No Matter How Loud I Shout (11 page)

On this morning, an assistant district attorney looks to Peggy for guidance on an armed robbery case, an unusual stickup involving a sixteen-year-old honors student from a wealthy family from a coastal enclave in South Los Angeles County. The kid has no priors, the assistant says. Unlike most kids in Juvenile Court, John Sloan's family is intact, supportive, churchgoing, well connected, and desperate to do whatever it takes to keep their son out of a state prison system that would eat him alive. The case is the flip side of Ronald Duncan's—since he was over sixteen at the time of the crime, John can be sent to adult court, where he could end up doing more time for robbery than Ronald could for murder. The defense lawyer hired by the family wants the DA to drop its effort to have John sent out of Juvenile.

Peggy shakes her head no without hesitation. There won't be any deals on this one. Bad enough the law forces her to keep murderers when they happen to be under sixteen. She certainly won't voluntarily hold back on older violent criminals like John Sloan, not when California's extremely tough “fitness” law makes a transfer to adult court a virtual lock for prosecutors when a kid is over sixteen. Besides, she has talked to the victim of that robbery—his whole family was traumatized, his little girls are afraid to let him leave the house, afraid he'll never come home again. One nervous pull of the trigger that day, and this could have been a murder case, she reminds her deputy DA. “We're going forward with the fitness hearing,” Peggy says flatly, looking the defense lawyer squarely in the eye. “Office policy. We don't withdraw fitnesses. If your client committed an adult crime, he deserves to go to adult court.”

The answer is the expected one. The other lawyers nod like old bridge partners and head into court, while John's mother, who had been sitting nearby listening to the exchange, sits and weeps without uttering a sound, her eyes red and swollen, her hands gripping the purse in her lap as if it
were a shield, waiting for a loudspeaker to hiss and spit her child's name so that she, too, can rise and enter this grimy and forlorn hall of justice.

It would not always have ended this way. At one time, before LA began to drown in a juvenile crime wave, Peggy and her colleagues did not feel the need to be so inflexible: Prosecutors used to pick and choose only the absolute worst kids to target for the adult system. A few years ago, John Sloan would never have faced transfer into the adult arena and its theoretically harsher punishments. Now, though, prosecutors here file fitness motions on nearly every kid over sixteen who commits a serious crime—over nine hundred of them last year, triple the number five years earlier. And the law is so tough, judges—albeit grudgingly—have become little more than rubber stamps for the prosecution's wishes. It is a trend mirrored nationwide, a deliberate shift in policy, letting the crime, not the criminal, dictate how a child is treated by the system.

Starting today, it is also a policy that will further distract Peggy Beckstrand from prosecuting Ronald Duncan, putting her—and the rest of the Juvenile Court—on a collision course with the new supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall, Roosevelt Dorn, judge of the Superior Court and minister of God, whose self-appointed mission is nothing less than rescuing the system, one kid at a time.

“My mother and father made a lot of money off of ripping people off, and using scams such as cashing bad income tax checks. But the main cash that my parents made came from selling homegrown marijuana. We had a backyard that was full of marijuana plants that grew at least an average of four feet tall. My mom and dad sat around the house smoking marijuana and having sex all day long; even if I was right in front of them. My parents didn't care, they would just blow the smoke in my face until I got a buzz and left the room on my own.”
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Geri Vance looks up uncertainly from the story he is reading, chapter two of his autobiography in progress. He is a handsome teenager with large brown eyes and a receding hairline, a brotherly peacekeeper on the unit, a favorite of both the staff and the other kids at the hall. He is bright and insightful, but there are enormous blind spots in his experience: he has never been to a museum or a baseball game or a public library or a doctor's office (unless you count the infirmary at Juvenile Hall). He reached sixteen without ever writing much of anything, but our class has opened a door. He is churning out ten and twenty pages a day now, handicapped only by the rigorous schedule of the hall, and the propensity of the staff to confiscate papers at night, promising to return them in the morning, then losing or destroying them. Geri has to hide his best work under his mattress as if it were contraband.

The room we sit in is dank and musty, like a seldom-used closet in someone's basement. There is a folding table and chairs. A few bedraggled paperbacks and a row of Gideon Bibles occupy a bookshelf bolted to one pale blue cinder block wall—props that enable the Juvenile Hall staff to label these uninviting quarters the “library.”

Now Geri hesitates in his recitation, glancing at the other boys, unsure if he should be smiling and boasting about the passage he just read, or ashamed. The other kids are listening intently, their faces neutral, though there is some snickering when he reads the next passage. It describes the day he walked in on his father and a prostitute in bed, and how they reacted to the intrusion by ordering him to fondle the woman's breasts and genitals. He recalls that he was six or seven years old at the time. It was a scene that would be repeated many times.

“I knew it was dirty,” Geri writes, “and I ran to my room and felt really bad and confused every time. But I liked it, too.”

After one bathtub frolic with the prostitute, Geri tells the class, his mother came home and found him playing in his room with his father's gun, a gang-style bandanna on his small head and a marijuana joint in the corner of his mouth—imitating Dad, he said proudly. Geri's mother beat him with an extension cord until he bled. Then she took the gun, found her husband in bed with the hooker, aimed the pistol at the father's head, and pulled the trigger. The gun, it turned out, was not loaded. Geri watched his father knock it from his mother's hand, then savagely beat her while the prostitute sat naked and giggling, too blasted to get dressed and leave.

Geri and his mother left instead, fleeing the house that night and living for the next few months on peanut butter and bologna, staying in cheap motels, surviving on his mother's earnings as a prostitute (or that part of her earnings not squandered on crack cocaine). Geri did not attend school, but stayed in the motel room to watch his younger brother, Joachim, while Mom was out scoring tricks and dope. This lifestyle lasted until Geri was eight or nine, when his mom was sent to prison for cashing other people's checks, and Geri went to Juvenile Hall.

“I've been in the system ever since,” Geri reads, putting down his paper. “That's the end of the chapter. I haven't gotten any farther yet.”

I look around the table at the rest of the class, hoping to see astonishment or horror registering on some of the faces in the room, these boy with their unlined features and old, world-weary eyes. Instead, I see knowing looks of recognition, kids who had witnessed or experienced the same sort of life, or worse.

Someone tells Geri, “The Menendez brothers got nothin' on you,” and everyone laughs. The Menendez case had been much in the news at the time, the two monied brothers from Beverly Hills who killed their parents, then justified their premeditated act by claiming their father physically and sexually abused them. Their uncorroborated story had so confounded jurors that no verdict could be reached—something Geri and my other writing students find perplexing. They, like many kids in Juvenile Court, can make claims of terrible abuse, all of it documented and indisputable, yet it does them no good. In Juvenile Court, being an abused child is no defense.

“It's all a double standard. You have to be rich and white for that defense to work,” Elias says. He has previously advanced the theory that the single most important fact in a court case is the color of the defendant, something that virtually every kid in the hall seems to take as a given. Elias nods at Geri. “You think anyone is going to let him off because of what his parents did to him? A black kid? Shit!”

Geri smiles, embarrassed. “That's what my public defender told me,” he murmurs. He then reveals to the class his experience in the distant Pomona Branch of Juvenile Court one recent morning. It was an important day for him—his fitness hearing—yet he had not met his lawyer until an hour before court was to convene. The attorney told him they had nothing to discuss: the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

“You're charged with murder, you're over sixteen, you're a black kid with a gun, and this is Pomona—white, suburban, middle-class Pomona,” the lawyer said, as if explaining immutable laws of physics. “The judge is going to take one look at you and you're gone.”

“But I didn't kill anybody,” Geri insisted.

“I know. Doesn't matter.”

At the hearing, Geri scanned the seats in the courtroom, looking for a familiar face, seeing none. His parents had long ceased being a part of his life; his grandmother was too old and sick to make it. His attorney presented little evidence in opposition to the DA's fitness motion. There were no expert witnesses, no psychological exams. No one asked Geri about his background, his willingness to reform, the trust and praise he had earned from the Juvenile Hall staff. The whole process of determining Geri's future—of choosing between mandatory release from the juvenile system at age twenty-five, or mandatory life in prison as an adult—lasted less than ten minutes. Without Geri ever saying a word, the judge pronounced him unfit, then told the bailiff to call the next case.

“Maybe if I had a different judge, it would have been different,” Geri suggests to the class. “I heard about this judge down in Inglewood, he's supposed to be good. Really tough, but good.”

“You mean Dorn?” Ronald Duncan asks. Several of the other kids nod knowingly. They have heard of Judge Roosevelt Dorn.

“Yeah. I wish I could have gotten him,” Geri says. “Who knows what might have happened?”

C
ALL
the calendar,” Judge Roosevelt Dorn intones at exactly 8:30, the first words he utters each morning after climbing the bench and settling into his huge leather chair, the day's files spread out before him like the tarot. Few Juvenile Court judges (or adult court judges, for that matter) in Los Angeles start so punctually, and Dorn's recent arrival in Inglewood has shaken the courthouse crowd from its previously torpid pace. The murmur of a dozen separate conversations in the courtroom gallery evaporates. The bailiff begins reading the names of the cases to be heard that day, one by one, checking off a box on his list every time a boy or girl answers Present.

The courtroom is jammed, as it is every morning, standing room only, a constant rustling of coats, of settling into lumpy chairs, of heads poking in the door wondering if this is where they should be. Every tenth name or so, no one responds, and Dorn immediately orders an arrest warrant issued. Dorn's predecessor was not so harsh, the defense attorneys grumble to themselves. But Dorn is a stickler for punctuality, and for many of the kids, this will be the first time anyone has expected them to be on time for anything. If the child shows up later in the day (as opposed to blowing off the hearing entirely, which happens in about one in ten Juvenile Court cases),
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he or she will be taken into custody and locked up for a few hours, until the judge feels his message has been conveyed. “You'll not come late to Judge Dorn's courtroom again,” he says to one of these latecomers, accused of emblazoning his spray-painted “tag” on several freeway overpasses.

“Yes,” one attorney in the audience whispers to a colleague. “Next time he'll know not to show up at all.” The lawyer starts to snicker, then falls
silent and shifts uncomfortably when Dorn, who could not possibly have heard the remark, flicks a cold, prescient glance in the lawyer's direction, the teacher who can always detect the spitball's origin, even with back turned.

When the calendar call is through, the procession of cases begins in earnest. Lawyers line up in what once was a jury box (juveniles do not get trials before their peers, for obvious reasons), and compete with one another to have their cases called first, waiting to leap up and announce “Ready!” before anyone else, a kind of verbal elbowing to the head of the line. It is childish and raucous and the lawyers who get shoved aside pout and complain. Hearings for the kids in custody are supposed to have priority, but because the Probation Department is frequently tardy with both its buses and its intake reports—a child's entry into the system, the crucial passport to delinquency—this rule is often broken. Newly charged children are arraigned, their trial dates set. Older cases go to trial or, more often, get delayed, dismissed, or resolved through a plea bargain negotiated in the hallway, in which case the witnesses who wait through the morning are sent on their way, their days wasted for nothing. Perhaps they'll return for the next court date. Perhaps not.