Those are the words, but here's the resulting context. The author is a public defender tasked with finding the best possible resolution to impossible cases.

In one case they uttered those 11 words after an unsuspectedly harsh sentence, followed by:

> “All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

> The judge then imposed two days in jail. Two days instead of one hundred and eighty.

It sounds like the words are legalize for "would you please reconsider?"

Defendants are streamed in every 5-10 minutes, so in this case, simply asking again was enough for the judge to agree and move on to the next case.

Two days instead of 180--and certain deportation.

Normally I appreciate the extraction of what's left unsaid in a clickbait headline, but this is not that. This is story-form writing, where a intriguing title is appropriate, and the significance of the words is completely absent out of context, so revealing them buys the reader nothing.

...and I can't parse that; I suspect the author has perpetrated a typo. Is that "to review or to reconsider"? "To review or reconsider"?

Lawyers tend to be pernickety about precision in language.

It makes sense in context, where the author is asking the court if there is anything they could take another look at with the goal of prompting them to reconsider. He is not asking if they would like to do A or B, but rather if they would please consider doing A in order to then do B.

Not bad; so you say it's "to review in order to reconsider", or something. So I'll buy that interpretation. I still think the language is clumsy, and way too ambiguous for a lawyer.

I'm sorry the author didn't explain why these words are magical. They flipped the judge (who seems to be hardline) from 180 days jail, to time served. Is there some rule of court procedure that these words invoke? Do the words comprise an implicit threat to appeal?

The purpose of the article is to talk about the arbitrary and sometimes cruel nature of the legal system. They have power because they are known to have power, because what lawyer will overstep the boundary implied by the almighty power bestowed onto the judge to effectively ask, “will you please just do a different ruling?”

They don't invoke anything, beyond a simple appeal to humanity. And the fact that they work, when everything else about the legal system is based around mechanical certainty, is terrifying for a lawyer; because it undermines the system they're trained to understand as “if X then Y will (almost) always happen.” If a judge can just decide, “you know what, instead of Y I'll decide to do Σ,” then that shakes the implicit trust of the system. By revealing that the Justice System is based around the whims of a small group of people with disproportionate power.

Thank you! I was having a very frustrating time trying to parse the titular sentence, after all that build up.

Username checks out by the way.

The court is asked to maybe review something (a file, paperwork, etc…) and _then_ reconsider its decision.

Thus the « … to review to reconsider »