Part Five: The Courthouse
I was forty-three minutes late to the Williams hearing.
My clerk, a young woman named Priya who was in her first year and had a quality of unflappable competence that I found enormously reassuring, had informed the courtroom of a delay without specifying the cause. Both parties’ counsel had waited with the professional patience of people who understood that judges were sometimes late and that the correct response to this was patience.
When I entered the courtroom, I was aware — I was always aware, it was one of the conditions of the work — of the specific quality of attention in the room. The attorneys for both sides, the court reporters, the gallery, all registered my entrance in their particular ways. I took my seat.
I was, I should note, in full judicial robes.
I had changed in the courthouse parking garage, standing beside my car, taking the robes from the carry bag with the specific calm of someone who understood that what you wore in a courtroom was not incidental. It was the uniform of the institution. The institution had just been involved in something that was going to require my full participation, and I was going to bring my full institutional weight to everything that came after.
“We are in session,” I said.
The Williams hearing proceeded.
I want to be clear about this: the hearing proceeded with the same quality of attention I would have brought to it on any morning. What had happened on Carver Boulevard did not change what the Williams case required. It required careful evaluation of evidence, precise application of legal standards, and the specific kind of sustained attention that did not allow for distraction. I gave it those things.
What it also gave me — and I have thought about this carefully, about whether it is appropriate to say this, and I have decided it is appropriate because it is true — was a kind of experiential supplement to the documentary record I was evaluating. The cases before me involved allegations of an officer approach characterized by pre-formed conclusions, by escalation beyond what the situation required, by the specific failure to listen that converted a manageable moment into an unmanageable one.
I had spent the morning inside one of those situations.
This did not change the legal analysis. The legal analysis was the legal analysis. But it confirmed, in the specific way that direct experience confirmed things, that the pattern being described in the Williams case was real, was recognizable, was something that happened in the way that the evidence described it happening.
I ruled carefully and completely on the Williams case.
