When I was ready to drive, she asked whether I had changed my mind about testifying.
“No.”
“Good. You can be frightened and still mean yes.”
I turned off the engine, waited another minute, and started it again.
The injury faded faster than the attention.
For several weeks, people spoke to me with a careful softness that made ordinary questions sound like medical assessments. Officers who had greeted me casually for years became formal. Lawyers asked whether I was all right while studying whether I looked angry enough to affect their clients.
I could not blame them for considering it.
I considered it too.
In my first years on the bench, I had treated self-examination as something that mostly happened while writing reasons. Now it arrived before I opened a file: whether I had slept, whether anger was supplying an answer before the parties spoke, whether I was mistaking familiarity with one injustice for knowledge of another person's circumstances. The questions required attention rather than a dramatic declaration that I had changed.
Whitcomb and I reviewed assignment conflicts. Cases in which Briggs was a material witness would go elsewhere. Talia's matters remained with other judges. If a connection created a reasonable concern about impartiality, the parties would have an appropriate process to raise it.
The arrangements were not an admission that I had lost the ability to judge.
They recognized that a court should not depend on my private confidence in myself.
My colleagues took the transferred work. I took other cases in return. Ruth made the calendar changes without announcing them as a favor.
Then I had to continue making decisions about people who had nothing to do with the corridor.
In one suppression hearing, an officer said he noticed a condition that justified further investigation before opening a vehicle door. The body-camera sequence placed his first mention of that condition after the search had begun.
The difference required examination.
Counsel questioned him. The state offered another explanation. I reviewed the recordings and applicable arguments and issued the ruling the record supported.
A commentator later claimed I was punishing officers for what Briggs had done.
The written decision did not mention Briggs because Briggs had no place in it.
In another hearing, the disputed recording supported an officer's account of a warning and a defendant's subsequent movement. The defense's description omitted a part of the exchange that mattered.
I ruled against that defense argument.
No one circulated the order online.
I did not publish it as a certificate of balance.
A judge's work is not improved by making decisions to supply evidence for a public image. The parties deserve the actual reason, written carefully enough that it can be challenged.
Still, I found myself returning to old assumptions.
How often had I heard a confident description and treated the confidence as evidence of careful observation?
How often had I asked a frightened person to supply a chronology without recognizing that being frightened could interrupt one?
The questions did not permit me to reopen every concluded matter because I now felt differently. They did require me to listen more precisely in the cases properly before me.
At a training meeting, I asked colleagues to consider how the word resistant was being used in reports.
Some welcomed the question. Others worried that we were drifting into skepticism directed at one category of witness.
That concern deserved an answer too.
I suggested an exercise using accounts from different sources: officers, defendants, complainants, clerks. For each label, we would identify the conduct supporting it and the information that could test it.
It was slower than talking about credibility in general.
It was also more useful.
One afternoon, a woman receiving a sentence told me she had seen the photograph of my face.
I acknowledged that she might have.
Then I reminded her that we were there to address her case, including what she and the other parties had submitted.
She nodded but looked disappointed.
I understood the wish beneath it. My experience might make me seem more reachable. It could not become a promise of a particular outcome.
That evening, I wrote to Paul that the hardest consequence had been learning how many people expected the incident to transform me into either a symbol or a suspect.
He called rather than replying.
“Which do you think you have to be?”
“Neither.”
“Then stop accepting the premise before you answer.”
He made difficult advice sound annoyingly simple.
In chambers the next morning, I took the card bearing Talia's question from the drawer.