Judgment begins long before testimony is spoken.
In this courtroom, perception itself becomes evidence.
Returning to the courtroom that once reshaped his family’s life, a man observes judges, prosecutors, and lawyers whose faces resemble creatures hardened by repetition?mudskipper, hawk, toad. As a trained face-reader, he recognizes that verdicts are already forming before language enters the room. Testimony unfolds within a structure where multiple fraud cases are compressed, responsibility is displaced, and linguistic coercion quietly governs what may be said. Blending legal realism with sensory metaphor, the story examines how institutional bias operates through perception rather than explicit command. Justice appears less as deliberation than as an economy of gazes, where truth is filtered through habit, hierarchy, and misrecognition, and where victims rarely recover what was lost.
institutional violenceinstitutional biascourtroom fictiontestimonial fragilityperceptual misrecognitionlinguistic coercionstructural prejudiceevidentiary perceptionmoral responsibilitylegal truth
