S.F. State student who invoked Shield Law reveals murder scene photo in national contest

The trickier question is whether Welsh made the right decision — choosing to use a photograph of the gunned-down Bennett to advance his career, but not to advance police officers’ efforts to solve Bennett’s murder. Edward Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said journalists’ conflicting obligations to the criminal-justice system and their own methods and sources have “always been very problematic” and not prone to simple moral calculus. “Is there some kind of moral rule you can apply? Probably not,” he said.