A Miami judge ruled on Tuesday, March 4 that Bieber's dignity would be retained as the video gets edited.
- March 5, 2014
AceShowbiz -
To prevent any unwanted incidents, a Miami judge has ordered a Florida court technician to blur Justin Bieber's private parts on jail video. Under Florida's open records law, the video of Bieber's arrest on DUI charges back in January will then be handed to several news agencies this week.
"The court finds that images of the defendant while in custody at the Miami Beach Police Department are relevant to the public's right to know," Miami-Dade County Judge William Altfield ruled Tuesday, March 4. He rejected Bieber's lawyer arguments that the video, captured by surveillance cameras inside Miami Beach Police Department's jail, should be kept private.
Bieber spent hours inside the jail before he was released on bail. A segment from the video showed Bieber urinating in a cell, "revealing an image of the defendant's genitalia." Of blurring the genitalia, Altfield reasoned, "While the defendant may not enjoy all of the expectations of privacy that he enjoys outside of a jail setting, he still retains his expectation of dignity."
Other parts of the video have made it online in the past few months. There were segments when Bieber was hand-searched by an officer, the pop star doing push-ups in a cell, and him doing a sobriety test in a hallway.
Three clips will be released without redaction, shot from an angle that was far enough away to protect Bieber's privacy. The public records unit of the State Attorney's Office will need "a few days" to redact the video clips and get final approval. A status hearing is set for March 11 in the case.
