On a quiet Friday afternoon in the summer of 2007, the phone rang in The Sun’s office. It was someone calling on behalf of a man on death row to inform us of a glaring error in an upcoming issue.
We’d accepted a piece by the prisoner for our Readers Write on “Rivals” but had failed to list him as “Name Withheld,” which he’d requested because he was worried what he’d written about gang violence in prison might provoke a violent reprisal. We’d sent the man our edit for his approval weeks earlier, but because of the sluggish prison mail system, he’d only just received it and was unaware the issue had already gone to print. Eighty thousand copies of it, in fact, were sitting in our printer’s warehouse, ready to be picked up by the postal service.
