On the morning of the fourteenth — a Thursday in November, the kind of gray, cold morning that the city produced in quantity at that time of year — I was sitting with my coffee and my files at six-fifteen when I felt the particular quality of focus that settled over me before hearings that mattered. The Williams case was not a simple case. It was a police misconduct hearing involving allegations against four officers from the third district, allegations that had been documented, corroborated, and contested in ways that were going to require the kind of careful, steady attention that I had spent twenty years developing.
The irony of what was about to happen did not register until afterward, when I was telling the story to my sister and she put her hand over her mouth and said: you’re serious. I was serious. The universe had a particular sense of timing that I had learned, as a judge, to find professionally interesting.
