Sure, but surely sketches can be just as twisted and misused (e.g. drawing a defendant with a menacing snarl), and even more so given that there's no source of real truth.
Sketches are further removed from reality than photographs, so the viewer would know that this is the artist's interpretation of the event. If you bring a camera and take 100 or 1000 shots of someone, you can pick any one of them to act as the full representation of reality. Look how much people trust publicity photos or photos in ads to be unaltered to see how much faith people put in photography. Also, anyone can be made to look jovial or angry if you take enough photos of them, and the photo is more closely related to reality in the viewer's mind than an illustration.
Kind of related, in Sweden, there's been a murder case in the newspapers the last months where the defendants' heads were blurred in photos during the trial and their names were anonymized. As soon as they were convicted, full photos and names were published. Here the idea is to protect their identities until found guilty. I don't know if this is regulated by law or if it's just a matter of press ethics.
But people seem to inherently understand that the sketch artist controls what you see, the moment they're showing you. They're less aware that photographers do the same thing - most people treat photographs as "objective truth".
Kind of related, in Sweden, there's been a murder case in the newspapers the last months where the defendants' heads were blurred in photos during the trial and their names were anonymized. As soon as they were convicted, full photos and names were published. Here the idea is to protect their identities until found guilty. I don't know if this is regulated by law or if it's just a matter of press ethics.