No Matter How Loud I Shout (62 page)

Until Judge Michael Nash came along.

Shortly after I finished
No Matter How Loud I Shout
, Nash took over as juvenile presiding judge. Instead of two years and out like most of his predecessors, Nash has stayed. And stayed. At the time of this writing, he has been presiding over Los Angeles's fractious juvenile court for most of the last twenty years.

“I came here,” he tells me, “because I like the mission . . . putting families together instead of putting people away. That's the goal . . . But we can do better. We have to do better.”

When the subject turns to the failings of Los Angeles County's immense foster care and child welfare bureaucracy, as problem-plagued today as it was twenty years ago, the laid-back California jurist with the sweep of silver hair suddenly disappears and the plain-talking native New Yorker within takes over, as Nash's voice rises with such choice phrases as “It's a stinking mess!” and “The blind leading the blind!”

As he speaks, Nash manages to locate the few square inches on his formidably cluttered desktop not obscured by journal articles, legal briefs, spreadsheets, or complaint letters (in addition to his other duties, the presiding judge is also the courthouse Dear Abby). He starts pounding on the little clearing with one fist, punctuating each word with a thud. Soon the entire mound of papers on his desk has begun to shudder and shimmy like a hillside during a 5.0 magnitude quake, until his pounding finally sends a framed photo of his daughter (one of a dozen on display) tumbling to the floor.

This is not theater. Nash just can't help himself, and this says something about the kind of operator he has been. Here's a sixty-five-year-old judge who has spent twenty years at the same often thankless, usually frustrating job—a job that has burned out some very good men and women—and yet he's still enthusiastically pounding the desk like a freshman debate team president. Only the clatter of his daughter's portrait brings him up short. He eyes the mess he's made, takes a calming breath, grins sheepishly, and assures me he's going to clean up his desk after our visit.

“Don't believe it,” attorney Sherry Gold later observes. She, too, has not stopped working with kids. She's now with the LA County Alternate Public Defender and works in Nash's Mental Health Court, his innovation for delinquents with heavy-duty psychiatric diagnoses. She is Nash's friend, ally, nudge, and occasional combatant, and she credits him with some genuine improvements in the nation's largest juvenile court over the past twenty years. A tidy office is not one of them, she says, laughing. “He's totally dedicated. But that office has been like that as long as I've known him.”

Nash tends to brush aside praise, allowing only that “I like to think I'll leave the court in a little better shape than I found it.” And that, it turns out, may be his secret. Instead of pushing large-scale reforms of the juvenile justice system that never come to pass, instead of fomenting revolution and alienating everyone around him as Judge Dorn did, Nash has been an incrementalist. He sees a need, such as the poor treatment of mentally ill juveniles, recruits energetic allies such as Sherry Gold to help, and says,
Let's see if we can make this one thing better, this one area where the court fails. Just this one thing.

Nash has made a career of “just this one thing,” and he has an office wall filled with plaques and awards attesting to the results. Early in his tenure, he created “Adoption Saturday” to show off one of the more positive moments in the juvenile court workday: successful adoptions of the system's wards. Court staffers, lawyers, and judges volunteer their time on Saturdays throughout the year to help close out the 1,500 to 2,000 annual adoptions of Los Angeles's foster children, with the public invited to observe what had always been a secret proceeding. The program succeeded so wildly that more than two hundred other jurisdictions in all fifty states have adopted it, ultimately spawning a National Adoption Day.

In 2010, Nash started a similar showcase for a different juvenile court milestone: reunification, in which the public is invited to attend the final hearings in some of the six thousand annual cases that end with parents and children put back together as families—the foster kids who didn't have to be adopted because they went home.

“It doesn't get any better than that,” Nash says.

Many of his initiatives have been adopted elsewhere, and Nash has served as both president and treasurer of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. He pioneered juvenile drug courts to better deal with kids with addictions. He created a one-family-one-judge system to make sure fewer juveniles fall though the cracks by requiring that the same judge stick with a child throughout his or her years in the system. And
he has improved the abysmal level of communication between the two sides of the juvenile court when it comes to “crossover kids”—those who move from dependency and foster care to delinquency and probation or detention. No more summarily dropping foster kids who commit crimes while under the care of the dependency court, Nash has insisted. George Trevino's fate might have been quite different if he had entered the system today. Or perhaps not; Nash, more than anyone, knows that his improvements, needed as they were, can do only so much, as they are erected atop a shaky and flawed foundation.

All this seems a bit unlikely for a man who started his legal career in 1974 as a tough prosecutor for the California Attorney General (having given up his childhood dream of a football career when he stopped growing at five-foot-five). Nash co-prosecuted the infamous Hillside Strangler serial murder case from 1981 to 1983—the longest criminal trial in US history. But a hint of the career to come was captured by a news photographer who snapped Nash's glum, exhausted expression after the guilty verdict came in, then asked why he wasn't celebrating with his colleagues. “What's to celebrate?” Nash recalls saying. “We're talking about human tragedy all the way through.”

A few years later, after he had been appointed to the Superior Court bench and began hearing criminal cases in Hollywood, a defense lawyer approached him about a young woman with a chip on her shoulder and a drug and alcohol problem that contributed to her crimes. Nash had given her a long jail term, but her lawyer said he had found a program that might help her—the then new, now respected Phoenix House—if the judge would agree to free her. Nash said okay and put her on a very long probation, and the young woman turned her life around. Nash even wrote her a letter when she successfully completed her probation, saying she had done a great job and that he was proud of her.

Nash had always found incarcerating people a depressing necessity of his job. But this case, finding a way to help a young woman change her life, thrilled and inspired him. It led Nash to move to juvenile court not long after, believing he might find more opportunities there for such positive outcomes. He tried dependency cases at first, then became supervising dependency judge, then took over as presiding judge in 1995 and, except for a two-year hiatus, has been presiding ever since.

Now his duties are almost entirely administrative. These days he convenes committees, not courtrooms. He struggles to accomplish the court's work after budget cuts axed six of his twenty-eight delinquency judges.
He's also the unofficial shrink for the judges still on the job, who sometimes feel unable to go on, crushed by the weight of the hopelessness so many parents and, worse still, so many children carry into the courtroom. Nash tells them his own method of coping: just before you leave, go through your daily calendar and look for the one positive thing that happened that day.

“If that's the last thing you think about, you can come back the next morning,” says Nash, who has announced he will retire in 2015. “On your worst day, you're going to do something good for someone. I guarantee it.”

Every once in a while, someone will provide such a reminder for him, Nash says, and he'll remember anew why he does this work. Not long ago, he received a letter from the woman he sent to Phoenix House so many years before. She had been sober all this time, had a family up in Northern California, and worked as a drug court coordinator. One day she heard Nash's name mentioned by one of the judges she worked with and looked him up to confirm that this was the same person who had given her a second chance in life. She felt she owed all her achievements to him, and that the letter he wrote her to close her probation had inspired her. It was, she told him, her prized possession. Which is something, because Nash says the same about
her
letter to him.

Nash drove home from work that night, rushed into his house, and said to his wife, “Guess what.”

“What?”

“I won the lottery today.”

A handsome young couple approaches me. I'm at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the leafy campus of the University of Southern California, and the dark-haired young man, dressed sharply in black, is grinning at me. It's plain that he knows me, and I realize I know him, too, though I cannot say how or why.

“It's Elias,” he says at last. “Elias Elizondo.”

So my soulful, angry, heartbreaking teen poet, now in his thirties, is back in the world after being sent from juvenile hall to adult prison. Elias is back.

And he looks great. I soon learn he
is
great, with a good job, a nice young woman on his arm and in his life, a plan for the future. He was able to take
college classes in prison, earned a degree, and is continuing his education. I had not seen Elias in twenty years, and the transformation renders me speechless, the wounded boy I still remembered, now this confident man before me, whom society had given up on, sent to enter adulthood in a terrible and inhumane place of cages and desperation.

As we embrace before parting, I can't help but marvel at Elias, whose case I had deemed an abject failure of juvenile court. And so it was, for a young man who had so much to offer, so much potential, and who had been so deserving of a break that the system could not or would not offer. Yet he had the resilience and courage to triumph in the end, to finish his sentence, to come back, and to move forward. I look at him and think of all the other young men and women I met in that year in the life of juvenile court, all of them now in their thirties, and wonder how many of them have been able to persevere and build a life like Elias.

He walks off with his friend, and I watch them recede into the distance until I can no longer see Elias. I feel a fierce and humbling pride for his accomplishments, which came largely despite the juvenile court's efforts in his behalf, not because of them. It is as Judge Nash said: in that moment, I feel like I won the lottery.

But, of course, that's the real problem with juvenile court: lottery winners are all too rare.

—Edward Humes

Los Angeles

July 2014

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