JUDGED IN SECONDS: Intersecting Police Liability with Neurobiology

Nine minutes. Nine seconds. The same uniform. Two deaths a nation called identical — and the prosecutor who came to believe they were never the same thing at all.

Imran Ali charged Kim Potter with manslaughter three days after she killed Daunte Wright, in the rawest, angriest weeks his state had ever known. He had spent twenty years putting violent offenders in prison. He believed in accountability without apology. And yet, in the aftermath, he found himself unable to stop asking the question no one around him wanted to hear: what actually happens inside a human brain in the instant everything goes wrong?

Judged in Seconds is the answer. Pairing Ali’s decades in the courtroom with Dr. Mitch Javidi’s research into human performance under extreme stress, it reveals how catastrophic outcomes are decided not in the moment we all replay on video, but in the seconds and conditions that load that moment long before it arrives. It introduces Pre-Escalation Syndrome — the science of the flooded nervous system — and shows why the difference between a tragedy and a crime is precisely the difference our justice system has stopped being able to see.

This is not a book that takes a side. It asks for something harder: that we hold both families in mind at once — the person who died, and the human being inside the uniform — and refuse the cheap comfort of a villain and a verdict. Grounded in the law itself, from Graham v. Connor to the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2025 ruling in Barnes v. Felix , it builds a clear-eyed case for how we train, how we judge, and how we finally prevent the next death.

We are all judged in seconds. The only question left is whether we can learn to judge those seconds justly.