Twenty years ago, I was working as a copy editor at the Asbury Park Press when a wire story broke that gave me pause. “We’d better be very careful about how we present this because the guy they’re talking about might well turn out to be innocent,” I recall saying to the person designing the front page.

The guy in question was a security guard named Richard Jewell, whom the FBI had decided to zero in on as the prime “person of interest” in a bombing that had taken place at that summer’s Olympic…