Is it legal to take pictures of corpses?

Question

Is it illegal to take pictures of corpses in California for non first-responders, considering the existence of bill AB-2655 that prohibits first responders from taking pictures of corpses outside of job duties? Are there specific laws and regulations that apply to non first-responders regarding the photographing of corpses in California or the US?

Answer 1

The Bill Analysis associated with AB-2655 attributes the following to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department:

Current law generally prohibits a reproduction of photographs of the body, or portion of the body of a deceased person, taken by or for the coroner at the scene of death or during a death examination or autopsy. However, there is no prohibition of first responders capturing the image of a deceased person for no lawful purpose. On a daily basis, first responders find themselves in situations, as a result of their duties, where they are exposed to deceased persons. First responders are trusted to secure and preserve scenes of great disaster and death. The dignity of the deceased must be protected as well as the privacy of their loved ones.

The comments of the bill's author indicate that it was motivated by the accident which caused the death of Kobe Bryant in 2020:

But what we found afterward was unacceptable – that those who were tasked with responding to this tragedy were inappropriately distributing images they took of the scene for their own personal pleasure. These irresponsible acts could cause civil harm or liability to the affected agencies and are invasive toward the privacy of the families affected. This bill would make it a misdemeanor for a first responder who responds to the scene of an accident or crime to capture the image of a deceased person for any purpose other than an official law enforcement purpose or a genuine public interest.

So, those who passed the bill thought that photographing dead people was not prohibited by the criminal law, but "could cause civil harm or liability to the affected agencies." This strongly suggests that there are no "specific laws and regulations" in California which apply to non-first responders in this situation.

However, if AB-2655 had not been passed or did not apply, it's possible that prosecutors could still charge an accused person with a less specific offence based on obscenity or public decency. Such charges may be avoided for constitutional and public policy reasons (which are partially addressed by passing a specific law like AB-2655), but resorted to in exceptional cases when no other law seems to apply.

This happened in Victoria, Australia in 2021, when Richard Pusey was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, the common law offence of "outraging public decency" for recording the scene of a car accident. Such prosecutions are exceptional: the sentencing judge noted that "in Australia there have only been six reported examples of an offence that includes the concept of outraging public decency, between 1899 and 1978."