The jury listened to closing arguments without interruption. The judge instructed them that the government's burden remained proof beyond a reasonable doubt for each criminal count, no matter how disturbing they found the evidence. They were not to punish Hask simply for being an unpleasant man or for running an office people disliked. They were to decide whether the government had proved the charged conduct. Then they retired to deliberate.
Adrien waited in a private room away from reporters. He did not want to be photographed watching for the verdict as though the proceeding had been staged for his vindication. Garrett sat with Lena in a hallway, both too tired to discuss what might happen. Nolan walked outside and stood near the steps, looking at people holding signs with names of seized-property claimants written across cardboard. He recognized three names from dispatch calls he had taken years earlier and had no idea whether those people remembered his voice.
The jury returned a guilty verdict on all counts submitted to it. The clerk read the findings slowly while Hask stood beside his attorneys. He showed little expression, though his hands pressed tightly together at his waist. No one in the gallery applauded. Some people cried quietly, while others seemed unable to move because they had spent years imagining that a verdict against this man could never be read aloud in a public courtroom.
At sentencing, the judge heard from the government, the defense, and people affected by the conduct established at trial. Hask's attorneys presented his years of service, letters from residents who believed he had helped them, and the hardship imprisonment would cause his family. The prosecutor described the abuse of authority and the deliberate falsification of records. The court considered the applicable law and the individual circumstances rather than treating the crowd's anger as a sentencing guideline.
The sentence was seven years in federal prison. For some residents, the number meant that accountability was still possible. For others, it seemed painfully small against the value of property taken and the number of people whose lives had been disrupted. Garrett sat through the announcement without smiling. Estelle folded her hands in her lap. Nolan stared at the floor until the court adjourned, thinking about how long seven years could feel and how little time it had taken to put Adrien against a cruiser hood.
When Hask was led away, he looked neither dramatically defeated nor suddenly harmless. He looked like a man whose movements would now be controlled by rules he could not rewrite. That change mattered, but Adrien did not mistake it for a complete repair. The people harmed by the department still needed property returned, records corrected, and institutions capable of hearing them when the headlines disappeared. A sentence could address one man's conduct. It could not carry every other obligation by itself.