In last Tuesday's issue, we published a front-page story ("Pachanga night yields arrests, medical crises") detailing the chaotic night of Saturday, Oct. 23. This article has generated a great deal of feedback. In particular, one of the events this article addressed involved the arrests of two students in Ziv Quad. The students were charged with disorderly conduct and assaulting police officers. One was also charged with resisting arrest. In the week since we published that article, the Justice has received a deluge of questions: Why did we mention this incident at all? Why did we publish these two students' names? And why did we portray the students the way we did by presenting only the Department of Public Safety's account of what happened and not the accounts we later heard from student eyewitnesses?

I would like to address these questions to offer some insight into why we chose to write this article the way we did as well as into how we at the Justice view our role as the independent student newspaper of this university.

I say "we" because no reporter writes and publishes a Justice article unilaterally; all articles are edited for content by a minimum of two editors, and I personally read every word of every article before the newspaper goes to print.

We at the Justice believe that one of a newspaper's primary duties is to keep its readership informed of important campus news, and an on-campus arrest is no exception. I believe that it was not our prerogative but our obligation to you as our readers to report on these arrests to the best of our ability.

There is no question that we acted completely within legal and journalistic standards by printing the arrested students' names. Names of arrested individuals are part of the public record and are made available to the public by law enforcement agencies. And on a less journalistically pertinent note, had we not printed the names, the public still would have been able to find them through the Waltham Police Department or with any detailed criminal background check.

Nonetheless, the editors of this newspaper did not take the decision to print the names of the arrested students lightly.

However, we concluded that the names of the students were an important aspect of the story. The students themselves were an integral part of the story, and to avoid printing the names would be to withhold crucial information from our readers.

Some readers have asked why we excluded the names of the police officers involved. In this story, the students acted as individuals and official charges were brought against them as individuals. In contrast, the Brandeis police officers that night operated as a department, and to date, no specific charges have been leveled against any single officer for his or her conduct. Those facts in conjunction with the totality of information we as a newspaper had on record at press time led us to print the story that we printed.

As for the issue of the perceived one-sidedness of this article: Yes, we did only publish the police account of that night's events. But we did so because both the student eyewitnesses whom we contacted and the arrested students themselves were either not available to comment or were available but elected not to comment. The Justice always strives to write articles in as balanced a fashion as possible, but we will never print unverified information. If a person or group does not give us its side of the story on the record, we cannot print it.

However, in the past week, a number of students who witnessed the arrests and the events surrounding them stepped forward for interviews, and in the interest of balancing the article and including all relevant parties' accounts, we have published another article on this story in this issue.

As I mentioned earlier, we take significant care to attribute all information that is not common knowledge to the source from which we acquired that information; this is true for all of our content, from articles to photos. In last week's article, we never claim to know the facts of what happened that night: We provide attributed information based on interviews and public record. Our job is to get at the truth, and we did our best to do so. We had access to a limited amount of information, and to the best of our knowledge, that was the story. In our follow-up article, we include new information that has surfaced since.

Our news articles do not make judgments about the stories they cover. We do not decide who is innocent or guilty. Put another way, we do not attempt to convict anyone by reporting on arrests; likewise, we do not attempt to protect anyone, especially by withholding names.

I hope this clears up some questions that have been raised in the past week. We appreciate feedback on articles, both positive and negative. We always strive to improve our coverage in order to best serve the Brandeis community.