The 16-year-old boy pleaded with the judge through scratchy handwriting on a crinkled piece of notebook paper.
He wrote about crying every night in his cell, about missing his family and his school. He told her he wants to be a welder and if she gave him a chance, she’d never see him in court again.
“I promise you I am not a bad person,” the boy wrote in the letter sent this summer to Jefferson Circuit Judge Tracy Davis, which the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting reviewed in court records. “I was just hanging around the wrong people.”…