. . .  my involvement in the story began in summer, 2002 when Guandique’s name first surfaced as a potential suspect. I found and interviewed his family in El Salvador and his friends and relatives in D.C. I wrote to Guandique in federal prison, where he was already being held in September, 2002 for attacking two female joggers in Rock Creek Park, and we corresponded in Spanish for several months. When I resumed the correspondence in 2007, he replied immediately, and after a couple of letters, he consented to a visit, as he had in 2002.

She spoke Thursday in her chambers, a temporary, smaller office than usual because of the court's ongoing renovation. Ginsburg appeared in fine form, getting up often to retrieve books to show a visitor. She has resumed her usual schedule of conferences, dinners and travel.

Fatal Distraction
Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn't want any sedation, that he didn't deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

When a person's future is at stake, what kind of a system depends on the chance rescue efforts of volunteer lawyers? And does it really have to be so hard to hold public officials accountable for their misconduct--or to get them to say they're sorry?

Mr. Canter said the senator should be assessed based on her record in Congress, where she has voted against the industry’s interests on several occasions, including supporting cigarette tax increases to help expand children’s health care.

And Todd Henderson, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, argued that it would be unfair to assess lawyers by whom they represent. “Nobody would want to live in a world in which lawyers are judged by the clients they take,” he said.

George Vasilescu’s reaction was immediate. He tossed his head back, thumped his feet.

“No more,” Mr. Vasilescu, who is deaf and mute, signed. “I beg you. No more.”

Mr. Vasilescu, 64, a hotel steward who hurt his back, neck and wrist, had just been told by his lawyer that the judge wanted him back for another medical exam, another hearing, another delay, after four years churning through the system.

It is a good day at the Queens hearing office when there is only one such outburst.