And it worked.

I have come to think of what my grandmother did with Sheriff Miller as a kind of masterclass in a thing our culture badly misunderstands, which is the difference between mercy and weakness.

We tend to collapse the two — to assume that a person who declines to inflict the maximum available punishment is being soft, is failing to stand up for themselves, is letting the wrongdoer off.

And sometimes that is true; sometimes the failure to punish is simply cowardice, or the inability to hold a boundary.