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and claustrophobic: A father says, You listen to the judge, boy, followed by a shrill, Fuck the judge . . . . A woman’s voice pleads, Can my daughter come home today? while someone’s brother complains, Why are they charging him with murder? He was just drivin’ the car. Next to him, a public defender wheedles with a DA, a salesman at the bazaar, pressing to close the deal: Come on, you don’t need a felony on this one, we’ll cop to the misdemeanor, save some court time . . . . The DA has her eyes closed, files tucked under each arm, trying to remember the facts of the case they’re talking about, one of forty-seven she is supposed to handle that morning.
    As each of the three courtrooms begins its morning calendar call, the blur of intertwining hallway conversations fades as lawyers and litigants hustle into court. There are enough stragglers, witnesses, and families waiting for their children’s cases to be called to keep the hallways crowded and loud, and any respite in the noise quickly evaporates as the public address system kicks into gear. Throughout the rest of the day, conversations will be drowned out by an intermittent electronic bong, followed by the voice of one of the court bailiffs speaking over the PA summoning somechild or his family or a witness or an attorney to court. During morning calendar call, the busiest time in the courthouse, the harsh screech of the loudspeakers reverberates constantly, so loud that not even the thick, heavily worn double wooden doors barring entry to each courtroom can stop the sound. These announcements frequently drown out the words of judges and lawyers in the midst of hearings, destroying any semblance of courtroom decorum, and proceedings constantly are delayed as attorneys leap up to telephone some other courtroom competing for their services via loudspeaker. The crush of cases is so great, and the public defender and the district attorney here are so understaffed, that it is not uncommon for them to have two, three, sometimes five or more cases scheduled simultaneously in different courtrooms, causing impatient judges to electronically bellow for them to come on down every few minutes.
    Peggy Beckstrand strides through the chaos, up the stairs, and makes her way into the courtroom of Judge Roosevelt Dorn, the newly arrived supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall. Ostensibly, she is there to pay a courtesy call on the new judge, but her real purpose is to assess what she will be dealing with in the coming year. She sits down inconspicuously in the back of the courtroom, surveying the scene like a baseball coach scouting the competition, jotting down the occasional note but mostly just watching, taking it all in. On the bench, she sees a fifty-seven-year-old man, short and a bit stocky, with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to his head, unfashionably long sideburns, a scrubby, well-clipped mustache, and large gold rings on each of his thick, blunt pinkies. Aside from his booming voice, his most daunting characteristic is a pair of pouchlike cheeks that seem to puff up when he is incensed, a warning sign as unmistakable as the maraca chatter of a rattlesnake. Lawyers have pushed through the double doors to his courtroom, spotted those inflated cheeks and slitted eyes peering over his reading glasses, and they have spun around and left, preferring to wait until later to ask him to call their cases. Peggy has seen that look during past encounters with this judge, when they both worked in adult court. “With Dorn,” she has already warned her staff, “it’s not a question of if things will come to a head. It’s a question of when.”
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    â€œYou may have been on probation before, young man,” the judge says, his trademark baritone booming, a radio announcer’s voice emanating from the little man peering over the tops of gold-rimmed reading glasses. “But you have never been