Georgia state Sen. Brian Strickland, a McDonough Republican, sitting next to Dallas Republican state Rep. Joseph Gullett, takes questions from members of the House Public Safety and Homeland Security committee on March 26, 2026, at the state Capitol in Atlanta. Alander Rocha/Georgia Recorder
A bill making its way through the Georgia Legislature in the final days of the session aims to protect the innocent and victims of tragedies, but free speech advocates say it could disadvantage some news outlets.
The goal of Senate Bill 482 is to prevent businesses lawmakers characterize as exploitative – like websites that publish booking photos or shock sites that show gruesome crime scenes or police shooting videos – from making money off of the tragedy of others.
“We are going to hopefully start the process of recognizing in our state that body camera footage and mug shots are not entertainment,” said the bill’s sponsor, McDonough Republican Sen. Brian Strickland. “They’re news. They’re something that we should preserve for open records, but not preserve for entertainment and for making money in our state.”
The bill unanimously passed the House Public Safety Committee Thursday and will need to pass both chambers by April 2 to become law.
News outlets often request booking photos, commonly known as mugshots, by emailing a jail, sheriff’s office or other law enforcement agency.
Under the bill, these requests would need to be made in person rather than electronically, and as individual requests rather than in bulk.
To request a booking photo, one would need to make a notarized request including the first and last names of the person depicted. For law enforcement videos, the request could include the approximate date, time and location of the video rather than a name.
These changes are intended to weed out entities that make blanket requests, for example a publication that requests mugshots from all DUI arrests from a county for a given month.
Another section deals with audio, video or images of a dead or dying person. With the exception of the dead person’s next of kin, the bill requires an order from a superior court judge to release such media.
‘Bona fide’ press
The bill contains an exception for each of these changes – “bona fide credentialed members of the Georgia Press Association or the Georgia Association of Broadcasters.”
Strickland said those two groups were included because they already have privileges under Georgia law.
“The whole point of going in person and signing the affidavit is we want to know who’s getting the images, who these people are, because getting the image and posting it does potentially subject you to a claim from the attorney general,” he said. “So there is a policy reason to make sure we know who’s getting the images or the videos.”
But some free speech advocates like Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the national nonprofit Free Press and a board member of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, say the bill could put some newsrooms at a disadvantage.
“The way the bill now has passed out of (committee), it does so much more and is far outside the bounds of the problem that I think the sponsors were hoping to address, this issue of the industry around mugshot photos,” she said. “We’re looking at having to now wrestle with questions around what news providers can have access and are grandfathered in or exempted and leaving out a large swath of organizations that would not be exempt from the various requirements in this current bill.”
According to its website, active membership in the Georgia Press Association includes “newspapers that have published for more than two years in Georgia on a weekly basis with a minimum of 50 issues annually and have a bona fide list of paid subscribers” along with other requirements.
This appears to eliminate outlets without a print component at a time when a Pew Research poll shows 56% of Americans report often getting news from a computer, smartphone or tablet while only 7% report that they often get news from a printed newspaper or magazine.
It would also leave out news outlets that do not have paid subscribers at a time when nonprofit news outlets are making up an increasing part of local news outlets nationwide. (The Georgia Recorder is among them).
“If you’re a small outlet or even an independent journalist in one part of the state and you’re looking at an incident that is literally on the other side of the state, that could be a five-hour drive, if not more,” Benavidez said. “And it could very well now make the difference between a local story being covered and reported on and not being covered for the rest of the state and for Georgians to be aware of.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
