Georgia Court Says It's Legal to Film Video Up a Woman's Skirt

Georgia Court Says It's Legal to Film Video Up a Woman's Skirt

Justice is blind—unless it's looking up your skirt.

Madison Pauly
Jul. 25, 2016 6:05 PM

In a win for folks who believe women's bodies are public property, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a supermarket employee who followed a customer around the store, secretly recording a video of the view up her skirt. Citing a "gap" in Georgia's criminal statutes, Judge Elizabeth Branch and five colleagues ruled earlier this month that "upskirting" is permissible under current law.

"It is regrettable that no law currently exists which criminalizes (the appellant’s) reprehensible conduct," Branch wrote.

Security footage from a Publix store in Houston County, Georgia, shows employee Brandon Lee Gary stooping down behind a woman and aiming his cellphone camera underneath her skirt as she picked an item from the supermarket shelves. Then he did it at least three more times. Upset after catching him on the floor behind her repeatedly, the woman left the store. She later returned to complain to the store's manager, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Gary later admitted to police officers that he was responsible for the video recordings.

Following the June 2013 incident, a local judge convicted Gary of criminal invasion of privacy, deciding that "there's no more blatant invasion of privacy than to do what (Gary) did," according to the appeals court ruling. But in Gary's appeal, the court examined whether his conduct was actually criminal under the state's invasion-of-privacy law. The statute forbids "any person, through the use of any device, without the consent of all persons observed, to observe, photograph, or record the activities of another which occur in any private place and out of public view."

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/judges-view-your-skirt-public-space-ladies

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Brandon Lee Gary