Mitchell had a private theory, developed over three decades and never spoken aloud to anyone, about the eyes of the condemned.

He believed, though he knew it was unscientific and would have been embarrassed to defend it, that a person facing a just punishment and a person facing an injustice carried themselves differently in some way too deep to fake, and that with enough years of watching you could learn, imperfectly, to tell them apart.

The guilty, in his experience, eventually turned inward.

Whatever they said with their mouths, their eyes carried the knowledge of what they had done, a heaviness, a hiding, a flinching away from being truly seen.