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A jury of five men and four women officially began deliberations Wednesday in the graphically gruesome civil trial between Vanessa Bryant and Los Angeles County.
After hearing 10 days of testimony and another round of closing arguments on Wednesday, it now must weigh the evidence and answer some questions about what to do with it:
Did county sheriff’s and fire department employees simply make internal policy mistakes when they used their personal phones to share and display horrific photos of Bryant’s deceased daughter and husband, Kobe, the NBA legend? Or did they violate Vanessa Bryant’s constitutional privacy rights by publicly disseminating those photos for no good reason after those family members died in a helicopter crash in January 2020?
Mira Hashmall, the lead outside counsel for the county defendants, made her case Wednesday during closing arguments to the jury. She said there has been no public dissemination of the crash-scene photos because they were not posted online, were deleted shortly after the crash and were never even seen by the plaintiffs in this case, including Chris Chester, who lost his wife and daughter in the same crash.
“This is the photos case, but there are no photos,” Hashmall said.
She said that what happened in some cases amounted to internal policy violations by county employees but did not rise to the level of constitutional violations. This includes the time she said sheriff’s deputy Joey Cruz “made a mistake” when he displayed crash-scene photos to a bartender at a Mexican restaurant two days after the crash, one of which was a photo alleged to be of Kobe Bryant’s torso.
Hashmall urged the jury to consider evidence and not arguments or emotion, keeping in mind that first responders need latitude to do their jobs. Sometimes, she said first responders need to document the scene of an accident.
“Imagine if they have to have doubt the next time they ask for that information from a fellow first responder because a lawyer two or three years later (might say) it wasn’t necessary,” Hashmall told the jury. “That’s not what the constitution requires.
