Because Lucas was being arraigned on a Monday morning, he was brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs, wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.

Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them with a level of guilt that was not theirs.

I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had belittled him since he was a child.

Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at $200,000.

I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back of his wrist with mine.

'Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin doesn't have a case and he knows it.'

The judge's glasses were orbs of light and the lines in his face seemed gathered around his mouth like crinkles in papier-mâché.