Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Your policy of publishing information on local arrests and guilty pleas is hurtful. Perhaps there are proud families who, seeing that their children have "made the newspaper," trim the arrest and guilty plea sections from your paper to be displayed on their refrigerators. Then again, perhaps not. Certainly not in one case.

Two and a half years ago, my beautiful and intelligent daughter committed an ugly and stupid crime. Inexplicably, she misused her otherwise excellent mind to commit a serious crime of theft against her employer. At the time, your paper faithfully recorded her arrest, so that our friends, neighbors and co-workers would have an open window on our family's sufferings.

Now that she has finally faced an arraignment, you have followed through by publishing, not only her name, offense and sentence, but her address, presumably to give guidance to local tour buses.

The details that you have chosen to publish are necessarily one-dimensional. Certain relevant facts were, quite naturally, left unreported. You did not mention the fact that her offense was contrary to the deepest values with which she was raised. Nor did you mention that news of her crime broke the hearts of her parents and the rest of her family. No one reading your stark report would learn of the long hours that I held my wife as she wept over our daughter's wrongful choices. And your readers would never be able to draw conclusions about the ways in which grace and forgiveness function in this family, or the specific ways in which they have been extended to our daughter.

Most importantly, you failed to say anything about the fact that, in the two and a half years since her offense, my daughter has, herself, worked through stages of remorse and self-loathing, and on to repentance and a resolve to live as she has always known she ought.

How could anyone reading The Citizen know anything of the profound impact that the recent death of my wife's mother, a woman of the highest moral integrity and deepest Christian commitment, had upon my daughter's very orientation on life? Could they know anything of the wonderful role that she has since assumed as aunt to the two little boys who were born close to the time of her crime and arrest? What could your readers possibly infer about the subtle ways in which my daughter has come to evidence a love and respect for her parents that seemed to be wanting some two and a half years ago?

Much less does your news bite indicate that it took the Fayette County prosecutor more than two years to draw up an indictment (justice in Fayette County may be happily blind, but it appears to be unhappily lame as well), as my daughter and her family have yearned for closure in this sordid episode. (Given the unreasonable amount of time that passed between arrest and arraignment, and your corresponding reports, passing acquaintances now wonder whether this young girl is a habitual offender. Has she "struck again"?!)

These reports are, I think, fairly common among small-town newspapers, but they are not universal. What purpose, other than the further stigmatization and humiliation of offenders and those who love them, do they ultimately serve? Armed only with the information that you have provided, self-appointed judges in the community may rest their case: "What need have we for further witnesses?"

My daughter is unquestionably to blame for inflicting the original wound. But our lethargic local legal system has hindered its healing. And your paper has seen fit to pour salt into that wound.

For obvious reasons, I remain anonymous.

Name withheld by request

[The editor replies: Our intent is to provide an accurate account of crime and law enforcement action to a public that expects protection from criminals and criminal activity.

Undoubtedly, every one of the names that appears in our news accounts of those arrested and tried for crimes represents personal tragedies and family pain. This grieving father's solution would be to ignore and thus cover up from public view all those arrests and trials and deprive the taxpaying public of an account of their law enforcement agencies.

The real question is: Why should this case of admitted criminal activity be treated differently than all others?

We rejoice in this child's apparent rehabilitation. But first she had to be caught, exposed, tried and punished. Not all such stories end this positively, however. We can't predict which ones will and which won't. All we can do is give an accurate report of what actually happened. Our job is not to ignore, but to report, the truth. We have absolutely no apologies for doing our job.]