As we awaited the reading of the verdict Tuesday in the trial of former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin, you could practically feel the tension in the air. Until the judge uttered the word, “Guilty,” once for each of the three criminal counts against him, many of us felt like we just couldn’t take the outcome for granted, despite the mountain of direct evidence against him. But the jury did as prosecutors urged them to do – to believe what they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears. What they saw, what they heard, was an officer who believed his badge and the authority that accompanies it gave him absolute power to assert his will, to ignore the desperate final breaths of the man pinned beneath his knee, to disregard the pleas of onlookers to show some mercy to the man in his custody.