The letter on my desk was from a family, a husband and wife. They had written to me after reading a short news article I’d done about a 26-year-old convicted child molester who had been arrested that week and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. The girl was their daughter. She had been raped by the man two months earlier but had been locked away in juvenile detention for more than a month—longer than her attacker had been in custody.

Their story seemed unbelievable to me. They claimed that a local judge had sent their daughter to a private juvenile detention facility hundreds of miles away from their home in northeast Pennsylvania without notifying them. She had been on probation for a simple assault charge the year before (a mild altercation with a neighbor), and when she showed up to school intoxicated a week after she was raped, she was arrested for violating the conditions of her probation. The parents also claimed that she’d had no legal representation at the time of the sentencing. Like most reporters, I have a knee-jerk skepticism about people and their problems, especially people who write letters to newsrooms, and it didn’t seem possible that this had really happened—at least not in the way they described it.

The couple wanted to meet with me and explain everything in hopes of getting their daughter’s case reconsidered, or getting her moved closer to home. I thought meeting with them was a bad idea. Even if they were telling the truth, I didn’t have time to investigate Luzerne County’s juvenile justice system and I didn’t want to promise them a story or an outcome I couldn’t deliver. And if even half of what they’d written were true, then they had suffered enough without some reporter dragging their private tragedy into public.

But I agreed to meet with them anyway, out of a mixture of pity and curiosity. I had been a reporter long enough not to act on pity alone or let my pity push me into advocacy journalism, which I esc...