A British Coroner’s Jury Finds The Paparazzi Helped Kill Princess Diana By Chasing Her Car That Crashed In A Paris Tunnel, And If It Had Happened In The UK They Could Be Found Criminally Liable

Philip Stone April 8, 2008

A British coroner’s jury returned a verdict far harsher than had been expected – that the car crash that killed Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed came about not only because of the reckless driving of the car driver, but the paparazzi chasing the ill-fated Mercedes contributed to their “unlawful deaths”.

And if that verdict had been returned against an incident that had actually happened in the UK then the paparazzi could well face criminal proceedings in the British courts. But since the French paparazzi didn’t even come to Britain to testify in the hearing, and since the British don’t have jurisdiction over what happens on French roads, that’s basically the end of that.

Except that the coroner’s jury has basically set some common law upon which British jurisprudence is based and it therefore one  of the first legal warnings shot across the bow of paparazzi that chasing celebrity automobiles around town day and night can have serious legal consequences if it is found they were a contributing factor of something going terribly wrong,

The coroner had given the jury several choices on the verdict they could bring in, but he set the bar very high if they wanted to call the deaths  “unlawful killing” – the coroner told them that basically meant manslaughter and they had to be “satisfied beyond all possible doubt” that the deaths had been caused by gross negligence. And that’s exactly what the jury believed, far harsher than the “accidental death” conclusion of a British police investigation.

Nary a day goes by around the world that the paparazzi aren’t making news themselves because of how they are hounding those they target. Paris Hilton slightly hurt by scuffles in Prague, and then Turkish paparazzi running amok when she visits there, and Britney Spears is still the favorite – around 30 – 40 paparazzi follow her every move.

Teri Hatcher of Desperate Housewives fame tells what happened to her and her daughter when visiting France last year for co-star Eva Longoria’s wedding. “I had a kind of scary time when I was in France for Eva’s wedding. I was out with a French friend and my daughter Emerson, and we were kind of swarmed by the papas. My friend said to them, nicely, ‘Would you please stop now? She’s with her daughter. This is too much.’ They swore at him in French and told him they would punch him in the face and kill him.”

It’s really hard to accept that freedom of the press allows people to get away with that. We belong to a social responsibility theory of press freedom and when the social responsibility breaks down, as it is with the paparazzi, then all of the press suffers accordingly.

Perhaps the most persistent of Europeans to continually fight against the paparazzi is Princess Caroline of Monaco. In her case it’s not so much that she is swarmed by paparazzi but rather it is the long lense that she says intrudes her private life, but her targets are the publications that print their final product.

She basically set European law in 2004 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that photos published in 1993 and in 1997 of her and her children out in public – sitting at a café, playing sports, out shopping etc – things any normal person would be doing during their time off from work – were illegal. She said the pictures violated her privacy, a German court had ruled against her because she was a “public figure”, but she won her appeal at the Court of Human Rights.

The court ruled that every person, however well known, must be able to enjoy a legitimate hope for the protection of his or her private life and that included public figures. No one can publish a picture of her during her private life without her express consent, the court said. The court said that to do so within the EU would violate her human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Although the ruling was directed at Princess Caroline, it could apply to anyone.

And yet even with that ruling Princess Caroline still gets mixed rulings in the German courts as she continually sues media she says is invading her privacy. Germany’s Constitutional Court in March ruled against her complaint that a magazine had printed pictures of her and husband Prince Ernst August of Hanover on holiday in Kenya. The magazine cleverly pegged the pictures to a news story – that the couple were leasing out  their Kenyan holiday home and the story went on about how other celebrities were also leasing their vacation homes.  The court ruled to prohibit the pictures was an invasion of press freedom.  It said that “normalcy of everyday life” was fair game as long as such pictures were useful for the public to form an opinion about matters of general interest. The same court rejected her complaint of pictures published over the illness of her father, Prince Rainier, since deceased.

On the other hand, the court did ban pictures of Caroline skiing in St. Moritz and there will no doubt need to be future high court rulings to specify just what is and is not allowed. A possible case that might do that is one making its way through the British court system. JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has asked an appeals court to overturn a judgment last August that it was okay for paparazzi to shoot pictures of her then 18-month-old child and her husband with a long range lens. She wants an injunction against further publication of the picture and financial damages.

Richard Spearman, Rowling's lawyer, told the appeals court, "This claim is not about the rights of adults, this is about the rights of the child." But paparazzi lawyer Mark Warby said Rowling has never been able to show any way in which her child had been hurt by the taking and publication of the pictures.

The original trial judge had ruled, “I have considerable sympathy for the claimant’s parents and anyone else who wishes to shield their children from intrusive media attention. But the law does not in my judgment allow them to carve out a press-free zone for their children in respect of absolutely everything they choose to do.”

Mind you, if a life of being hunted by the paparazzi sounds appealing then you can try it out. In Boston, Your Paparazzi for Hire  will, for $499, hunt you down with four Paparazzi who will stick  like glue for 30 minutes. Of course, you could go for the big-time “Star” package -- $2,479 --  and accompanied by a bodyguard, and with a limo hire, six paparazzi will hound you for two hours.

Yes, people are actually paying for that!