Summary

Introduction – The author begins with narration of a court case from 1995, when he was early in his career as a defense attorney in Washington, D.C. He describes working on the case of a black 15-year-old client whom he calls “Brandon,” commenting in narration that he has changed the names of clients, lawyers, and judges. He outlines how Brandon was charged with possession of both a firearm and a small amount of marijuana, was sentenced to six months in an under-developed correctional facility in the aftermath of what the author and his fellow attorneys called the “Martin Luther King speech.” That speech, the author says, delivered by Judge Curtis Walker, evoked the life, work, and death of the famed civil rights activist in the hope of getting a (usually black) defendant to reconsider his ways and choices. The author then describes that instead of...