Anthony Graber, the Maryland motorcyclist being prosecuted on state felony wiretapping charges for recording his traffic stop and posting the video on YouTube, is the subject of an article in today’s Washington Post. I have said (again and again) that this is a misreading of the Maryland wiretapping statute, which is not supposed provide grounds for prosecution where there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Graber was on the side of the highway, and the police officer asserting this expansive reading of the wiretap statute while making an arrest at the Preakness was in the middle of a large crowd. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in either of those places. The Post article provides the other side of the argument:

The attention the Graber case is receiving has surprised Harford prosecutor Joseph I. Cassilly, who said his office has prosecuted similar cases before, including one within the past year against the passenger of a car that was stopped during a drug investigation who started taping officers with a cellphone camera. Cassilly said he didn’t know the status of the case because the prosecutor handling it has been out sick.

“The question is: Is a police officer permitted to have a private conversation as part of their duty in responding to calls, or is everything a police officer does subject to being audio recorded?” Cassilly said.

Cassilly thinks officers should be able to consider their on-duty conversations to be private.

I disagree. The injustice of the Maryland wiretap law was demonstrated earlier this week when Rep. Bob Etheridge assaulted a student who asked him a question while recording the encounter. The students were lucky that they were in the District of Columbia.

If the scuffle had been in Maryland, Etheridge could have been prosecuted for misdemeanor assault (this remains true for D.C., but I am not aware of any charges that have been made). In contrast, the students would have been on the hook for a felony violation of the wiretap law for recording the event, another violation for posting the event on the internet, and an additional charge for possession of the device used to intercept the conversation. I’m not agreeing with that reading of the law, but that’s the interpretation being used to prosecute Anthony Graber.

Whatever your views on privacy are, that’s not justice.