to think they shouldn't send you to prison for taking a picture of a corpse

[pisacake]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4611862/Man-jailed-posting-Grenfell-Tower-victim-picture.html

Apparently Mr. Mwaikambo, who is of Tanzanian origin or extraction, opened a body bag at the Grenfell Tower and posted the picture on Facebook.

I'm not sure about Tanzania, but I am in Indonesia and it's very common to post selfies with dead (i.e. in the moments after they die) relatives etc. on Facebook. There was a case earlier this year where a Western man died and the local newspaper published multiple shots of him dead, dressed only in his underpants with blood coming out of his nose etc. Those photos remain online.

Obviously this is not the done thing in England, but it seems that someone they have come up with a fairly arbitrary charge (sending obscene materials over the internet) - there's no law against what he did, per se - and whacked a rather stiff sentence on him.

I'm not saying he was right to do it, but it seems that there is an excessive sentence for someone who broadcast to a fairly limited number of people (he has a couple of hundred friends on Facebook), something which inherently is more about outrage at the fire than the fact of what he did.

The law used is obscenity, but the photos are no more obscene than going to Tanzania/other parts of Africa and taking pictures of dead Africans to be broadcast on the news, or photos of the deceased Gaddafi (widely distributed in Western media) or whatever. The obscenity is the fire, but Mr. Mwaikambo is in no way responsible for that.

I knew there were cultures that take photos of their dead relatives. I always thought that it was carried out in a loving and respectful way and something the family does together? Has that been what Had happened here I'd be agreeing.

This man breached a police cordon to open a body bag, take several photos of not just the person, but also their injuries and then share those photos on Facebook. Even if that is a norm within his culture and he thought it was a norm here too, the many many comments on his pictures telling him it's upsetting and asking him to take them down was a big hint that it's maybe not ok here. He may not have known when he uploaded, he will have known by the comments, but he didn't remove them.

If it is genuinely a cultural norm to unzip body bags of strangers to take pics of them and their injuries and share them with other people who are also strangers to the deceased, then perhaps the judge was concerned about other people from the same culture doing the same. It's entirely reasonable that some of this mans friends are from the same culture, and may have saved a copy of the images to share with their friends etc, entirely plausible if it's a cultural norm, so perhaps the judge gave a jail time to make sure anyone for this mans Facebook friends who have downloaded a copy know that's it's absolutely not ok in the uk.

Id assume the body was there for a few hours because the blaze was still going and emergency services were trying to put the firs out and get people out who were still in the Building? I can understand him being anxious, I could kind of understand if he said he was trying to help and just went about it the wrong way by posting images on Facebook instead of keeping for emergency services once blaze was out, but again, he'd have taken them down when he realised his mistake.

He left the pics up, and I know they are deleted from Facebook now, but it's perfectly possible that people on his page saved a copy, either because it's their cultural norm too, or because they are a ghoul, and the judge is trying to make sure anyone who has saved a copy for whatever reason is deterred from sharing again.

We need to make sure this kind of thing does not take off and I am glad he was caught out over it as he probably ought to have known it was illegal.
If he did not know then schools (and for people from abroad the authorities) need to hammer into people the British cultural rules so they know what they are and can obey them.

It is entirely different if it is your own relative and indeed in some cultures they take photos of their own dead child. The Victorians did it all the time in the UK - it's part of the English tradition BUT and it's a very very big but it is the relative who decides, not some stranger on the street.

Sod his flipping 'culture'!!!!

Amen to that. If you choose to come to the UK to live, you need to learn to respect OUR culture.

The bloke's an attention seeking ghoul and good for the authorities for putting him where he belongs. I hope facebrag deleted his account and the deceaseds relatives sue him

I think it's ghoulish and disgusting. Actually makes me sick to think anyone could think this was acceptable. What if that was your husband?

The obscenity is actually unzipping a body bag !

FFS @pisacake he wasn't sentenced on obscenity!!! They section they used was the "likely to cause offence" section. Defending the indefensible is one thing but not understanding what you're talking about is another. No one in the U.K., or that court think a dead body is obscene, in fact they think they are important enough to warrant respect, privacy and dignity as they would have in life. What the court DID decide, as was evidenced by the comments of EVERYONE who saw his post, was that it was grossly offensive so he was punished accordingly. The custodial sentence was probably justified by the potential reach of a facebook post and the fact that everyone who had already seen it represented a victim of his offence.

It's disgusting. Should have got longer.
Id have been devastated if that had been my relative!

If he unzipped the bag his DNA woudl be on it. Surely that in itself is a serious criminal offence. Okay in this case we wll probably not be dusting the corpse for DNA but we might be taking DNA from it to match a relative to a body so even just unzipping the body bag is surely tampering with evidence.

I'm shocked. I think that's a disgusting thing to do, so disrespectful. Sentence deserved.