OPINION: Why we published story about candidate's arrest

We received a number of emails, letters and social media comments on an article, “Court records show City Council candidate arrested in 2015,” published on Nov. 28 by our courts reporter Olivier Uyttebrouck. So, I wanted to address the criticism here.

First the facts: Teresa Garcia is in a Dec. 9 runoff for the District 3 City Council seat, challenging three-term incumbent Klarissa Peña. Peña won 41% of the vote Nov. 4 in a three-way contest, sending the race into a runoff with Garcia, who received 38% of the vote.

Garcia has spent her life working as an advocate for victims of domestic violence — an admirable career and one born from her own professed experience as a survivor of domestic abuse.

In the weeks following the election, Journal staff began to hear from several places that Garcia had been charged with domestic abuse herself. We looked and found a court case dating back to 2015 where she was accused by her ex-husband of abusing him. She stood trial and was found not guilty.

In our article, we described the facts of the case and gave Garcia ample opportunity to tell her side of the story. She is quoted throughout.

In the ensuing days, some have asked: Why did we choose to write about this at all? She is a victim of domestic abuse, she was found not guilty and it is common for an abuser to use the system against his or her victim.

My answer: She lied to us. In a questionnaire that the Journal sends as a standard to all candidates for public office we ask: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime?

Other candidates previously have disclosed DUIs and drunk and disorderly charges, among other misdemeanors and crimes. Garcia was not convicted, but she was arrested and she chose not to disclose that information — not just to the Journal but to the public at large.

Some have said that it is a private matter. To that my answer is two-pronged: She could have filed paperwork to have the case expunged, so that no one would, or could, ever know of it. But she did not. So, the information was there for anyone to find if they knew her married name. Secondly, she is a candidate for office. She has thrust herself into the vortex of the public eye — the Supreme Court’s standard for any expectation of privacy since 1974 — and therefore has no expectation of privacy.

Personally, I would add a third reason: Would anyone really want their elected officials to lie to them? To be comfortable lying to them? To hide and obfuscate the truth?

In these pages we have another op-ed running today from MaryEllen Garcia, CEO of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Tiffany Jiron, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, defending Garcia. In it they say: “We wish the decision to print these articles had resulted in a holistic picture of the actual outcome of the legal case in question, in which the subject of the story was found not guilty by a jury of her peers. Instead, both stories miss the opportunity for the nuance, care and humanity required to approach survivors’ stories with intention.”

The second story to which they refer is columnist Jeff Tucker’s opinion piece revoking his endorsement of Garcia because she lied, entitled “Q&A lie should disqualify Garcia for City Council.”

I will leave Tucker to his own opinions, but to this criticism I have to answer: Garcia had every opportunity to tell her story in all its nuance from the get go, from when she first filed to run for office to when we interviewed her as we do all candidates, to filling out the questionnaire and to the second interview we did before publishing Uyttebrouck’s story.

“I was not the offender,” Garcia told Uyttebrouck of the 2015 incident. “I was the victim and that was proven. I was exonerated and acquitted.”

And we quote her three times extensively in that relatively brief story — which ran at the bottom of the metro section that day.

Many have called for us out to name our sources for this information. To this I respond: Not only would we never disclose a source, but in this case the sources were multiple and all they did was point us to publicly available documents. In the story, we do not quote her opponent. Indeed, the only sources we quote are Garcia and the court documents.

Finally, though Garcia herself has not asked for a correction, critics have said that information that we ran was incorrect. To that I say: I am perfectly happy to correct any story where there is an inaccuracy, including this one. Quoting court documents is not inaccurate. Especially when those documents have not been expunged and are available for anyone to see. If she believed the documents included inaccuracies, why not have them expunged before running for public office?

Finally, critics have said that we have retraumatized her by writing about this incident. I must in this case circle back to the definition of the expectation of privacy. Garcia should not have thrust herself into the vortex of the public eye if she did not want to be scrutinized. And, I must say, the scrutiny is all the worse when you lie about it.

Jay Newton-Small is the executive editor and vice president of the Albuquerque Journal.