I recently put the condominium I lived in as a graduate student on the market. I moved out in 2007, not the best time to sell real estate. During all these years, the condo board allowed me to rent out my unit. When the condo hit the market, I received an offer on the first day. The offer was good: 95 percent of my asking price with a preapproved buyer. It was not perfect, as it involved an F.H.A. loan, a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which requires buyers to jump through more hoops and thus tends to be more involved than a conventional loan. I was still ready to make a counteroffer, however, and would have gone forward if we could have reached a middle ground on some concerns I had.

We never got to that stage, though. When I Googled the name of the prospective buyer, I learned that the person was charged with attempted sexual assault in 2016 while in college. The gist of the charge is that he kissed a fellow student against her will, refused to leave her room, attempted to touch her sexually and exposed himself to her. I am 99 percent sure this is the person who wants to buy my condo. The person has very unusual first, last and middle names, and someone with that name was arrested last year on charges of disorderly conduct in the city where I own the condo. I looked up the court calendar, and his trial for the attempted sexual assault was set for this spring.

In the abstract, I do believe that people who are charged with a crime should not be barred from purchasing real estate. But I also like the people who live in my building, and they have always been generous to me in letting me rent out my unit. There are quite a few single women living in the building who will find the same information I did when they Google this person’s name. I know they wouldn’t like having this person as a neighbor. At the end of the day, I didn’t want to sell my place to this man and decided to reject the offer, much to the chagrin of my real estate agent, who claimed I need only look at the terms of the offer and nothing else.

Was such a decision justified? Name Withheld, Chicago

Let’s suppose your identification was correct. People will complain that your making the decision before he was tried means that you were ignoring the presumption of innocence. But the presumption of innocence is a legal standard: The state shouldn’t punish someone unless it can prove he has done something beyond a reasonable doubt, and that isn’t established until a conviction is secured. We can make reasonable judgments as individuals, however, on the basis of the total evidence available to us.

So let’s ask what we’d think if you had been dealing with someone who had been convicted of the offense in question. There are various considerations here. The federal government, in 2016, warned that a blanket policy against providing housing to people with criminal records could violate the Fair Housing Act, because of its disparate impact on minority applicants. That’s presumably not the issue here. It’s also the case that most sex offenders, so far as we can tell, don’t reoffend; and there are good reasons to be wary of sex-offender registries, which arguably increase homelessness among former offenders without seeming to reduce recidivism. Still, the recidivism rate of sex offenders means that they pose a greater risk than do people taken at random.

Once again, a clash between values presents itself — in this case, between giving proper weight to sexual assault and giving proper weight to the welfare of the accused. There’s no algorithm for action here. But in siding with a community you were once a part of against the interests of a stranger, you did nothing wrong. You could make a case that you protected your building from the prospect of housing a convicted sex offender whose propensity to assault women was higher than that of the average person. The arrest on charges of disorderly conduct provides further reason for concern. I understand that you don’t want to be rendering a judgment on a fellow citizen, but you were perfectly entitled to have made the choice that you did.