When the assailant is also a victim

As a general rule, the Times Union identifies adults accused of serious felonies — sexual assault up to and including rape, other forms of physical assault up to and including murder. At the same time, the paper as a general rule doesn’t identify the victims of crime, especially those injured by what’s known as intimate partner violence.

These two guidelines were set against each other earlier this month when Schenectady County reporter Paul Nelson reported on a grand jury’s decision to exonerate Gabriella Beckwith, a 23-year-old mother of three young children who was charged with manslaughter and assault following the July 18 death of her boyfriend, Beyquan Campbell, in their second-floor apartment on Schenectady’s Avenue B.

It was undisputed that Beckwith stabbed Campbell in the leg, severing his femoral artery. The 29-year-old bled out despite the efforts of paramedics.

Our Schenectady correspondent had reported on Beckwith’s arrest and arraignment in the days after the killing, and noted her attorney’s intention to argue that the stabbing was self-defense and that his client was a domestic violence victim. Should that statement alone have prompted us to keep her anonymous? I don’t think so: On the scales of this particular journalistic decision, the weight tips in the direction of the fact that she was charged with manslaughter and more.

Nelson reported a few days later on the decision to allow Beckwith to remain free — albeit with GPS monitoring and the supervision of the county probation department — as investigators explored her self-defense claims, and we once again named her.

And then, after more than seven months of what was surely high anxiety for the defendant, came the news that a grand jury had refused to indict Beckwith, and that Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney had presented evidence that Campbell had been “volatile and violent,” and had pistol-whipped Beckwith with a home-built ghost gun as she held her infant. The former alleged perpetrator was free, and in the eyes of the justice system a victim of domestic violence.

So our managing editor for news, Susan Mehalick, called me and posed the question: Should we name Beckwith this time?

After a not especially long discussion, we came to the conclusion that the best choice for readers and for the former defendant was to use her name in this story just as we had in the previous two. Leaving her name out would in effect create a digital breadcrumb trail of articles about her arrest and release pending trial, but nothing about her exoneration. (We added a short paragraph in Paul’s story explaining this decision.)

Beckwith’s story is one that we followed from arrest to resolution, which is the standard we’re now trying to use when we make the decision to name a defendant. In the case of a murder, there is virtually no chance that we won’t be paying attention as the case moves from arrest to trial to verdict. But in the case of a drunk driving arrest or drug bust involving people whose

names are of no import except to their friends and family? There might have been a day when a news organization enjoyed the personnel to follow all those cases, but it hasn’t been for decades.

And I’m not sure readers particularly miss it. There are still papers in this region that run the police blotter, which is nothing more than a handout list of police activities resulting in arrest. It’s not really journalism; it’s little more than copying and pasting. I’ve received outreach from people about errors in cop briefs from years ago that misstated the charges they faced or even the spelling of their name. Reporters make errors and so do police, but at least our mistakes are our own.

But what about the future, after Campbell’s death is not months but years in this community’s rear-view mirror? I’ve written before in this space about our openness to “deindexing” digital stories (a process that makes them invisible to most web searches) where the ongoing negative impact to the subject doesn’t balance out to the news value of making those stories accessible — such as an old DUI arrest or bar fight committed years ago by a person who has led an otherwise blameless and non-high-profile life. You can be sure that I receive numerous deindexing requests from people who have committed egregious offenses — aggravated stalking, official misconduct, even bank robbery — and are under the impression that these stories should just expire like moldy bread on the supermarket shelf.

If Beckwith someday wants to see her name scrubbed from those stories, we’d be open to it. But would we then scrub the stories themselves from the web? Almost certainly not — both because they concern a homicide, and because they speak to issues of how our criminal justice system addresses the damage done by domestic violence.

Should it have taken eight months for the system to exonerate Beckwith? That might be a good idea for a future story — perhaps the first about this case that allows her to remain anonymous.