😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.

Therein lay the real weight, without Tomás saying it as a threat: I wasn’t deciding about a petty thief. I was deciding about a man in a chair, on the other side of the city, who didn’t even know his life was at stake in a courtroom.

We went back to the courtroom. The judge asked me, now formally, if, as an officer, I had anything to contribute to the continue reading …