No Matter How Loud I Shout (15 page)

Richard, holding a switchblade in his gloved hand, took a halfhearted swipe at the man, not coming close to connecting, but still making him jump back. He said, “Give us your wallet, Mexican motherfucker.”

The man handed his wallet over. This, John thought, was almost too easy. Then, realizing the man could simply hop in his car and follow them once they left, John demanded his keys. “Don't worry, we're not gonna take it,” he said contemptuously. “We don't need no fuckin' low rider anyway.” He hurled the key ring toward the other end of the parking garage to keep his victim at bay once they left. Everything had gone perfectly, exactly as he had planned.

It wasn't until John flipped open the guy's wallet that everything fell apart. It wasn't a wallet, after all. It was a leather case of some kind. And inside it, bright as a new penny, shone a large gold badge.

Now it was John who had to worry about bladder control. He had to stop himself from yelling,
Oh my God, we're robbing a cop.
He saw himself
arrested, fingerprinted, and jailed, his mother and father peering at him through a visitor's window, eyes hollow with reproach. It no longer seemed a very amusing prospect.

There was only one thing to do: He and Richard both backed away, then turned and ran as fast as they could, the pounding of their footsteps echoing in the empty garage.

·  ·  ·

While Judge Dorn considers the case against John Sloan, Joseph Gutierrez paces and sighs in the crowded hallway outside, the fourth time he has come to Juvenile Court as a witness to armed robbery. He cannot sit inside and watch. Some hearings are closed to the public and, in any case, as a subpoenaed witness, he is not permitted to watch others testify, for fear he would be influenced or change his story. Each time, he has missed a day of work. Each time, he has been told to sit down and wait and to keep out of the courtroom. Each time, after hours of waiting, he has been told there has been a delay in the
People
v.
John Sloan
, that he has to go home and that he must come back again—not a word of explanation or apology offered.
¹

“This is how witnesses are treated in Juvenile Court,” he gripes to a uniformed policeman waiting to testify. “Like we're the criminals.” The cop nods absently, then returns to reading the paperback book he brought with him:
Presumed Innocent.

“I've missed three days of work,” a woman whose Mercedes was stolen six months ago pipes up from her seat on one of the second-floor benches. “Now they tell me the case has been transferred to another court, one that's closer to the kid who stole my car. They want to make things more convenient for him! And I'm supposed to go to another courthouse and start the whole thing over.” She is rummaging in her purse as she speaks, talking more to herself than to anyone else in the hallway. Then she stands to leave. “This sucks. I'm thinking of just forgetting the whole thing. They can deal with that kid without me.”

But of course they can't. If she fails to show up, there will be no case, and the boy who stole her car will be set free. That is why defense attorneys delay and transfer and insist on needless hearings—hoping witnesses will grow disgusted and stop coming. Defense lawyers in Juvenile Court use quirks in the law that force prosecutors to prove the obvious—that, for instance, a kid driving a stolen, hot-wired car did not have permission from the owner to shatter a window, hack the dashboard, maul the ignition, and drive away. That means calling the owner and forcing him to wait for hours or days for thirty seconds of testimony that consists of: No,
he did not have permission to wreck and take my car. In graffiti cases, the owner of a wall emblazoned with gang insignias must be called to state the obvious: that he did not give permission to the vandals who defaced his property. If that property is a freeway overpass, then the state of California must appear to say it didn't authorize the six-foot neon message “FUCK HOOVERS,” scrawled above the 405 freeway. Needless to say, the state of California often has better things to do than show up at Thurgood Marshall Branch. Private property owners in gang-dominated neighborhoods are understandably reluctant to testify in open court as well. No matter—the public defenders have a policy of insisting on such testimony, a legal loophole that wins dismissals of half such cases. Half.
²

“We're not social workers,” one of the defenders explains. “We can't worry about what happens after we win. If we get a kid off and he goes out and kills someone, that's not our fault. The prosecution should have done a better job.”

Gutierrez has heard this logic before. He shakes his head. “This place is like some huge dysfunctional family,” he says, still pacing. “I'm the victim. That kid shoved a gun in my face. And I can't even go in there and watch what's going on.”

The cop sitting nearby looks up from his book again. “You don't really want to,” he says quietly. “It'll just make you madder.”

A short time later, Joseph Gutierrez is called into court to describe the night John Sloan robbed him.

·  ·  ·

“Were you scared, Mr. Gutierrez?” the prosecutor asks.

“Of course,” the man on the witness stand says, recalling that moment in the parking garage when he thought he might die.

The government's primary witness against John Sloan has been on the stand about five minutes so far. He glances uneasily at Judge Dorn, who is rubbing his eyes again. The judge's eye-rubbing can communicate a host of different emotions and tempers; at this time, it seems a gesture of impatience, even annoyance. The witness says, “Of course I was scared.”

“What happened after that?”

The gold shield Joseph Gutierrez carries is not a policeman's badge, but a city electrical inspector's, he tells the court. John and Richard apparently could not tell the difference. But though he was no cop, he says, his initial fear at being braced at gunpoint had turned to rage once the bandits left him standing there. He had gone on to do something extraordinary, something cops are paid to do, but ordinary citizens like himself usually avoid.

“I ran and got my keys . . . and I went to the trunk of my car and I got out my .45 Ruger automatic. . . . I cocked the gun and loaded it, and started the car and took off in the direction that they had run.”

Joseph Gutierrez had simply gone out to mail some letters that Sunday night at a post office near his home. The area is one of LA's most beautiful and affluent, climbing a high, verdant peninsula overlooking the rocky froth of the South Bay, its neighborhoods stocked with estates that have housed such diverse luminaries as Ronald Reagan and Tom Petty, not to mention more millionaires per capita than any other Southern California community, Beverly Hills included. Gutierrez had moved his family to one of the more modest slices of this area as a hedge against crime.

“It doesn't get any safer than this,” he had proudly boasted to his wife and daughters when they found a home they could afford there.

That sense of ease and security evaporated when John Sloan and his friend popped up from behind a dark green Pontiac, wearing gloves and bandannas, slinging a gun and racial epithets, seemingly full of hatred and violence.

They had caught him half in and half out of his car, reaching for the letters on his front seat, exposed and helpless. He had frantically looked around the parking garage for help or escape, seeing neither. There was no one to call to, nowhere to run, just an impossibly long moment of agonizing silence, a frozen tableau in which Gutierrez simultaneously thanked God that his wife and children were safe at home, prayed that he might see them again, and wondered what the hell two Asian gangbangers were doing in this neighborhood. When they called him Mexican motherfucker, he thought, I'm going to die right here, in some empty garage, just for a couple of letters. Just because their forebears came from across the Pacific, his from below the Rio Grande. But then, when they ran off, his own anger took over. He found the racist taunting particularly galling because his wife was Asian-American; he had always made it a point to teach their children not to judge people by color or ethnicity. He felt this was a hate crime, that he was targeted simply because he was Hispanic, that the real goal of the robbery was not to gain money, but to humiliate a Mexican-American. And without really thinking through the possible consequences, he had pursued them, gun in hand.

As he fetched his keys, he saw through the open-air parking garage where they were running, their bandannas now down around their necks, a yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia the only car in sight. Gutierrez rounded the corner and froze the two assailants in his bright headlights while John
was still fumbling with the car door he had stupidly locked. Gutierrez leaned out of his car window and trained his weapon on them, then told them to lie facedown on the sidewalk. When they obeyed, he took John's gun away and made his captives put their hands behind their heads. A passing motorist called the police on his car phone a few minutes later.

“Did you get a good look at their faces?” the prosecutor asks.

Gutierrez looks at John, whose position in the courtroom is almost dead in front of the witness stand. John does not meet his eyes—he has barely looked up from the tabletop in front of him throughout the proceedings. “Yes,” the thirty-seven-year-old city inspector says. “Many times. . . . That's the one with the gun.”

“No more questions.” The prosecutor sits back, satisfied. He is certain he has more than met the legal requirements for booting a kid out of Juvenile Court—requirements that amount to little more than proving the kid's age, and that the offense he is charged with committing is on a laundry list of twenty-four crimes for which the California legislature has authorized transfers to adult court.
³
In a fitness hearing, the prosecution need not prove guilt, and innocence is no defense (the theory being that no harm is done if a child is transferred to adult court and later found innocent—the switch in courts matters only if he is convicted and sentenced). Legally, John walked into court
presumed
to be unfit for Juvenile Court, one of the few legal presumptions in the criminal justice system that does not favor the defendant. The law virtually handcuffs Judge Dorn to the prosecution, which is why he hates fitness hearings so much.

John's attorney, Angela Oh, must attempt to undo this legal presumption if John is to avoid an adult-style punishment, and to do so, she launches a novel line of inquiry. She asks Joseph Gutierrez if he thought John and his accomplice were punks.

The witness looks confused. “What?”

“There was something about this interaction that suggested to you that these were a couple of punks, really, right?” the attorney asks.

Judge Dorn is looking amused and interested at this, and the prosecutor gets nervous, seeing where the defense is headed. For the defense to win a fitness hearing, the focus cannot be on disproving the charges—a trap some attorneys fall into—but on a legal test that examines five factors: a kid's past criminal record, the time left to rehabilitate him, the results of past attempts at rehabilitation, his criminal sophistication, and the gravity of the crime.
⁴

No one doubts that an honors student with a supportive family and no
prior criminal record is a good candidate for rehabilitation. That gets him past three parts of the test. But the prosecution, as it does in almost all fitness cases, is hanging its argument on the two remaining parts—armed robbery, with its potential for injury or death, is inherently grave, and a kid who buys a gun on the street from an arms dealer, then uses a mask and gloves to avoid detection, shows he is capable of planning and executing a sophisticated crime. Sophistication and a grave crime are all that is needed—failure of any
one
of the five parts of the test requires judges to transfer a kid to adult court, which is why prosecutors win fitness hearings nine out of ten times in Los Angeles. This is the draconian result law-makers intended when they redesigned the law in the 1980s under the assumption that too few kids had been landing in adult court before. And it is why Angela Oh desperately wants to paint John Sloan as a punk: Punks, she argues, are incapable of committing a sophisticated or grave crime.

“If I use the word ‘punk,' do you understand what that means?” she persists.

The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Hyman Sisman, decides he has to put a stop to this. “Objection. It's irrelevant.”

Judge Dorn agrees. “The fact that one may consider an individual a punk,” he says, emphasizing the word “punk,” almost drawing it out into two syllables, “does not mean that individual cannot necessarily be sophisticated in committing a crime.”

Sisman sits down and relaxes again. But he seems to have missed the real message behind Dorn's comment. What the judge is really saying is that whatever Mr. Gutierrez thinks of John doesn't matter. Dorn's body language throughout the victim's testimony has grown increasingly hostile. At one point, he stood up, walked behind his chair, and watched Gutierrez from a distance, as if he did not want to be too close to the state's star witness. It unnerved the man in the witness chair; Sisman seemed to take no notice.

A few minutes later, Dorn reveals his feelings about Gutierrez even more clearly as Oh continues to argue that the man's willingness to pursue two armed robbers shows they were unsophisticated punks, and therefore still suitable material for the ministrations of Juvenile Court. Friends had lionized Gutierrez as a hero for capturing his assailants, but Dorn proclaims his act “something that no reasonable person would ever have done.” It is a curious attack on a victim of a crime, especially from a judge who carries his own gun, even to court, and it should have served as a red alert to the prosecutor that he badly needed to bolster his case. Again,
though, the prosecutor appears to take no notice, and he rests his case a short time later.