>>98758339>Literally any other story he'd smash the trigger in a heartbeat.Matter of fact, it's what he did at the end of Inferno, although Titan at least made the point that there were "innocent", non violent prisoners in the ships as well as rebels.
But here's the thing: Chopper is not a bad guy. He's a tenacious, ballsy kid who doesn't kill, steal or threaten anyone, who only wants to be somebody in a city of nobodies. Even before the end of Oz, Dredd admits he admires the kid's sheer brass balls, after finding out he succeded in travelling across the Cursed Earth and then the Pacific on a surfboard. He even tells him to go win Supersurf for Mega-City One, right after letting him know he's going to arrest him the moment he crosses the finish line.
Sure, Dredd is perfectly capable of working 99.99% of his cases with mechanical precision, but every now and then he runs into one case that for some reason resonates with him. Be it a talking rat or a girl's brain in a jar, it's stuff that touches him and makes him really think beyond what the Law says. And Chopper is a very extreme version of that.
Wagner's point in stories like this and Error of Judgement is that Dredd isn't an infallible machine, that he's susceptible to being touched by random cases, and that, much like with Minty before him, the older he gets, the more it happens. And then he gets that one letter in the mail and, well, we all know how that goes.
