No Matter How Loud I Shout (22 page)

Meanwhile, Sisman quietly fills out a disposition report on the case and checks a box at the bottom that says “No further action,” effectively killing the case. There will be no refiling. Rafi's mother is on her own.

“If this were happening in adult court, Mr. Sussman”—Dorn occasionally mispronounces prosecutor Sisman's name, and it is not entirely clear this is accidental—“heads would be rolling. What is happening in your office?”

Sisman says there are reasons for the dismissal problems. Adult DAs have witness coordinators to keep track of subpoenas and witness lists; Juvenile Court DAs have to press overburdened secretaries into service to type subpoenas, in addition to all their other duties, and once typed, the sheriff's department may or may not get around to serving them in time. About a third of the notices to appear in court are delivered
after
the court date or are not delivered at all. Those that do get notice that they must appear in court are often treated shabbily, even when they are the victims of crime, subject to the delaying game some defense lawyers play. With enough delays and inconvenience, witnesses stop coming, and defense attorneys win a dismissal of charges. Hundreds of cases are dismissed this way every month in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—twenty-five in Inglewood alone in just two weeks. Kids who are dangerous, and kids who need help, walk free, unrestrained, unsupervised.

The worst of these dismissals is haunting Peggy Beckstrand's office this week, a kid named Norvin, fourteen and out of control, who was arrested months earlier for shooting an LAPD officer. Charged with attempted murder, the kid waited in Juvenile Hall while his lawyer requested repeated postponements until, finally, the two crucial witnesses in the case—two policemen—decided to go forward with their plans for a vacation cruise abroad. They were to be gone when the next trial date came up, but they figured it didn't matter, there would be another delay anyway. After all, it was only Juvenile Court.

Norvin's public defender, who had indeed been planning on another postponement, saw the two cops had not come to court and insisted on an immediate trial. The DA was forced to dismiss the case, and, though the charges were refiled immediately, Juvenile Court rules require kids be released from detention in every refiled case—even when a kid is charged with a violent offense. Even a kid like Norvin, whose stated ambition—after his arrest—was to kill a cop.

Within a week of his release, Norvin was rearrested for participating in a murder. A seventeen-year-old boy who passed him on the street made the mistake of looking at Norvin and his friend with something less than admiration, and they decided he had to die for it. A similar scenario in adult court would have led to public outcry, investigations, firings. In Juvenile Court, the case caused not a ripple. No one outside the system knew about it.

A few minutes after Rafi's departure, Dorn has to dismiss yet another case, this one against a gangbanger accused in three armed robberies. Again, none of the eyewitnesses were subpoenaed in what should have been an open-and-shut case. Sisman tried to put his case on anyway, but the one witness he managed to get into court was the wrong witness—he could not identify the boy on trial. Dorn's hands are tied, and he must watch the boy leave the courtroom, free and clear. The judge is beside himself.

“I don't know what's happening in your office, but something has got to change,” the judge says, loud enough to make everyone in the courtroom drop what they are doing and stare. Sisman starts to protest that he is helpless when witnesses fail to show up as scheduled, but Dorn cuts him off. “What's happening in this courtroom is a travesty. A travesty for these minors, and a travesty for the People. It is unfair to minors, to parents, and to our citizens. Case after case has been dismissed because the People cannot proceed. I've had two today already, and the day isn't over yet. . . . Your office is programming these children for the cemetery or the penitentiary. You are telling them it's all right to break the law.”

“We are having trouble serving subpoenas,” Sisman says mildly.

“I'll put a call into Garcetti,” Dorn rails, angered further by the prosecutor's casual response, referring to the elected District Attorney, Gil Garcetti. “I'll go to the press. Someone in the DA's Office isn't taking care of business. . . . This rarely happens downtown. It happens here all the time.”

Another prosecutor waiting for his case to come up, Kevin Yorn, from
the DA's special hard-core gang unit, can't resist standing up to try to defend his office's reputation. “I disagree with your assessment—” he starts to say, but Dorn cuts him off, waving his right hand as if delivering a karate chop.

“I did not make my statement for you to agree or disagree with me,” Dorn says in a low, menacing voice. “The fact is that it is happening. I can't believe you can't subpoena witnesses in Inglewood, but you can downtown. This court needs to be taken just as seriously as adult court. More so.”

A moment later, he tells his clerk to call Peggy Beckstrand. “I want her in my chambers tomorrow morning. We are going to do something about these dismissals, or I'll call a press conference. This travesty will end, one way or another.”

P
EGGY
is in trouble.

It is time to go to court to begin the Ronald Duncan murder trial. She has prepared obsessively for this day. Last night, she dragged a rocking chair and a blanket into the bathroom, with all her papers and files, so as not to disturb her husband, Steven, a senior prosecutor in adult court downtown. He is intimately familiar with the long hours and obsessions that come with the job. But even he has not seen his wife so immersed in a case before. He found her still in the bathroom at six the next morning, stiff and shivering in her sleep. She had been pasting photos onto poster board for a courtroom exhibit—the deputy in charge of an entire DA's Office reduced to working with Elmer's Glue-All and Magic Markers on the hard tiles of her bathroom floor, because in Juvenile, prosecutors either make their own courtroom visual aids on their own time, or they do without. And Peggy is not one to do without.

Even so, even after all the sleepless hours and preparation and second-guessing, she believes her case to be in disarray. The sheriff's investigators who busted Ronald have dodged her phone calls, she says, too busy, they say, with “real”—that is, adult—cases. A crucial witness, Ronald's friend Marvin, is still missing. Ronald's new, privately retained lawyer has convinced her that the all-important taped confession to the police, concrete
proof of Ronald's guilt, likely will be tossed out on a technicality. To fill the resulting gaping hole in her case, Peggy now must consider granting legal immunity to a young man named Jason Gueringer, who says he happened upon a blood-drenched Ronald on the night of the murder and gave him a ride home, making him an accomplice after the fact, a felony, though a relatively minor one for which he had never been arrested. Peggy had long resisted offering Jason immunity for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility that Jason might be a liar—that he might be an accomplice to the murder itself, not a mere witness, and had been holding back all this time. Officially, he remains a suspect in the killing, which is why he was never charged with the lesser crime. With the confession, she didn't need him. Now. . . .

And while she ponders all this, the endless series of crises and distractions of her job must be dealt with as well. Four other murder cases are reaching the make-or-break stage—plea bargain, or go to trial—including a boy who clubbed his mother to death, possibly because she molested him. Peggy is not trying those cases, but she must approve every major move her deputies make. Then there is an ongoing war between the fiery Commissioner Polinsky and the young prosecutor assigned to his courtroom. Each wants to discuss with Peggy a list of grievances about the other, some of them substantive, but most of them matters of style and personality—they despise one another. She will have to find some way to juggle prosecutorial assignments to separate them. There is the usual assortment of plea bargains to approve, lawyers to coddle and placate, memos to answer and write, county computers that freeze up and crash every few hours. The computer crashes mean the paperwork stops spewing from the printers, clogging the paper pipeline, making the subpoenas go out late (if at all), which means more witnesses won't show, and more cases will be dismissed, leading to more yelling judges, more meetings, more memos. More contemptuous kids committing more crime without consequences.

Which brings Peggy to her first order of business this morning, her meeting with Judge Dorn to talk dismissals. Her boss has already seen the erstwhile supervising judge of Thurgood Marshall on the eleven o'clock news complaining that the DA was programming children for the penitentiary while letting violent offenders off the hook. This is not the kind of publicity the DA is looking for, Peggy was told in no uncertain terms. “Deal with it,” her boss instructed.

“Give me more people, and I will,” she shot back.

When she arrives in Dorn's chambers, he goes on the attack as soon as she
sits down. “The DA is not doing its job, witnesses are not showing up, minors are not showing up. The public defenders are waiting your people out and getting dismissals. It would be malpractice for them to do anything else. But the result is disastrous, not just for the People, but for the minors as well.”

Peggy just nods, and Dorn becomes even more furious.

“You are understaffed here, and Garcetti doesn't care. I'll go to the press with this, I'll call a press conference. Don't think I won't. You're processing these minors for the state penitentiary.” He has begun to shout.

Peggy bristles at this. “A lot of what you say is true, Judge, but I will never take responsibility for these minors' crimes. I come along
after
they've done their dirty work. If they're programmed, it's before I enter their lives.”

“Oh, well, I know that,” he concedes, backing down a bit, and no longer looking as angry. Judge Dorn tends to steamroll over people in his way, but he admires—to a point—those who stand up to him. “But what I'm telling you is that these witness problems are tying the court's hands with these minors. Something's got to be done.”

“You're right about that,” Peggy says simply, and her agreement defuses Dorn's anger further. She says she will talk to the bosses downtown, to see if they can spring for a witness coordinator to help keep pace with the huge number of trials Dorn is scheduling every day.

“Now you're talking,” the judge says. “That's how business is done in adult court. Shouldn't be any different here.” He is smiling broadly now. He promises to draft a memo to DA Garcetti to help things along. It is his way of announcing a truce. Peggy wonders how long it will last.
¹

She runs back across the street, plows through some paperwork, explains to one of her deputies that the office cannot afford to appeal a bad ruling in a shoplifting case, no matter how badly the commissioner erred, then prepares to return to court to start her murder trial. She pulls a pair of new shoes out of a shopping bag and puts them on—one of her pretrial rituals. She must have a new pair of shoes before starting a trial, though there are no jurors to impress in Juvenile Court. It is simply for luck, something she started early in her career, the way some baseball pitchers always wear a certain game shirt. In her wallet is a lucky one hundred dollar bill given to her by her mother during her last Christmas visit to El Paso. She would starve before she would spend that money. Peggy runs a brush through her long, straight hair, rubs her cold hands together for warmth, then gathers up her Duncan files, hugging them to her breast, ready to go.

Just then, her phone rings, bringing the first bit of good news she has heard all day. It is the one part-time DA investigator she shares with another
group of juvenile prosecutors, whose main job is to serve subpoenas, but who puts in extra time chasing down loose ends in Peggy's cases when he can find the time.

“I found Marvin,” he tells her. “He was standing in a phone booth right where some friends of his told me he'd be. He and his father will be there today.”

“That's great,” Peggy says. She had been worried about going to court without Marvin, afraid she'd have to watch her case dashed to bits, that she would have to shamefacedly tell the relatives of the victims, Sorry, I blew it.

“Just be prepared,” the investigator warns, deflating the burst of elation she briefly felt. “Marvin's not exactly dressed for success these days.”

Peggy hangs up, wondering just what she was in for. Marvin had always been a clean-cut, good-looking kid, kind of preppy, a perfect witness—but he had been living with his mother then. Now Dad is in control, a man who was less than eager for Marvin to testify, and who seemed to consider him a snitch for revealing Ronald's confession to murder. She picks up her files again and makes her way across the street, dreading the day ahead, her hands cold as ice.

·  ·  ·

Peggy Beckstrand almost quit over the weekend. She was a phone call away from packing it in. “If the Peace Corps hadn't rejected me, I'd be on my way to Africa right now,” she told her husband.

She had interrupted her preparation for the Duncan trial over the weekend, driving to her office on Saturday to deal with the files, which were rapidly getting out of control. The previous year's collection of files had taken over the conference room, pulled from the cabinets lining the room to make room for the new year. They were stacked on the long tables in the conference room, hundreds of manila folders piled high in rough alphabetical order, waiting for Peggy's review before they could be boxed and stored for three years, after which they could be fed to the shredder. They had sat there for weeks, galling her, a constant reminder of the flood of juvenile crime she faced each day. The files had to be put into cardboard boxes the size and shape of large file drawers—there would be more than fifty of them before Peggy finished. One year's worth of juvenile crime, in one branch of Juvenile Court—a humbling sight.