The Judge Who Remembered the Forgotten

In 2015, Judge Steven Leifman of Miami-Dade County stood in his courtroom and watched the same faces cycle through again and again — homeless men and women with untreated mental illness, arrested for minor offenses, jailed, released, and arrested once more. Nobody in the system saw them as people worth saving.

Leifman refused to look away. He built the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery, replacing the county's crumbling, warehouse-style facility with a place designed around dignity. Crisis teams now meet people on the street before the handcuffs come out. Peer counselors who have walked the same hard road sit beside those in crisis. The program has diverted thousands from jail into treatment, and recidivism has dropped dramatically.

What made the difference was not a new law or a bigger budget. It was one person in a position of authority who decided that the crushed and the forgotten mattered.

This is the vision the psalmist casts in Psalm 72 — a ruler who "delivers the needy when they cry, the poor and those who have no helper." The Almighty measures leadership not by territory conquered or wealth accumulated, but by what happens to the most vulnerable people in the kingdom. The reign described here bends toward the overlooked, the voiceless, the ones everyone else steps over on the sidewalk. God's justice does not trickle down. It reaches down — and lifts up.