No Matter How Loud I Shout (23 page)

So here was the supervising DA of one of the busier Juvenile Court branches in LA all set to go crawling around in her blue jeans on the weekend, boxing up files. It was menial, time-consuming work, but this was
Juvenile Court. There was no one else to do this: Either Peggy handled it, or the files just sat there, collecting dust and coffee stains as her deputies tried to find room on the table to have lunch. Besides, she had to read through each of the files before boxing them, particularly the dismissals, to see what the judges and commissioners had been doing to her prosecutors for the past year. Occasionally, her deputies attached notes to the manila folders: “This is outrageous” or “Once again, this bench officer shows he is ignorant of the law.” She keeps copies of these in a separate place in her office—the outrage pile—so that she can make a list of them, to be turned into higher-ups downtown for purposes that are not entirely clear. She was simply ordered to start “keeping a list,” apparently so that, when the time comes for reappointment of court commissioners or reelection of judges, the DA can have ammunition for ousting those considered most egregiously antiprosecution. The public defender, of course, is doing the same.

Peggy parked her white Corvette in the municipal parking garage, then walked around to the front door, so she could ring the security guard to let her into the otherwise deserted building, ready for eight hours of filing. But when she got there, she found a homeless man sprawled on the steps, blocking her entrance. She at first thought him asleep or drunk, not an unusual find in this neighborhood. His face was obscured by a tangle of matted hair, and he was dressed in clothes so filthy they had taken on the color of wet cement, except for the very odd purple shoes he was wearing, huge misshapen things. Then Peggy noticed the tattered pair of high-top sneakers on the steps next to the ragged man, and she realized with a jolt that those things at the ends of the man's legs weren't purple shoes, but hideously swollen and infected feet, stinking of gangrene. She tried to rouse the man then, yelling and shaking him, but he couldn't move or even talk clearly. He just mumbled something about having crawled out of the cardboard box he lives in that morning, looking for help. He had the strength to reach the steps, but then couldn't stand up to ring the buzzer for the guard. “My feet hurt,” he moaned. “My feet.”

Not sure what to do, Peggy tried to hand him some money, but he could not grip it. She buzzed the guard, then broke off a piece of the submarine sandwich she had brought with her for lunch. He managed to thrust some of that into his mouth, then croaked, “I haven't eaten in twenty days.” Peggy could almost believe him.

After a while, the guard ambled up and unlocked the door. “I think he's dying,” Peggy told him.

“Oh, him?” the guard said, looking down at the man expressionlessly. “He's been there all day.”

Peggy looked at her watch. It was noon. She was furious that this guard could have let the man lie there for hours. “Call the paramedics. Now!” The guard, rather reluctantly, shuffled to the phone and called for an ambulance. A half hour later, the man was whisked away.

Peggy went up to her office then and hurled the rest of her sandwich into the trash can, appetite for food and for filing destroyed. She tried to imagine a hospital admitting the man, treating him with respect and kindness, letting him die in a warm bed with food and humanity around him at the end. But the fantasy lasted only a few seconds. Just as likely, she knew, some harried emergency room doctor or nurse could have taken one look at his reeking, stained clothes and wild hair, given him some antibiotics for the infection in his feet, maybe an IV to get some nourishment into his wasted body, then put him out the door to die alone in his cardboard box.

Suddenly, Peggy burst into tears, staring at all those files, each representing a kid, the paper trail of more lost souls she couldn't help. The man on the steps seemed to her the perfect metaphor for it all. Why had he come to the steps of the Juvenile Court for help? Had he been there before? As a parent? He hadn't looked that old, really—perhaps he had been there once as a delinquent himself. Peggy couldn't shake the thought that his life, too, had once been reduced to a manila folder stuffed into a box somewhere in this building. She went to her computer and started typing a letter of resignation. Who could do this for a living? What good was she doing?

Then she stopped, sat still for a moment, calmed herself. She forced herself to open her top desk drawer, to take out the crime-scene photos—the Ronald Duncan murder scene. She stared at them for a long time. Chuck and Ada Rusitanonta, their bodies broken and abandoned, stared back at her with sightless, dead eyes not yet closed by the undertaker. She had visited their store, talked with the sister and brother-in-law who had taken over the business, who treated Peggy like visiting royalty whenever she came to update them on the case, who called her “our lawyer.” “We know you will punish whoever did this,” they always would say. “Thank you.”

After a while, Peggy put the photos back in the drawer and deleted from her computer the resignation letter she had been writing. Then she walked to the table covered with files, and picked one up and started reading. She was only up to the B's—there was a long way to go.

When she left the building five hours later, it was dark outside, the street cool and empty of traffic. In her conference room, fifty-three boxes sat neatly stacked, labeled in her flowing handwriting, ready for the closet and, later, the shredder. Then she drove home. She had a murder trial to prepare for.

·  ·  ·

“Bring in the minor,” Judge Charles R. Scarlett says in his mild, distracted way, and the bailiff rises to fetch Ronald Duncan from the holding tank. Peggy nervously shuffles papers, idly listening to the continuous courtroom babble of lawyers, parents, kids, and cops coming together on uneasy common ground. As a deputy in charge, she hadn't tried a case in a long time, and she felt uncomfortable back in the prosecutor's chair. It didn't help that Scarlett, once one of Los Angeles's top civil rights attorneys and now one of the most senior judges on the juvenile bench, was stubbornly resistant to the get-tough policies transforming Juvenile Court, and could be counted on to rule against the prosecution on many close calls. He had retired a year earlier, ceding the supervising judge position to Roosevelt Dorn, but that had not removed him from the courthouse. He immediately became a “retired judge on assignment”—an unofficial retirement program judges in California have given themselves—allowing him simultaneously to collect his judicial pension while still working as a full-time bench officer. He even kept his old courtroom.

Nor did it help Peggy's cause that Duncan's private attorney, the former head public defender in Inglewood and very popular in the courthouse, was in a relaxed and jovial mood, joking with other defense lawyers, who were eagerly gathering in the back of the courtroom to see if the Duncan confession would get thrown out or if Peggy would give legal immunity to Ronald's getaway driver, Jason. Such legal maneuvering, though commonplace in adult court, is relatively rare in Juvenile—few attorneys have the time to litigate many motions at all, much less file briefs or perform legal research. This case was drawing a crowd, and the defense lawyer retained by Ronald's parents, James Cooper, clearly enjoyed the attention, discussing a new movie with the judge, a legal point with some young lawyers, and hurling the occasional gibe at Peggy: “You're not really going to give Jason Gueringer immunity, are you? Don't you know he's the one you should be prosecuting?”

Peggy winces at the comment—pure psychological warfare, as obvious as it is effective. She still has not decided whether or not to give the driver of the getaway van a free ride, though she knows, either way, Cooper will
try to put the older boy on trial in place of Duncan. Before she can think of a retort, Cooper is already telling the judge another joke, earning chuckles. “Everything's a cocktail party with this guy,” Peggy mutters. “He laughs and jokes and everyone has a great time, and pretty soon, the judge thinks he's at a cocktail party, too, and he forgets what's going on. Cooper wants us to forget that two people are dead. He's a genius at that.”

Just then, the heavy door in the back of the courtroom opens. Echoes from the lockup, the sound of metal clanging and of shoes scuffing on linoleum filters into the room, then Ronald Duncan emerges, blinking. The boy wears handcuffs and a bemused expression as he is led by a khaki-uniformed bailiff to his seat next to his attorney, where the cuffs come off with a merry jingle. He giggles and smiles over his shoulder at his parents sitting in back of the ancient courtroom, with its faint smell of mildew and old paper, his expression, as usual, a chilling contrast to the grave charges against him. Cooper puts his arm around the boy and whispers something to him, after which Ronald assumes an erect posture and solemn facial expression.

His mother and father sit huddled in the back of the courtroom, trying to make themselves small and inconspicuous, radiating hopelessness and anger, glaring occasionally in Peggy's direction. Ronald's mother is fairly young and sharp-faced, with a tendency to shake her head and growl when she hears the DA say something unfavorable about her son. His father, divorced but living in the same home, is much older than Ronald's mother, quiet, careworn, in cowboy boots and sparse gray hair, a well-worn cap hung on his left knee as he sits in court. Mother and father occupy different rows and rarely seem to speak to one another. They have other children, at least one of whom has had trouble with the law. But not Ronald. He is their baby. The kid who never gave them a moment of trouble. Their hope for the future. They simply could not accept what their son had done. He told them he was innocent, and they believed him. They believed it was all a conspiracy, all racism, all coercion of their son, all favoritism toward Jason, who is a cop's godson, another reason why Peggy is hesitant to give him immunity. The appearance of favoritism would be overwhelming, confirming everything Ronald's parents believe. To his credit, defense lawyer Cooper keeps telling them as gently as possible that Ronald is unlikely to be acquitted, but the Duncans only blink with incomprehension when he says such things. They trusted this man—trusted him with the precious life and fate of their son—but when it came to discussing the likelihood of Ronald's conviction, they did not believe him, either.

“My son says he is innocent, and I know there is no way he could do this terrible thing,” Ronald's father says just before the hearing begins. His voice is quiet, tremulous, his calloused hands turned palms up in a gesture of bewilderment, a man speaking from the heart, from bedrock belief in a boy he loves beyond the power of any law or evidence. He is not a small man, but at this moment, he looks brittled and hollowed by grief, as if a strong wind would send him skittering down the hallway like a dead leaf. “The judge will see it. God will see to that. He will see my son is innocent.”

The buzz in the courtroom gradually stills as milling attorneys and other observers find seats. Peggy stands. She has the option of litigating the admissibility of Ronald's confession before beginning the trial, or during. Peggy chooses the latter. She wants Scarlett to know more about the case—and what is at stake—before asking him to make such an important legal ruling. Let him look at those evidence pictures first, she figures. Theoretically, they should not influence his decision on the separate issue of the confession's voluntariness, but Peggy knows better. Judges are human, too.

“The People are ready to proceed,” Peggy announces. “Should I make an opening statement, Your Honor?” she asks.

“No, no need for openings. No jury here,” Judge Scarlett says with a wave of his right hand. Opening statements are part of the theatrics of adult trials, like movie previews—highlights without substance, intended to influence jurors. They are rarely heard in Juvenile Court. There is no time for such frills. Scarlett settles back in his chair and steeples his fingers. “Let's get on with it.”

So Peggy begins a textbook murder case presentation—revealing the evidence as if it were an onion, peeling back each layer, first with the discovery of the bodies, then an examination of the physical evidence, then the trail of testimony, events, and objects that leads inexorably to the defendant. It is how virtually every murder case is presented, a time-tested formula that applies in Juvenile Court just as it does in the adult world.

First to the stand is a man who lived in the neighborhood where the bodies were found. He testifies that he heard what sounded at the time like a car backfiring, but what he now believes were gunshots, followed by the sound of a car crashing into something. He walked out onto his porch, saw Chuck and Ada's station wagon smashed into a light post a short distance down the street, then saw a young black male emerge from the backseat and run away from the car. The man left his porch to approach the car, saw the murdered people inside, then took off after the fugitive, watching from a safe distance as the killer climbed into a blue van. The witness
had the impression that the van had been waiting for the gunman, but he couldn't be positive.

As for the person he saw running: could have been Duncan, the witness says, but he only saw him from the back. Can't be sure. Peggy is satisfied, though. This testimony is just a scene-setter, establishing time and place for the judge, like the opening scene of a movie.

Next comes the first uniformed deputy on the scene, who describes the condition of Chuck and Ada's bodies and the bloody car, providing the legal basis for introducing those blood-drenched crime scene photographs into evidence. Peggy figures she can quash the cocktail-party mood with those. She had stayed up late painstakingly pasting the photos to poster board, then hand-lettering captions under each one in black Magic Marker. She had felt like a kid on an elementary school project. It paid off, though: Scarlett stands up and walks to the far side of his elevated bench, standing next to the witness stand so he can scrutinize the display as Peggy walks the deputy through each picture. The judge's expression remains impassive as he studies the pictures of Chuck and Ada in their Baskin Robbins shirts, heads imploded, gore everywhere. When he returns to his seat, though, Scarlett avoids looking at Ronald, which is not as easy as it sounds, because the boy's seat is directly in front of the judge.