The Four-Year Lag: When a Split-Second Decision Collides with a System on Standby

We build systems for a reason. We create frameworks of law, order, and process to elevate ourselves above pure, chaotic instinct. We check into a place like a downtown Hyatt Hotel, a gleaming tower of steel and glass, and we expect that order. We expect the quiet hum of air conditioning, the polite nod from the concierge, the predictable elegance of a Morton's Steakhouse. We expect the system to work.

But what happens when, in the span of a few heartbeats inside a sterile, tiled restroom, that entire system becomes irrelevant? What happens when the primal, biological code of survival—a code written in millennia of fight-or-flight responses—overwrites everything?

This is the story of Cory Hall. And while on the surface it’s a story about a shooting and a trial, I believe it’s really about something much deeper. It’s a story about latency. It’s about the staggering, almost terrifying gap between the speed of a human decision made under extreme duress and the glacial pace of the system we’ve designed to judge it. For four years, Cory Hall’s life was stuck buffering, waiting for the system to process an event that was over in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

When I first read about this case, I honestly just sat back in my chair, speechless. It wasn’t the verdict that shocked me, but the timeline. Four years. Four years in a cell, without bond, for a decision made in a flash of terror. It’s the kind of temporal disconnect that reminds me why I got into studying systems in the first place—to understand where they succeed, and where they catastrophically fail the very humans they’re meant to serve.

The Primal Algorithm

Let’s strip this down to its core processing. Imagine the scene: September 4, 2021. Cory Hall is at a party, wearing flashy jewelry that marks him as a target. Two men, who weren’t guests, follow him. The location shifts from a public space to a private one—the restroom. The door closes. In that moment, the sophisticated social contract of the Hyatt Regency dissolves. The rules of the outside world are suspended.

According to Hall’s testimony, he was attacked. He saw guns. His defense attorney, Andrew Rier, summed up the internal calculation with brutal simplicity: "It was either kill or be killed."

This is what I call the Primal Algorithm. It’s the oldest software we run. It’s not programmed in Python or C++; it’s programmed in adrenaline and cortisol. It weighs variables—threat, escape routes, probability of survival—and executes a command in milliseconds. There is no deliberation. There is no committee. There is only an output. In this case, the output was Hall firing his weapon to defend himself.

The system’s first piece of evidence that this algorithm had run wasn’t a security camera, but a human observation. A state witness testified that Hall’s appearance had physically changed between entering and exiting the restroom, a clear sign of a violent struggle. It was the human body itself, broadcasting the results of a brutal computation. But how do you translate that instantaneous, biological reality into a language that a courtroom, a system built on painstaking deliberation, can understand? Can a process that takes years ever truly comprehend a choice that took seconds?

The System's Latency

After the Primal Algorithm ran its course, the institutional one began. And it was a system plagued by lag. Cory Hall, the man who made a split-second decision to live, was put on hold for 1,460 days.

Think of it like this: the event in the restroom was a high-speed data packet, a compressed file of terror, violence, and survival. It was sent to the justice system for processing. But instead of an instant download, it was met with dial-up speeds. The system had to deconstruct the event through forensics, interviews, and testimony—in simpler terms, it had to rebuild a high-speed car crash using only verbal descriptions and still photos, years after the fact.

This four-year delay is a terrifying bug in the code of our justice system. The fact that a jury could eventually parse through the evidence and arrive at the conclusion that Hall was "justified in using deadly force to defend himself from a robbery attempt" is a testament to the system's potential for accuracy, but the four-year delay is a soul-crushing cost of that processing. It reveals an immense, agonizing price for processing a human reality that the system itself wasn't built to experience in real-time.

This wasn't a crime that unfolded over weeks in some shadowy underworld. This happened at a Morton's Steakhouse, a symbol of corporate order, nestled inside a hotel brand like Hyatt Place or Grand Hyatt, which are practically monuments to predictable, structured environments. The raw, bloody chaos of that moment stands in such stark contrast to the sterile, organized world around it. It’s a collision of two realities. So, what do we do when our systems, designed for the predictable world of a Hyatt House lobby, are asked to judge the unpredictable chaos of a life-or-death struggle? Is four years of a man’s life, a father separated from his young son, an acceptable processing fee?

The Human Code Isn't a Flaw

In the end, the jury’s acquittal of Cory Hall and the dismissal of charges against Paige Gallon feels like the system finally catching up to reality. It’s a validation that the Primal Algorithm, in this specific and terrible instance, made the correct call. But we can’t ignore the cost of the lag. This case is a glaring signal that we need to re-examine the latency in our institutions. The verdict isn’t just a legal outcome; it’s a profound statement about the primacy of human instinct, with lawyers reacting to the news as ‘Justified in defending himself’: Lawyers for man acquitted of charges in 2021 deadly Hyatt shooting react to verdict. We can’t treat a human life like a data packet stuck in a queue. The system worked, yes. But it was four years too late.