When it’s time to give sentences, there’s something about the courtroom that no camera can quite capture. How the air feels denser than usual. The moving around of papers that no one is reading. They sit on opposite sides of the aisle and try hard not to look at each other, but they fail most of the time.
That kind of day finally came not long ago for a case in Johnson County, which is just outside of Kansas City. The case had been going through the system for almost a year. Someone got life in prison for killing their boyfriend. The news doesn’t find it easy to write about. It was a very human moment in a room that has seen a lot of them, though.
The courts in Kansas City have a long and complicated history with time and justice. After all, this is the same metro area where Lamonte McIntyre got out of prison in 2017 after 23 years for a double murder he didn’t do. He was 17 years old when police in Kansas City, Kansas, arrested him. It turned out that the only real evidence against him was his first name and the statements of two witnesses who were forced to give them. In the end, that case led to an investigation by a federal grand jury, the arrest of former detective Roger Golubski in 2022, and a reckoning within the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department that the city is still working through today.
It’s hard for that history to leave. It’s built into the walls, in the institutional memory of lawyers who have worked in these courts for decades, and in the doubt of people who live there and have seen the system almost equally fail and succeed. It’s almost like the exception that proves the rule when a verdict is right.
In part because of this, courtroom events like the Johnson County sentencing feel important to pay attention to. As I watch these proceedings, I get the feeling that justice isn’t just an idea that comes from above. Piece by piece, motion by motion, witness by witness, it’s put together by people who are tired, sometimes short on money, and almost always aware that no matter what happens, at least one family will be devastated.
This kind of weight was recently held in a different courtroom in Anderson, South Carolina. Two families got together while the judge decided what would happen to a teen murder suspect. One family begged for help. It seems likely that the other person asked for something more definitive. These scenes happen all the time in American courtrooms, but there’s something about the Midwest, the South, and smaller cities with long histories that makes them feel more squished, personal, and harder to get away from.
It’s not always dramatic like what you see on TV. In general, the real drama, if you want to call it that, is less loud. To keep her knees from shaking, a mother pressed her hands flat against them. During a victim impact statement, the defense lawyer was staring at the table. The exact moment when the judge stops moving papers around and the room stops moving at all.
Kansas City has seen a lot of these kinds of events. It keeps adding pages. Everyone was reminded by the McIntyre case what can happen when the system moves too quickly, on too little, and with too much power that can’t be checked. There is more to getting things right than just a gavel and a verdict. The cases going through its courts right now are a good example of this. It requires accountability at every step, from the first meeting with the police to the last sentence.
There’s still a lot of room for doubt about how consistent that accountability is. When a courtroom delivers what it promised—finality, accountability, or something close to the truth—it’s hard not to feel, if only for a short time, that the system is trying to be what it says it is.
