Bench

Petra Okolie-Hagstrom is a law clerk on the fourteenth floor of the Dirksen Courthouse in Chicago, working in the chambers of federal judge Ronan Vestergaard-Bell. She reads case files with meticulous care, drafts bench memoranda with precision, and lives by the discipline of the work. But she has noticed something troubling in the sentencing patterns of her judge, a pattern she has documented acr...