Part Ten: The Courtroom That Hadn’t Changed
I want to end with something true, which is different from ending with something satisfying.
The courtroom I went to that morning, after Carver Boulevard and the handcuffs and the officials arriving and the cuffs coming off — that courtroom was the same courtroom it had always been. The Williams case was the Williams case. The legal standards that applied to it were the legal standards that applied to it. My job in that room was what it had always been: to evaluate the evidence with care, apply the law with precision, and produce a ruling that was right.
The case had not changed.
But something had changed.
I had spent twenty years evaluating these cases from the bench — from the elevated position of the institution, with all the authority and distance that position conferred. I had been thorough. I had been fair, to the best of my ability, which was considerable. I had tried to see what the evidence showed and to rule accordingly.
What I had not fully been able to do, from the bench, was to inhabit the experience of what the evidence described.
Now I could.
This is not a simple thing to sit with. It would be cleaner to say that the morning had given me something — insight, understanding, renewed purpose — and leave it at that. But what it had actually given me was more complicated than that. It had given me the full weight of what the system felt like from the outside. The specific, acute, clarifying awareness of someone who knew every procedural protection available and could feel none of them working. The experience of having identification in her hand and watching it be disregarded. The experience of the handcuffs.
I was both the judge and the evidence.
What I did with that depended on whether I had the discipline to use it the right way — not as personal grievance, not as professional platform, but as information. As something that made my understanding more complete.
I think I had that discipline. I think I had been building it for twenty years.
I know that the day I sat in my chambers with Reynolds, asking him about not insisting, something was different than it would have been before Carver Boulevard. Not because I was angrier. Not because I had an axe to grind. But because the abstract had become specific, the documented had become lived, and the distance between the bench and the evidence had closed.
The courtroom had not changed.
I was more present in it.
That, I decided, was the obligation.
Not triumph. Not vindication.
Presence.
The kind that sees what is actually happening.
The kind that insists.
Elaine Washington continues to serve as a federal judge in the district where she has presided for twenty years. In the twelve months following the incident, she participated in the development of revised documentation standards for the city police department, contributed to a working group on officer accountability culture, and delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the National Association for Court Administration, where she spoke about the relationship between institutional authority and institutional responsibility.
Her address was titled: “The Distance Between the Bench and the Evidence.”
Officer Reynolds was commended in the revised incident report for his conduct following his initial arrival on scene.
Officer Brentwood’s case was referred to the departmental review board.
The Williams hearing concluded with rulings issued on all contested matters.
The judicial robes are still in the trunk.
Every morning.
