Naming the Killer, At Age 13

By: Dennis Anderson The following brief email is representative of the kind of query I get from time to time as editor of the Antelope Valley Press in Palmdale, Ca. It happens, usually, when there is an ongoing story of profound unhappiness involving young people. In this case, it was an inquiry about the story of Greg Harris, the 13-year-old local boy found guilty of second-degree murder by a juvenile court judge on Friday in the killing of 15-year-old Jeremy Rourke.

During the trial, defense attorneys raised a defense concept called "imperfect self-defense." In effect, the defense stated that 13-year-old Harris hit 15-year-old Rourke with a baseball bat back on April 13, because Rourke was a bigger boy, and thus, Harris feared he would attack him.

Judge Richard Naranjo didn't buy that defense. He said, in effect, that even if Harris were taunted or bullied, the right response was to walk away, rather than engage in a lethal attack with a lethal weapons, an aluminum bat.

A relatively frequent question that we get at the newspaper is about identification of young people charged with crimes, as in this case. The question is honest. So is the answer.

On July 8, 2005, a Mrs. Young wrote: "How can you report the name of a minor (accused/convicted) in your newspaper/media? Is it against the law to give out the name of a minor? Specifically if the minor is so young, why is AV Press doing this?"

Here is my reply:

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Dear Mrs. Young,

We have a number of considerations that we make in deciding whether or not to report the identity of a minor.

There is no law (and in fact, under the Constitution, can be no law) that restricts one from publishing a person?s identity. Actually there is such a law, but it involves only the identities of people engaged in intelligence work whose identification might endanger their lives. This is the case with Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose name was "outed" and this is the subject of a federal investigation.

In the identification of minors, we must rely on what we believe to be right. We try to give it a lot of thought.

First, we consider the gravity of the crime. The identities of juveniles routinely are not released by law enforcement, there being a somewhat archaic consideration that the youth deserves a break on an arrest made at an early age. News organizations may or may not discover the identities of youths charged with crimes, and then must make their own decision on whether publication of the i.d. is warranted.

So, we take the nature of the crime into account. Murder is the most serious charge. That inclines toward identification.

The next consideration is, "Do many people in the community already know the name?" In the Harris case, the name was known to hundreds of players and parents throughout Pony League, and was made further public during memorial services for the dead boy, Jeremy Rourke, the child killed by the other child.

Finally, we have the expectations of our community of readers. News organizations are daily engaged in the process of publishing or broadcasting what they know as fact -- not of suppressing facts that might be disagreeable to some. If news organizations were not to publish facts that are true -- but that might be disagreeable to some -- they would cease to practice what is the reason for their existence, the dissemination of news.

I can share with you that this is not done with glee, nor is there pleasure taken from it. We do makes decisions about identities from time to time -- people who may be further jeopardized after being victims of a criminal attack. We are very conservative and follow the
accepted practices of not publishing the names of victims of sexual assault. There is no law that constrains us from doing it. Finally, it is something done on a case by case basis.

At AV Press, we are voters, taxpayers, citizens, pretty much like other members of the community we cover. We, in many cases, are parents, parents of young children and parents of teenagers. We are not without sympathy for the anguish across the board in a case like the Harris case. The path of the parents of Jeremy Rourke is forever
altered. And so is the path of the parents of Gregg Harris.

Jeremy Rourke is irretrievably gone from this life. Gregg Harris is held to answer in that death. It is hard to understand how we would be responsible in carrying the news of this community if we were not to report that. In the same breath, I add that virtually all other news organizations, whether a community paper such as this one, or a paper the size of the Los Angeles Times, or national media such as the networks, arrived at the same conclusion.

Not because it was a happy conclusion, rather, because there is hardly another conclusion to arrive at and still be in engaged in the process of reporting news. We deal in matters of public record, and washing names from the record is not a function of a newspaper responsible to its wide readership.

I hope, Mrs. Young, that this answers your question in a serious way. I do not expect it to be an emotionally satisfactory answer, but it is the real one.

Yours Very Truly,
Dennis Anderson
Editor, Antelope Valley Press