Red-Flagged Petitions

By the time Sloane got back to Montgomery, the eleven petitions were stacked on her desk in a crooked tower, yellow legal paper bent at the corners from being handled too many times.

Tobin had flagged them in red. PLRA dismissals. Failure to exhaust. Five inmates, then six more from Hobson County, all claiming the same thing in different words: no hearing, no lawyer, no judge, money demanded for release, injuries ignored. One had written in block letters that the sheriff kept the night phone off the hook unless somebody paid cash. Another said the jailer told him the magistrate only came when Gaddy wanted him there.

Sloane stood with her hand on the top page and read them again.

Her own signature sat on the dismissal orders. Clean. Routine. No drama in it. That was the ugly part.

She had not asked for more because the record had looked thin and the filings had not met the rule. That was true. It was also a thin excuse in a county where the courthouse doors might as well have been nailed shut after dark.

She pulled one file open and saw the date stamp on the first petition. Six weeks. Then another, then another, each one older than the last, each one crossed out with the same language. Administrative remedies not exhausted.

“Hell,” she said to the empty office.

Tobin, from the outer desk, looked up over his monitor. “Judge?”

“Pull the county docket from Hobson. Everything tied to Gaddy. Bond, detention, habeas, any magistrate review.”

He was already moving. “Right now.”

She read the line again until the words stopped being words and turned into a shape. A man who could make the court vanish on paper could make people vanish off paper too.

That evening, after chambers had emptied and the cleaners’ carts had rattled down the hall, she stood at the window and looked out at the parking lot below. Her rental Chevy sat in the heat, silver paint dull under the lamps. In the distance, beyond the courthouse lights, the city went on like nothing had happened.

Her finger rested on the corner of the top petition. She had signed it away because the rule said to wait, and because waiting was easier than calling a liar a liar with no proof in hand.

On the page, in black toner, was a man’s name. Below it, another line for the prisoner’s signature. Blank.

Sloane closed the file.

“Get me the intake photos,” she said when Tobin came back in.

He stopped short. “Of the Hobson detainees?”

“All of them.”

He nodded once, already dialing.

Sloane picked up the first petition again and put it on top of the pile, then another, until the stack was square. By morning she would know whether the paper had been wrong, or whether the paper had been used to cover something ugly.

Either way, Hobson County was about to come into the light.