Mother Struggles in Bid to Revive Suit Over Photo of Son’s Body

An aggrieved mother whose son died by suicide faced a skeptical federal appeals court Wednesday in her bid to revive a lawsuit against a Philadelphia police officer who posted a photograph of her son’s body on social media.

Jim Davy, who represented the mother Karen Brookins, told the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit during oral argument that under US Supreme Court precedent surviving family members have a privacy right in death-scene images of their loved ones.

The argument highlighted a disputed legal question—whether a violation by a state official of common law privacy rights is also a constitutional violation.

Judge Tamika R. Montgomery-Reeves asked Davy whether the privacy analysis was changed by the public nature of her son’s death. “This took place on a public bridge, and there were bystanders,” she said.

Davy, founder of All Rise Trial & Appellate, responded that “the privacy expectations and what a reasonable officer would know not to do” is what matters.

“I’m having trouble with that, because ‘public’ is the opposite of ‘private,’” said Judge Thomas M. Hardiman. “Here, you’ve got a very public event—it’s a tragedy, but he was a public spectacle for a number of hours, was it not?”

Davy said the “entire purpose” of the officer’s presence at the scene was to set up a perimeter to keep the public out.

“So now citizens have a personal privacy right in a perimeter set up by police officers?” asked Hardiman.

“Our answer is that the right is that an image like this will not be taken and exploited and shared outside the surviving family members’ control,” Davy said.

Privacy Right

Brookins’ son died in March 2022 after jumping from a highway overpass in Philadelphia. Police officer Christopher Culver took a photo at the scene and posted it to Facebook and another social media platform. Brookins sued both him and the city.

After initially denyinga motion to dismiss, Judge Mark A. Kearney of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted the defendants’ motions for summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity after finding Culver couldn’t have known his “now-admitted reckless lapse in judgment” would violate Brookins’ privacy rights. The judge also dismissed Brookins’ claims against the city for failure to train officers in the privacy rights at issue.

Culver’s attorney Joshua Brownlie told the panel there “was no dispute that what he did was repugnant,” but said that shocking behavior untethered to a “liberty interest clearly established under governing precedent” wasn’t a constitutional violation.

Montgomery-Reeves asked Brownlie, an associate with Marshall Dennehey PC, whether the fact that the event took place in public eliminated any reasonable expectation of privacy related to it.

“I don’t think the court needs to reach the broader question about whether or not every single public space is devoid of any reasonable expectation of privacy,” he said. “The question is whether or not 14th Amendment substantive-due-process law clearly established that taking a photo under these circumstances violated a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Hardiman asked if the privacy violation wasn’t sufficiently obvious for a claim to proceed, despite what Brownlie argued was a lack of precedent to support it.

No, said Brownlie, because the Supreme Court hasn’t clearly established that violations of common law privacy rights, as Culver allegedly did here, also breach constitutional rights.

Allowing the claim to go forward would impose liability for constitutional violations on state officials “any time the court discusses common law traditions in any case, even outside the constitutional context,” he said. “That cannot be the law.”

Judge Jane R. Roth was also on the panel.

The City of Philadelphia Law Department represents the city.

If you or someone you know needs help, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

The case is Brookins v. Philadelphia, 3d Cir., No. 25-01041, oral argument 2/4/26.