Update on Troy Farlow Story and It's Not Good

Vivian posted a retraction of her earlier defense of candidate Troy Farlow today. Based on new and more complete evidence, she sadly realized she had been misled. Here’s her quote:

When the story of the hit and run charge against Troy Farlow emerged, I was contacted by the Farlow campaign. The result of that contact was this post. I’ve known Troy for a while but I treat information fed to me by campaigns (all of them) with a hefty dose of skepticism. Even after the post, I continued to question whether this was the whole story and was assured that it was.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am committed to telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. I get information from campaigns all the time and almost none of it ends up on this blog. I’m not into innuendo and gossip. In this case, I reported the “truth” as it was told to me. It appears that it just wasn’t the whole truth.

For that, I apologize to my readers.

To err is human, to retract is being a responsible journalist or blogger. Since I too launched a vigorous defense of Farlow, I am also going to apologize to any of my readers whom I misled. And to Vince at Too Conservative. My one plea to him is that next time he gets a story, please, please source it properly and write a fully fleshed out account. You’d be surprised how much benefit of the doubt we’ll give to a fellow blogger, regardless of which side of the aisle he's on, if his reporting is convincing. Unfortunately, Vince gave a sketchy report, with an inflammatory headline, that was short on facts and long on innuendo. It looked more like a hit piece than a factual description of events. But I’ll give Vince the benefit of the doubt. In the rush to get a story out and with a million competing priorities, it’s easy to report in shorthand and think others will be able to fill in the blanks. But we can’t. Anyway, I am sorry for doubting his integrity in my own rush to judgment.

And as this newspaper account, from the Daily Press shows, that judgment was wrong:

Democratic House of Delegates candidate Troy Farlow omitted a crucial element when he described his role in a 1999 hit-and-run case, according to the Virginia State Police.Farlow told the Daily Press last week that after having a "crisis of conscience," he went to authorities and turned in his father, who had driven away from the scene of a collision four years earlier. But Corinne Geller, a Richmond-based spokeswoman for the state police, told the Daily Press Tuesday that Farlow did not approach them until after a felony warrant had been issued for his arrest. In addition, a source directly involved in the investigation told the Daily Press that the state police had contacted Farlow repeatedly seeking his cooperation before obtaining the arrest warrant.

I can’t say I share Vivian’s outrage, though. I’m just sad at the turn of events. But there’s one important difference between me and Vivian. Unlike her, I’ve never met or spoken to Troy Farlow, so I can’t share her very justifiable anger at having been personally misled. I based my post solely on evidence from an earlier newspaper account in the Virginia Gazette, which seemed to support my belief that Troy was a conflicted young man who was simply the passenger in a car when his father hit somebody else and fled the scene. I believed that Troy wrestled with his conscience and eventually turned himself in because he was committed to doing the right thing.

Based on that, I concluded that he deserved a second chance. I believe everybody deserves second and even a third chance. The catch is they need to prove their integrity by coming clean and getting the entire story out, admitting their culpability and apologizing. And then going on to show they’ve turned their life around. Even if Troy had come forward only after he realized he would be caught anyway, if in the eight years that followed, after paying his fine and making amends, he had proved to have a sterling character, I’d say it was time to drop the incident and let him move on.

But the fact that he is still dissembling and still misleading even would be allies, like Vivian, leaves me with doubts about his character. I think both Republicans and Democrats can disagree on a lot of issues but all of us are united in wanting candidates who are honest, have good character and are committed to the public good.

And like Vivian, I am sorry for anything I did to mislead people. And for shooting a messenger whose message I disliked.

Troy Farlow and the Land of Redemption and Second Chances

H/t to Vivian for first exposing the attempted smear job on a fine candidate and bringing us the truth.

America has been called the land of opportunity. It’s the place where people from all over the world come to reinvent themselves. It’s the country that offers a second chance. And that’s a peculiar concept throughout the rest of the world, which respects rigid social caste and hidebound tradition. America, by contrast, is fluid, future looking, and egalitarian.

America is also the place where a young man can wrestle with his conscience, face up to the consequence of past actions, and find forgiveness. Or at least that’s what Troy Farlow thought.

When he was 24, he got into an auto accident with his father at the wheel of the vehicle. His father chose to flee from the scene after making sure that a woman in the car that he had hit had not been injured. Farlow, Sr., also convinced his son, Troy, not to tell anybody. Troy’s father, an insurance executive, feared that if word of the accident got out, he could lose his job.

Troy and his father had been estranged for years and Troy was desperately trying to reconcile with a parent he had never truly known, so he agreed to keep silent. And he did for about four years until his conscience couldn’t take it any more and he got a lawyer and turned himself in.

Despite the fact that nobody was hurt in the accident, a law had been broken when Farlow and his father left the scene of the accident. To reiterate, Troy Farlow was only the passenger. He did not, himself, hit another car. His only culpability was remaining silent. Until he broke his silence, made restitution and agreed to testify against his own father. Ironically, his father was never prosecuted so he’s the only one who actually paid the consequences for breaking a law. And his was a sin of omission, not commission at that.

Nevertheless, he paid his debt to the law and to society. He should have been allowed to move on with his life. Except, unfortunately, he decided to run for office. And he had the misfortune of running against Brenda Pogge, a floundering Republican candidate, who herself is facing a lawsuit for voter fraud.

So, a Republican blogger, Vince Harris, of Too Conservative, decided that the best defense for his failing candidate was to be as offensive as possible in smearing Pogge’s Democratic opponent. So, he dug up this unfortunate incident and blew it up all out of proportion.

Vince Harris received the arrest warrant and court papers, which he posted on his blog. Ironically, Vince also neglected to redact Troy Farlow’s social security number (it’s redacted now) from the documents in his haste to get up his smear post. Redaction is just a fancy word for getting out a black magic marker and crossing the damned social security number out. In an age of identity theft and privacy laws, Vince may himself have run afoul of the law. He certainly violated ethics by not checking the story thoroughly and deliberately leaving his readers with a misleading impression of the events. Ironically, Vince, who has written movingly about his grandfather, a Baptist minister, also probably broke the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bring false witness against your neighbor.”

But perhaps Vince doesn’t think a young man who makes a mistake deserves a second chance. One he, himself, got last year when another blogger outted him for posting comments to his own blog site under false names. It caused a minor flap and I defended Vince on the grounds that he was young and everybody deserves forgiveness and a second chance.

Unfortunately, Vince, the recipient of a lot of peoples’ willingness to give the benefit of the doubt doesn’t believe in second chances for others, especially if they happen to be Democrats. It’s just not politically expedient at election time when sliming and smearing an opponent takes precedence over ethics. At an important time like this, even redemption must take a back seat to victory in November. Even in the land of second chances.