The Forgiver

Michael Brick: The hallways of the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn are crosscut passages of venom and condemnation: on one floor, police officers daily stare down a man charged with killing one of their own; on another, a man accused of strangling a college student recently received letters that called him "a no-good son of a bitch."

Not even the judges are fully exempt. Justice Albert Tomei, taunted by a brutal rapist one day last year, sentenced him to "a place that is cold and heartless and not very humane, where you will spend the rest of your life thinking about what you did."

And yet here comes Denise Sandy: the forgiver. Against this backdrop, she seems profoundly out of place. Lost, maybe.