while…LOL.

I have also found over the years that people accused of committing crimes will sometimes take some interesting measures to try and block that face from the camera.

My favorite situation way back when involved the time the police were doing a drug round-up I believe it was, and I was following these two young rookie Williamsburg police officers (Denny Shelley and Wayne Bird) as they went out in the county looking for this woman, who wasn’t some hardcore, career criminal.

When they pulled up, the woman was in the driveway by her home getting groceries out of her car.

So what are two officers to do in this situation? As I wrote earlier, this woman wasn’t some dangerous hardcore criminal so the officers helped her carry her groceries into her home and put away the stuff that needed to go into the refrigerator or freezer.

Before they police brought her back out of the home, the woman, who didn’t want her face on the front page of the newspaper, grabbed a pair of blue jeans and put them over her head as the two young officers walked her out home handcuffed to the police cruiser.

I periodically bump into this lady in Williamsburg and we always stop and laugh about it.