Manchester, Conn.

What’s happening at the Cheshire (Conn.) Public Library is a legitimate controversy with fair points on both sides, not the “censorship” reflexively warned against by people who consider themselves the defenders of right thinking.

The question is whether the library should stock the new book about the murder of the Petit family in Cheshire, “In the Middle of the Night,” by Brian McDonald, an account arising from the author’s meetings and correspondence with one of the two career criminals charged in the atrocity, Joshua Komisarjevsky.

The opposition to the library’s stocking the book seems to be mostly emotional — a matter of wanting to respect the Petit family’s imagined feelings about the book and not wanting to seem to pay any respect to a perpetrator of something so horrible. People are entitled to their views about what their tax money should pay for and are entitled to try to implement those views through the democratic process, like complaining to a library board.

But even the most benighted libraries — libraries that mean to try to control what people think — do not really “censor.” To the contrary, since no library has the resources to stock everything, by necessity libraries do only what everybody else does in regard to reading material: They choose.

To censor is to suppress, and nobody is suppressing the book based on Komisarjevsky’s story. Through ordinary channels it will remain available to anyone who wants it. There are millions of books not stocked by the Cheshire library, some omitted because of the librarian’s decision rather than because of a simple lack of awareness, and that’s not censorship either.

No, the issue here isn’t censorship but the ordinary criteria for choosing, and Cheshire’s library director, Ramona Harten, has offered solid reasons for stocking “In the Middle of the Night”: It’s about something that happened in town, it’s the library’s longstanding policy to stock material involving the town, and the library has received requests from townspeople to stock the book.

There are less emotional objections to stocking the book at the library — for example, that it is poorly written; that it is likely self-serving, one criminal’s attempt to shift most of the blame to another; and that its widespread dissemination could prejudice potential jurors. But these objections are weak.

However poorly written and self-serving, the book is an account of an incident that horrified and shamed the whole state and so must be considered in an evaluation of that incident. For Cheshire, particularly, the book is a local historical document, not to be read credulously, to be sure, but an important part of the record of the case, just as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” hateful as its author is, is a vital historical document and, as the Meriden Record-Journal’s assistant managing editor, Eric Cotton, notes, has long been kept at the Cheshire library without complaint.

As for prejudicing potential jurors, the account given by “In the Middle of the Night” is bound to become evidence at trial anyway, whether or not Komisarjevsky stands by it. And of course there probably are few people in Connecticut who, because of news accounts, aren’t already well aware of details of the Cheshire atrocity, and anyone who is unaware of the case might be so ignorant generally as not to be a capable juror.

To achieve a fair trial here Connecticut will just have to rely on the efforts of the Superior Court to find a dozen intelligent, decent and conscientious people who understand their duty to separate whatever they have heard outside court from the evidence presented in court and to judge only on the basis of the latter. Jury service in a murder case is a great burden, the more so when a death sentence can be imposed, but Connecticut probably still can find such people.

Respect is best paid to the victims of the atrocity in Cheshire not by complaining about the local library’s collecting material about a horrible local event but by joining the atrocity’s survivor, Dr. William A. Petit, in petitioning the General Assembly for a “three strikes” law, or even a 15 or 20 strikes law, which might have prevented the atrocity but which most legislators somehow still can’t bring themselves to support.

And respect is best paid to the work of libraries not by crying censorship whenever there is controversy and thus suggesting that the judgments of librarians are unquestionable but by patiently explaining selection criteria and reviewing how thery apply to particular material.

Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., is a frequent contributor.