BOSTON — Stop us if you've heard this one before. A woke Massachusetts judge rolls the dice on a violent defendant — $0 bail, a continuance without a finding on felony charges, or, in this case, halving the sentence of a man who opened fire on Boston Police officers, saying on the record she's "taking a chance" on him. Then the man gets out and fires roughly 60 rounds at moving cars on Memorial Drive.

In Florida or Texas, opening fire on police officers while already on probation for a violent felony is the kind of conduct measured in decades, not years. In Massachusetts, with Sanders, it was five to six — instead of the 10 to 12 prosecutors demanded.

She did it on tape, telling him she knew exactly what she was doing.

"Mr. Brown, I do realize that I'm taking a chance on you," Sanders is heard saying on the recording. "When people stand up, experienced police officers and probation officers, and they tell me, 'This guy is a danger to the community,' I hear that and it gives me… you know, I can't look into a crystal ball and figure out what's going to happen once you get out. But I do understand that I'm taking a risk here."

"And I just pray that my intuitions are right," she added, "and that you have the ability, the smarts, the will, the support not to go out there and endanger other people's lives as you have in the past."

The 2021 sentencing was not a case where Sanders lacked information. She had it all — and brushed it aside.

An officer involved in the 2020 South End shootout — in which Brown, then on probation for an earlier stabbing, opened fire on Boston Police officers in the middle of a Saturday afternoon — took the stand at the sentencing hearing and warned Sanders, in plain English, exactly what would happen if Brown was sprung early.

"Mr. Brown could care less if innocent people get hurt," the officer told the court, pointing to Brown's indiscriminate gunfire in Boston on a Saturday afternoon. "I'm a firm [believer] that if Mr. Tyler Brown gets out, he will hurt or worse kill someone, because he has shown us how well he has done while out on probation for a stabbing."

The probation officer who testified said the same thing, NBC10 reported. He told the judge Brown's record showed random acts of violence and that he was a danger to the community.

Sanders ignored them all and gave him five to six years anyway.

The recording captures Sanders working out, in real time, the soft-on-crime philosophy that produced the sentence.

On the question of opening fire on police officers, she drew a distinction that has not aged well: "There's a difference between shooting at a police officer and shooting a police officer. And the reality is that no one was injured."

On the prosecutors' demand for 10 to 12 years, she balked — claiming the longer term would foreclose Brown's chance at redemption: "It would be very hard for him to get out after that sentence and still have the hope necessary for change to occur."

The decision was, even at the time, controversial. Then-Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins — herself a national figurehead of the progressive-prosecutor movement and not a politician given to demanding stiff sentences — was publicly "disappointed" with Sanders' decision, NBC10 noted in its Tuesday report.

Reaction to the recording on Tuesday was bipartisan in the sense that even progressive legal commentators couldn't defend it.

NBC10 Boston chief legal analyst Michael Coyne told the station the 2021 sentence "appears to be a rather generous and lenient" one, and added that "clearly he didn't deserve that opportunity, as yesterday's events show."

Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan, whose office now has the Memorial Drive case, told the station "there are some serious questions we need answers to" — a polite way of saying her office is now prosecuting an alleged double-shooting that several Suffolk-side professionals tried to prevent on the record in 2021.

Sanders herself is no longer on the bench. She has left the Superior Court and now works in private mediation. She did not return NBC10's request for comment through her new office.

Court documents in the Memorial Drive case show that Brown — who has been diagnosed with PTSD, depression and anxiety — was released from a psychiatric hospital on Friday. Before Monday's shooting, he called his parole officer to report that he had relapsed and was experiencing suicidal thoughts. He later flashed a large firearm on a Facetime call.

He was, in other words, telegraphing in real time the deterioration the 2021 officer-witness had warned the court about — to a parole supervision regime that exists in his life only because Sanders gave him a sentence light enough to put him back on the street.

A sworn officer who survived a 2020 broad-daylight shootout told a Suffolk Superior Court judge, on the record, that the defendant in front of her would eventually hurt or kill someone if released early. The judge said she heard him. She said she was taking a chance. She halved the sentence anyway, and she said why, and the tape exists.

Five years later, two civilian drivers are in critical condition on Memorial Drive because the chance Janet Sanders said she was taking was not hers to take.

This is a developing story.