See it for Yourself

The Charleston, SC Court degraded evidence by using a scan setting left over from bandwidth-constricted 1980s fax machines, effectively removing a woman from an image. Then a judge threw her privacy violations out based on her absence. See what was removed with the tools below.
The same filed page as it appears on the court's docket: a one-bit bitonal re-scan in which the person at the center of the photograph reads as a light-and-dark smudge.
The page as filed with the Court of Common Pleas: a full-color capture of the Realtor.com listing in which a person with dark hair, wearing a mustard-gold garment, stands at the center of the photograph.
As Filed · Full Color As Docketed · 1-Bit
Motion for Leave, filed page 56 · docket page 58. Left: the page as filed. Right: the identical page as re-digitized by the court's intake process. Both panels are registered to the same 1400 × 1377 frame and derive from the two PDFs of record. The filed capture measures 297 dpi with 8 bits per channel; the docket copy measures 300 dpi with exactly two tonal levels, and the printed page was reduced approximately 4.3% before scanning. Mean chroma falls from 18.81 to 0.00; the share of pixels at the tonal extremes rises from 0.529 to 0.956. The listing photograph inside the capture was served at 675 × 900 and painted at roughly twice that density by the browser on a high-resolution display. This comparison concerns what the court's intake process discarded from the filed page.

They Were Not Done with Scanning Degradation: Charleston, SC 9th Circuit Court of Common Pleas Degraded the US Supreme Court Petition for Writ of Certiorari Addressing the Constitutionality of their Filing Degradation - By Printing Out their Early Digital Courtesy Copy

Storyboard of Charleston 9th Circuit Court of Common Pleas' degradation of US Supreme Court document addressing their degradation of documentsYes, that's right - they degraded the US Supreme Court document addressing their degradation of documents - and, except for 2 of the pages, with the same 1-bit bitonal scanner setting.
(Click the image to the right for a large version in a new tab.)

Per a press release from McNeil and Poyer of McNeil and Poyer v SAC, 181, LLC et.al., "In a strange loop, a digital U.S. Supreme Court petition addressing scan-based evidence degradation was printed and degraded by scanning with the same fax-era setting by the Charleston, SC Court that is Respondent.

"The state circuit court was served a courtesy digital copy of the plaintiffs’ federal Petition for Writ of Certiorari, naming the court itself as the Respondent. Oddly, despite having no legal requirement or procedural jurisdiction to docket a federal appellate filing onto its own trial-level docket, the clerk's office rushed to entry-docket the document onto the local public index early.

"To achieve this unprompted upload, the clerk’s office printed the native digital PDF down to physical paper, then manually fed that paper into an intake scanner set to a primitive black-and-white fax setting (1-bit bitonal scanning). The result is an administrative irony now locked onto the public registry: the court's scanner flattened the document, actively degrading the petition's color evidentiary photographs into unreadable black-and-white smudges on the facing pages. The court literally inflicted the exact technological degradation the SCOTUS petition appeals, using the petition as the medium."