Mike Newall (thanks, Mara): In Courtroom 801, Maurice Ragland began to shake. The drug dealer who shot him twice in the head had just been led in for a May 6 sentencing hearing.
Ragland’s nerves were raw. The tremors began in his shoulder, rippled to his fingers – a lingering effect of his wounds.
Ragland was left for dead nearly four years ago in a puddle of blood beneath a West Philadelphia streetlamp.
“I’m not dead,” he told the police officer who found him.
Ragland recovered – aside from the spasms – and did something seldom heard of in Philadelphia: He testified.
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