Part 1
My name is Judge Regina Holloway, and the worst abuse of power I ever experienced happened the night I was treated like I had no power at all.
It started on a Thursday evening, just after sunset. I was driving home in a new silver Lexus LS, a tenth-anniversary gift from my husband, Warren. The car still had its temporary tag displayed exactly where the dealership had placed it, and the windows were factory tinted, nothing illegal, nothing unusual. I was tired from a long day in chambers and looking forward to nothing more dramatic than changing into slippers and eating leftover pasta.
Then the red and blue lights flashed behind me.
I pulled over immediately, lowered my window, and placed both hands on the steering wheel before the officer even reached my door. I have spent enough years in the legal system to know that compliance can save time, even when it does not earn respect.
The officer who approached was a white man in his forties, broad shouldered, with the stiff swagger of someone used to being obeyed before he finished speaking. His nameplate read Dean Mercer.
He said my temporary plate looked suspicious. Then he said my windows were too dark. Then he asked whether the vehicle was actually mine. I answered each question calmly. I provided my license, registration paperwork, proof of insurance, and the dealership documents. He barely glanced at them before his tone changed from skeptical to aggressive.
“Step out of the vehicle,” he said.
I asked if there was a specific problem. He repeated the order louder, one hand already near his holster. I stepped out. He circled the car as though he were waiting for it to confess. Then he told me the car might be stolen.
I remember staring at him, thinking surely this would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. I was standing on the shoulder of a public road, dressed in a navy suit and low heels, holding paperwork with my name on it, beside a car purchased less than a week earlier. But Officer Mercer had already decided what story he wanted.
When I told him he had no basis to accuse me of theft, he grabbed my wrist.
The movement was so sudden that I lost my balance. He twisted my arms behind my back and snapped the handcuffs on hard enough to make me gasp. I heard one of my bracelets crack against the metal. He told me I was resisting. I was not. He pushed me toward the squad car and said I could explain myself downtown.
I asked for his badge number. He smiled and told me I could read it in the report.
At the station, they took my phone, my jewelry, and my dignity with the same bored routine. A sergeant looked at me strangely, as if he sensed the arrest made no sense, but no one stopped it. I was booked on suspicion of possession of stolen property and obstruction, charges so ridiculous I almost laughed—until the holding cell door shut behind me.
That was the moment I made my decision.
I was not going to call in favors. I was not going to use my title to walk out before sunrise.
Because Officer Dean Mercer had no idea who he had handcuffed that night.
And by morning, he would be forced to explain his lies in the one courtroom where I held the highest seat.
Part 2
The cell was colder than I expected and louder than television ever gets right. Metal benches. Fluorescent lights. Women trying to sleep while officers laughed somewhere down the corridor. My wrists throbbed where the cuffs had bitten into them. When I finally saw the dark bruises forming, I touched them gently and felt my anger settle into something sharper than outrage.
Purpose.
I was allowed one call. I used it on Warren.
The moment he heard my voice, he said he was coming down with our attorney. I stopped him.
“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”
He thought shock had made me irrational. Maybe it had, a little. But I knew exactly what I was doing. If I let this disappear quietly in the middle of the night, Mercer would write whatever fiction he pleased, and by morning it would become procedure, then paperwork, then another untouchable lie in uniform. I wanted him on the record. I wanted witnesses. I wanted daylight.
So I told my husband to wait until morning and do one thing only: notify the presiding clerk that I would still appear for Friday’s calendar.
There was a long silence on the line.
Then Warren understood.
The next morning I was released on my own recognizance after a rushed internal review failed to untangle the mess quickly enough. My arraignment paperwork had already been forwarded into the docket system before anyone realized who I was. That alone told me how carelessly the arrest had been processed.
I went straight home, showered, changed into my black robe, and covered the bruises on my wrists with makeup that did not quite hide them. My clerk met me in chambers with a face drained of color. She had reviewed the arrest report.
“It’s full of contradictions,” she said.
Of course it was.
Mercer claimed my temporary tag was “missing or obscured,” though the booking photos clearly showed it visible in the rear window. He wrote that I became “verbally combative” and “refused multiple lawful commands,” though the dashcam timestamp—already flagged for review—showed less than three minutes between first contact and my being cuffed. He also claimed I could not provide proof the vehicle belonged to me. That was the easiest lie of all to break. My dealership packet had been entered into property the night before.
At 9:00 a.m., he walked into my courtroom in full uniform, carrying himself with the smug confidence of a man expecting a routine hearing and an easy nod from the bench. He had not yet looked up.
When the bailiff called the matter, Mercer finally raised his eyes.
I watched the exact second recognition hit him.
His face emptied.
He knew me. Not from the arrest—he had never bothered to truly see me then—but from the framed photograph in the courthouse lobby and the oath ceremony covered in the local paper two weeks earlier. He knew, in one devastating instant, that the woman he had shoved into a squad car was the judge now looking down at him from the bench.
And I knew something else at that very same moment.
This was no longer just about one unlawful arrest.
It was about how many times he had done this before, certain nobody he targeted would ever be in a position to fight back.
Part 3
Courtrooms are built on ritual, but that morning every familiar sound carried a different weight. The shuffle of paper. The scrape of shoes. The low murmur before silence. I had presided over hundreds of hearings by then, yet I had never felt the room so alert, so aware that something irreversible was about to happen.
Officer Dean Mercer’s attorney requested a continuance almost immediately. I denied it. The arrest had happened less than twelve hours earlier. The reporting officer was present. The charging documents were already before the court. The facts were fresh, and so were the bruises on my wrists.
I asked Mercer whether he stood by the contents of his sworn report.
He swallowed once and said yes.
That answer sealed his fate.
First, I admitted the dealership paperwork bearing my name and purchase date. Then I ordered the property inventory produced, which showed the same paperwork had been taken from me at booking. Next came the intake photographs, including close images of my wrists. You could see the swelling. The marks were raw, deep, unmistakable.
Mercer shifted his feet but said nothing.
Then the prosecution—clearly panicked by this point—attempted to soften the situation by calling it a misunderstanding. I stopped that too. Misunderstandings do not create fabricated facts. They do not erase documents. They do not justify excessive force after compliance. Lies under oath are not misunderstandings. They are perjury.
I ordered the dashcam footage played.
The courtroom watched in complete silence as the video showed exactly what I had remembered: my hands on the wheel, my calm tone, my immediate compliance, my visible paperwork, and Mercer escalating without any factual basis beyond suspicion he could not explain. There was no obstruction. No aggression. No attempt to flee. Just a man in uniform growing angrier because his authority had not automatically transformed his assumptions into truth.
When the footage ended, I removed my sleeve just enough to reveal the bruises still darkening my skin.
“You testified that force was necessary because I resisted,” I said. “Point to the resistance.”
Mercer looked at the screen, then at the floor.
He could not.
I referred the matter for immediate internal affairs review, ordered the charges against me dismissed with prejudice, and found probable cause for contempt and false statements in official proceedings based on the contradictions between Mercer’s report, the physical evidence, and the video. He was taken into custody before the lunch recess, this time with every procedure followed exactly.
What followed over the next year was slower, but no less important. Internal investigators uncovered prior complaints that had been minimized, delayed, or quietly buried. Two junior officers admitted Mercer had a pattern: stopping Black drivers in newer cars, implying theft, escalating first, writing later. The department fired him within days. Federal investigators later joined the case, and Mercer was convicted on civil rights violations and sentenced to prison.
As for me, I filed a civil action and won a substantial settlement. I kept none of it for myself beyond legal costs. I used the rest to establish the Holloway Justice Fund, which helps victims of police abuse obtain legal representation before their stories are swallowed by the system.
People still ask why I stayed in that cell overnight.
The answer is simple. Power that protects only itself is not justice. I stayed because too many people never get the chance to be believed. If my worst night could become evidence, precedent, and protection for someone else, then suffering it in silence would have been the true waste.
Justice is not blind when we force it to look directly at the truth.
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