Naming suspects in print not black and white

Aman was accused of sexual assault. The physical evidence, at least initially, was thin at best, and the complaint rested on a statement by the woman, who declined a more in-depth interview with officers who took the initial complaint.

That the man and woman were together on April 9 at a Cleveland hotel is not in dispute. What happened after they met is unclear enough that no criminal charge has been filed.

Few people knew about the situation until the police report surfaced last week courtesy of an online news organization that has few filters when it comes to journalistic standards.

And this is when our consternation began.

Our general policy is not to name uncharged suspects. This is a policy rooted in our effort to be fair and to treat others as we would expect to be treated. Our newsroom code of conduct says: “In general, The Dispatch does not print the names of uncharged suspects, sometimes also referred to by police as ‘persons of interest.’

“On occasion,” the code says, “the prominence of the suspect or the importance of the case will warrant a discussion with senior editors to determine whether an exception should be made. If we make an exception and that person is not charged, we should make that known in a follow-up story played comparably to the original story, if possible.”

The point, of course, is that we don’t want to rush to print something that might be inaccurate. Even when criminal charges are filed, of course, they do not imply guilt. They signal that there’s at least enough evidence to support a charge and put the matter in front of a judge or jury.

One exception we have applied in rare instances in the past is when such accusations trigger an administrative sanction, such

my attention that we had published a story online that named an uncharged suspect without us having had a conversation about the story, I asked the online news team to remove the story from our site.

The lack of evidence and the lack of comment from the accused raised concerns — not only for me, but also for others in the newsroom who had seen the story and wondered why we had made an exception to our general policy.

I heard several arguments for publishing the story:

■ The story was all over the internet and we were among the few not reporting it. That “everyone else is doing it” was not a valid reason to publish it, in my mind, although it certainly put a lot of pressure on us. Sports Editor Ray Stein and I each received notes from readers wondering why we were “hiding” the story. (As you can now see, in that period when we did not display the story, we were attempting to do our due diligence to be as fair as possible.)

■ We had published a story a little less than a year ago about another former Ohio State football player who had been accused of — but not charged with ■