The most frightening experience of my life began when I was 22 and detained in Massachusetts after an automatic license plate reader mistook me for someone who previously drove uninsured. I was pulled over about 20 minutes from my home dressed in a J. Crew Ludlow suit for one of my first post-college business meetings.

I felt like I was in shock as I was handcuffed and booked. Despite my objections, the officers said they’d heard it all, which makes more sense now that I know some estimates have found 10% of readings by automatic license plate readers in the U.S. are false. However, the consequences of those errors aren’t the arresting officer’s responsibility.

When I was allowed my one phone call, I made the mistake of trying to contact my employer, a newspaper, instead of a family member or a lawyer. I wanted to explain my absence from the meeting and assumed reporters on the team could intervene. That call was blocked immediately, and I had no second chance. Even though I had a journalism degree, I didn’t know that attempting to call a news outlet would cost me communication with the outside world until I was released.

Once I was put in the local lockup cell, I gave my lunch to an aggressive man who was incarcerated for alleged domestic abuse. Despite repeatedly asking for legal representation, I was told I was being transferred to Orleans, Massachusetts, (two hours away on Cape Cod), where a public defender would handle my case the following morning because I was out of calls.

They shackled my ankles and transported me to county lockup at 6 p.m. I was placed in an intake area with about 40 others, including a man who allegedly ran over his girlfriend (he left little doubt) and someone described as a “bully” for the Providence mob operation in New Bedford.

During processing, the other incarcerated individuals laughed as I handed over my gingham tie, shoelaces, belt and suit pants before I stripped naked, exchanging my shirt and dress pants for orange prison clothes. That night, I gave my dinner — a peanut butter sandwich — to a group of men who seemed dangerous, and a guard allowed me to skip showering.

I spent the night terrified on a top bunk. My cellmate hadn’t said a word. The guards mentioned he had been there for three years, and I spent much of my time wondering what he had done. I never learned why he was there, but he was kind and woke up early to wish me luck when the guards came for me at 5 a.m. the next morning.

I was moved to Orleans in an armored police wagon with rails along the floor for the cuffs on my ankles. Aside from the three armed guards that accompanied me, I was thankfully alone for the two-hour ride. By 10 a.m., a public defender recognized the massive mistake that had occurred. When I finally saw the judge that afternoon, he reprimanded the prosecutor and ordered my immediate release.

Back in my own clothes, freedom felt like a relief, but I had to make my own way home with a dead phone, no charger, and whatever was in my pockets at the time of the arrest. I lived alone, so I had no idea if anyone was aware that I was missing or the gravity of my absence. I was 22, freaked out, and needed to get home by traveling across a section of the state that declined in population and public transportation access significantly after October.

I finally reached my mom at 6 p.m. after borrowing the phone at a Boys & Girls Club once my Greyhound bus arrived from Orleans. My entire family feared I had died in an accident and had been searching for my car along Route 24 between Newport and Boston. My employer and my family were actively discussing whether to file a missing person’s report.

“We thought we lost you too,” an uncle said. A year had barely passed since my dad suffered a fatal “widow-maker” heart attack at 46 years old.

I didn’t drive for 10 years after the incident.

Still, I consider myself lucky compared to others who now face deportation and indefinite imprisonment after misidentifications or other mishandling of their cases, including Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who is being held in an El Salvadorian gulag. The judge in that Orleans courtroom recognized me as a person caught in a mistake and let me go. I wasn’t abused, beaten or forgotten. But now...

The constitutional power judges have been entrusted with is being actively ignored by elected officials who would rather gloss over facts or flat out ignore them. Their lawyers admit errors, but political contracts with hot-shot autocrats are apparently just too attractive to deny. Due process now seems to be a relic from a time before this administration came into power.

I have a tattoo on my wrist that is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which speaks in part to American self-determination and the idea that everyone has the power within themselves to turn “furies into muses and hells to benefit” through the power of their own mind. But if my tattoo had a crown over it, like Andry José Hernández Romero’s — the gay Venezuelan makeup artist currently at The Terrorism Confinement Center — and I were arrested today, could I be looked at differently?

Faith in one’s self ― like Emerson wrote about ― depends on the presence of judgment rooted in principle, not performance. What happens when that judgment is taken away? When politicians masquerade as prosecutors? When the laws and protections we’ve been promised by our Constitution disappear? When due process gives way to TikTok spectacle? Is anyone safe?

I was lucky. I walked out. I went home after experiencing 24 of the most terrifying hours in my life. I made it through a system error, but “error” itself is increasingly becoming a new American system as political incentives favor cruelty, as contracts reward confusion, and as furies are not transformed but enthroned.

Will McGuinness is a writer and an advisor to nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. He lives in Miami, Florida.

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