The Yale Daily News has been forced to apologize for running an advertisement from an imprisoned sex offender, according to a posting on the college paper's website.
In an editor's note posted Monday, the Yale Daily News admitted to mistakenly running an ad in its print edition titled, "Pen Pal wanted, incarcerated, treated as subhuman, remind me I'm human, write."
The individual who placed the ad was committed to a sex offender program and deemed "sexually dangerous," the paper wrote in its editor's note.
"At the time of publication, the News did not know that the man who placed the advertisement was committed to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program in 1998 after being declared a 'Sexually Dangerous Person' under the state's law following multiple sex abuse incidents against child victims, according to a Dakota County District Court file," the paper wrote. "According to U.S. District Court documents, he was denied release in part because he refused to participate in sex-offender treatment, regularly threatened and assaulted MSOP staff, and presented a high risk of reoffending."
The paper went on to apologize for running the advertisement without checking deeper into its origins and author.
"We want to provide a fuller picture for anyone who saw the print advertisement," the editor's note states. "We also want to apologize for not looking more deeply into the context of the advertisement, and failing to conduct a more thorough investigation of the advertisement's source. We have since implemented new steps to strengthen our ad vetting and research processes."