No Matter How Loud I Shout (27 page)

“I think we ought to have direct filing of murder charges in adult court, with no age restrictions,” Peggy suggests, the Duncan case and his nine-day window of invulnerability still heavy on her mind. “Murder is different. Kids who commit murder should automatically lose their right to be kids.”

“How about direct filing of
all
major felonies in adult court?” a colleague suggests, taking Peggy's idea a step further. “Why stop with murder?”

Again thinking of Duncan and his inevitable freedom at age twenty-five, Peggy reminds the group they should not focus solely on the front end of the process—the when and where and how charges are filed and tried—but on the back end, too, the conditions of release for juveniles.

“Murderers shouldn't just get to walk out the door at age twenty-five,” she says. “There should be some sort of review, parole, perhaps—and the power to keep them indefinitely locked up if they're still dangerous. Killers shouldn't walk out the door with a clean record and no supervision just because of a birthday.”

Similar suggestions follow, all with a common theme: The system needs
to be tougher on kids, imprisoning them longer, focusing more on protecting the public and less on protecting a youthful innocence that no longer seems to exist. For this group, the fix consists of pushing the juvenile justice system back toward the nineteenth-century model, when adults and children were treated exactly the same. Juvenile criminals are more sophisticated and less remorseful than previous generations, the prosecutors seem to agree. Treating today's child criminals differently from adults, Peggy says, “flat out isn't working.”

The setting for this attack on the system is appropriately glum: the musty and dark Eastlake Branch, largest in the system, a moldering, castlelike facility attached to Central Juvenile Hall, the busiest, most crowded, toughest branch of Juvenile Court. It consists of one long shotgun barrel of a hallway, branching off into a warren of offices and courtrooms. The shotgun barrel itself is crammed with people during court hours, close and sweaty as a subway car at rush hour, filled with a constant babble of voices as the attorneys interview their clients, negotiate deals with prosecutors, and whisper with witnesses while waiting for their cases to be called. It is a noisy, artless place, with smeary, colorless walls and an entrance equipped with a metal detector and a luggage X-ray machine, neither of which is working. (In a typical example of the juvenile system's odd priorities, none of the delinquency court branches have functioning metal detectors or secure entrances, although there clearly is a need for them—kids taken into custody after court hearings are routinely found carrying weapons. Yet, the county's new state-of-the-art dependency court, which hears child welfare matters only, no criminal cases—but which also just happens to house the Juvenile Court presiding judge—has an elaborate, airport-style checkpoint at the door, with guard, metal detector, and X-ray machine.)

The meeting is taking place in the courthouse's lineup room, where juvenile suspects stand in a row for witnesses to view through one-way glass. It is no different from similar adult facilities in police stations throughout the city, and it seems all the more appropriate for a discussion of dismantling the juvenile justice system.

But one of the prosecutors, silent throughout the discussion, waits for a lull in the torrent of suggestions, then voices his discomfort and disagreement.

“Unless we address some of the root causes, some of the social problems that contribute to juvenile crime, none of these things is going to make a bit of difference,” Jim Hickey tells the gathering. The others look at him as if he had just rolled a stink bomb into the room. Hickey looks at some of
their expressions and sighs. “Everyone says the children of the eighties and nineties are different, worse, more dangerous,” he says. “I beg to disagree. The children are the same. They do horrible, unchildish things because they have had very horrible, unchildish lives for ten years. It's like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.”

Hickey is the supervising prosecutor at Los Padrinos Juvenile Court. He is a tall, gentle man, with a big mustache and sad eyes, the sort who brown-bags a meal every day so he can work at his desk through the lunch hour, who thinks murderers, whatever their age, ought to be punished as adults, but who resists his office's tough fitness policy when he thinks lesser offenders deserve a break, and who thinks working on truancy cases is just as important as working on major felonies. “Every kid who comes to Juvenile Court starts out with problems at school, and that's what we need to address,” he reminds his colleagues. He is, in short, not in the mainstream of prosecutorial thought when it comes to juvenile justice—and glad of it.

“If some of these fourteen- and fifteen-year-old armed robbers were taken at age six and assigned to loving, good parents, things would be different,” he says. “No single solution is going to solve this. We have to start addressing the root causes, or it's all moot—we'll never fix the system.”

The room falls silent. A few look embarrassed by Hickey's comments. Several of the prosecutors exchange looks, one rolls his eyes. But Hickey pushes on. If we can just help families, if we can keep kids in school and off the streets, he argues, we'll do more to combat juvenile crime than a hundred new prisons could do. “And it should be up to us to say, Hey, we're for public safety, we're for stopping crime—and this is the best way to do it. By helping people have better lives.”

That's not our job, the others snap. We're not social workers. We're prosecutors. Peggy Beckstrand, in particular, is vehement in opposing Hickey's sentiments. Sure, she says, a lot of us wish we could make better homes for people. “But that's not what we do. We're at the bottom of the barrel. The DA's Office cannot save all these people . . . Our job is to deal with the people who break the social contract. We're the barrier between all the people in society who haven't stepped over the line and who are abiding by the rules and the social contract, and the people who they're afraid of—the ones who do step over the line. And what we need are the right tools to do that.”

In that barren lineup room full of prosecutors, the debate over Juvenile Court has crystallized as clearly as it ever will, striking at the ambiguities inherent in a system that wants to both punish and heal. Just as the defense
lawyer's role is blurred in this place—is it really in an angry, violent, out-of-control kid's best interest to walk him out the door on a dismissal?—so is the prosecutor's role a difficult one to pin down. With young offenders, is it always in the interest of public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution—the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?

“Love isn't going to fix these kids,” Peggy says of the major juvenile offenders. “By the time we step in, it's too late for that. All we can do is protect the people who obey the rules. That's our obligation.”

“I disagree,” Hickey says. “Sure, we need to look for the sociopaths, and put them away. That's got to be our role. But the rest, we're still talking about
children.
The rest, they're salvageable. That should be our role, too.”
¹

·  ·  ·

The Los Padrinos Branch of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court where Jim Hickey works is so physically and philosophically different from the Inglewood courthouse inhabited by Roosevelt Dorn and Peggy Beckstrand that it hardly seems part of the same judicial system. It lies not in a neighborhood crippled by violence and poverty, but in a serene corner of the city of Downey, a bedroom community on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County. The juvenile crimes tried here are often serious—there are gang shootings and murders and other acts of unchildish children. Richard Perez had his fitness hearing here, and George Trevino. But, by and large, the cases here are not quite so relentlessly scary as the Inglewood docket. The prosecutors, judges, and defenders are not constantly at war here, either, finding more room for compromise, primarily because of the even, understanding tone set by Jim Hickey. Even this courthouse's name sets it apart, the only juvenile branch in the LA system where the officials in charge of such things chose a lyrical name instead of a functional one: Los Padrinos. The Godfathers.

Its location is as oddly out of place as its euphemistic name, surrounded not by gang turf, but sandwiched between a complex of squarish gray condominiums and a municipal golf course whose duffers occasionally pelt the blockish courthouse and its attached detention hall with wayward golf balls. None of the barely controlled chaos that reigns in Inglewood can be found here. Parents, children, and witnesses are relegated to a large waiting area with rows of uncomfortable brown molded-plastic chairs to hold them. Loudspeakers summon participants one case at a time, instructing
parents and minors to pass by a guard desk and through black metal double doors, then to follow one of three colored lines imprinted in the scuffed black linoleum floor, yellow, red, and green. Each line leads to a heavy black metal fire door and a small courtroom beyond, so there is no confusion over room numbers, departments, or layout. Literacy is not required.

Off to the side, skirted by the procession of kids and parents following lines on the floor, is Jim Hickey's office, a large room with a bank of desks for two secretaries and two clerks, a chaotic file room, several side offices for prosecutors to share, and one private office in back, piled high with papers—Hickey's.

Usually, the door remains open to Hickey's private office, but today it is closed. The head prosecutor is talking with a man named Luis Silvestre, whose stepson has been murdered. Hickey is prosecuting two boys for the killing, intent on sending them to adult court.

Alfred Clark had been waiting in line at a McDonald's restaurant. Another boy had cut in front of him, then demanded he hand over his Sony Walkman CD player. Alfred had just tried to laugh it off. Alfred the high school senior honors student. Alfred the star athlete. Alfred the kid with the college scholarship and the girlfriend and the classmates and teachers who loved him, who was bound for great things. He never saw it coming.

The bullet sliced through his aorta and he bled to death there on the floor of a fast-food restaurant, French fries scattered around him, his eyes pleading and filled with disbelief while all the other kids in line scattered. The seventeen-year-old kid who shot him and took his Walkman—it was worth barely a hundred dollars—was caught the next day, no question about his guilt. He had no remorse. His eyes were dead.

Juan Macias, the sixteen-year-old who drove the getaway car, who protested his innocence, who said he had no idea his homeboy was going to shoot anyone—but whose gang name was Scrappy, with a long arrest record for car theft, burglary, and armed robbery that belied his credibility—had been a tougher call. At first, it seemed he might be telling the truth. But then Hickey heard a witness say Scrappy had stood in McDonald's and pointed Alfred out to the killer a few minutes before the shooting, and the prosecutor decided this boy should go to adult court as well.

Alfred's stepfather had come to all the hearings so far. He has stared into the bright eyes of the two accused killers, and felt a weary hate wash over him. He would see the case through to the end, a silent vigil for justice. Once, he had known nothing about gang wars or street crime or the
ruthless coldness that drove young people to kill for no reason and to feel no regrets when they were through. He was a careworn man whose quiet, law-abiding life had not prepared him for any of this.

Today, Luis has stayed after the hearing to talk with Hickey about his overwhelming feelings of loss and bewilderment, to find some sense in it, somehow. But he can't. All he can talk about is what an incredible joy Alfred had been, tears streaming like they always do. Every day, he tells Hickey, he has to walk past the closed door of his son's room, willing himself not to shudder. No one in his family has been inside that room since the murder, months ago now. It is not that they are keeping a shrine. They just can't bear seeing Alfred's trophies, his schoolbooks, the acceptance letter from UCLA sitting on top of his desk. It was too much. Easier to leave it be, just as Alfred left it.

Only another parent can really understand this thing that has happened, this feeling that you just cannot go on, Luis says. “That's why I can talk to you. You have children.” The portrait Luis has painted of his son is so clear, the family's anguish is so naked, that Jim Hickey is speechless. All he can do is nod, and clasp the man's hand. And then grieving father and professional prosecutor simply sit in that tiny room in silence, faces wet, weeping together, while Hickey's staff gamely tries not to look through the glass in the door.

·  ·  ·

Later, Jim Hickey sits in his office discussing the future of juvenile justice, a subject that consumes much of his thought these days, as well as filling his desk with reports and clippings and memos. His feelings for the family of Alfred Clark and his desire to see the killers punished severely do not diminish his belief that most juveniles are salvageable. He still believes the main role of any prosecutor is to represent the point of view of people like Alfred Clark's father. That holds just as true in Juvenile Court as in the adult system and, on this point, he and Peggy Beckstrand and all the other juvenile supervisors are in agreement. But there ought to be more to it than just that traditional focus, Hickey says. Juvenile Court demands more.

Look at the kids who committed the Clark murder, he says. Look at Scrappy. He has been in the system for years. He was made a ward, put on probation, twice sent to camp, returned to probation afterward each time, then got in trouble again. Every time he was placed in a structured setting, he did well, with good grades, good behavior. But then he would return to the same impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood, the same lack of
supervision at home, the same old homeboys urging him to return to his gang and his criminal ways. No one ever taught him all the little things you need to know to hold down a job: to be on time, to be dependable, not to call in sick all the time just because you don't feel like working that morning. Sounds like basic stuff, but Hickey knows, the way every other professional in the juvenile system knows, that the kids of Juvenile Court tend to be bereft of these basics—that's one reason why they have such lousy records in school.