Hi, this is Ruth Graham, the host of Slate Presents Standoff, what happened at Ruby Ridge. Each season of Slate Presents will be an in-depth reported narrative miniseries. Today, I'm excited to introduce our second season. It's called Charged, Inside New York's Gun Court, and it's hosted by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and the Slate Political Gab Fest. You're about to hear the trailer. New episodes will appear right here beginning April 17th, so stay tuned.

A few years ago, I started working on a book about criminal justice, and right away, I stumbled on an unusual experiment, up on the 19th floor of the towering justice center in Brooklyn.

It was called gun court.

Politicians said the new court was built to get guns off the streets by going after the worst of the worst.

I was being chased. Don't I know I'm being grabbed. after the worst of the worst. I was being chased.

All I know, I was being grabbed.

It's led to the ground, me about that.

And all I heard is, if you move, I'm going to kill you.

And they lock me up.

The gun court was a forced marriage between a liberal desire for gun control

and a promise of punishment without mercy.

If you pick up a gun, you will suffer the consequences. I think it's as simple as that.

Only it wasn't as simple as that. Inside the courtroom, the stories of the people facing charges turned out to be very different from the TV bad guys described in the press conferences.

Often they were teenagers or just a bit older, and they'd never faced anything like this

kind of punishment before.

Fifteen years, that's a long time.

Like, I was scared, to be honest.

Like, that's like my whole life.

Up on that 19th floor, I watched people's lives twist and turn as they hunted for a way out.

Then she calls us, and she said, well, you know, he was caught with a gun, and her whole, everything just changed.

I was looking for that bell ASAP, though, you feel me?

Like, y'all got to get me out of here.

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