Faith looked toward the jury. "The air was hot enough that I became aware of every breath. My wrists hurt, and I couldn't move into a comfortable position. I knew that the officer had the power to open the door, and I did not. What frightened me most wasn't that he had authority. It was that nothing I said seemed capable of persuading him to use it responsibly."
Price waited before asking his final question. He noted her thirty-four years of service and the dangerous places in which she had worked, then asked why she had not announced her rank as soon as the stop began. Faith considered the question carefully. She understood that her answer might become the most widely repeated sentence of the trial, but she refused to choose words for their appeal.
"Because I was a citizen traveling to see my mother," she said. "I was not on a mission, and I was not asking anyone to salute me. I gave the officer what the law required, and I followed the instructions that were lawful. My right to be treated fairly did not begin when somebody told him how many stars I had. It was there from the beginning."
A heavy quiet settled over the room. Faith continued, saying she had served in places where people risked their lives to protect the rule of law and had buried friends who believed that duty meant serving people they would never meet. She did not think her own suffering was greater than the suffering of those friends, but the roadside humiliation had wounded a different part of her understanding of home. She had returned from dangerous places expecting that ordinary travel within her own country would not require her to prove her humanity.
Keene approached for cross-examination with a folder of carefully organized questions. He asked whether military training had taught Faith to remain calm in dangerous circumstances, and she agreed. He suggested that her professional experience might have made her more confrontational because she was accustomed to giving orders, and she answered that she had given no orders to Lawson. She had asked questions and complied with physical instructions until he used force.
"You could have told him you were a general," Keene said.
"Yes, I could have."
"That might have shortened the encounter."
"It might have," Faith answered. "But that does not establish that what he did before learning my rank was lawful."
Keene tried to persuade her that the reach toward her pocket might have appeared threatening from Lawson's perspective. Faith acknowledged that officers must assess movement carefully but pointed out that she had announced her intention, moved slowly, and had no weapon. She refused to speculate about thoughts Lawson had not shared, even when the defense's questions invited speculation. By the end of the examination, the attorney had secured several concessions about the limits of her memory but nothing that changed the sequence on video.