No Matter How Loud I Shout (39 page)

It might have happened, too. But the county government's sudden budget crisis derailed the proposal for now, perhaps permanently. For the foreseeable future, only Dorn and his two colleagues on the bench in the Inglewood courthouse will aggressively pursue status offenders.

Though Dorn has won over converts, others in the courthouse remain fearful, even outraged, by Dorn's private sessions in chambers. They see
Dorn as playing fast and loose with the rules, aiming for his own personal vision of what's right, rather than what's legal. While Dorn is dealing with another status offender case in chambers, a defense lawyer waiting in court gripes, “Here he is, in there with a kid, making threats, making orders he has no legal right to make, there's no court reporter in there, the kid has no lawyer—it's a kangaroo court. There are no checks and balances. Dorn's doing exactly what a judge did to Gault thirty years ago.”

As much as Dorn would like to dismiss such criticisms as coming from recalcitrant bureaucrats and defense lawyers eager to protect a gravy train of court appointments, it is true that the status offense process Dorn is using lacks some of the checks and balances that other delinquency and criminal cases carry. Locking up status offenders is illegal, but Dorn finds ways to do it anyway, relying primarily on a judge's power to hold anyone who disobeys a judicial order in contempt of court. The problem with this, however, is the law still requires—for obvious reasons—that runaways, incorrigibles, and other status offenders be housed completely apart from delinquents who commit actual crimes. And there is no room for them all—there are only forty secure status offender beds in all of Los Angeles County, with Judge Dorn and the other two Inglewood judges quickly filling them all, leaving nothing left for the other twenty-five juvenile judges and commissioners who occasionally need to hold a child in that way.

“Judge Dorn does not live in the 1990s, he lives in the 1940s,” the director of one of LA's juvenile halls griped. “He says, ‘Lock 'em up,' and we have to obey his orders, but the thing is, the extra time and money we spend on his kids, we have to take away from other kids elsewhere. He's not operating in a vacuum.”

Status offenders also fall under a different portion of the welfare code than other delinquents, one the District Attorney does not enforce. Instead, a probation officer—who does not have the same independence from judicial control that a DA enjoys—fills that role, acting as prosecutor of status offenders. And though a child is still entitled to a defense attorney, that lawyer does not enter the process until after Dorn has had his informal hearing without lawyers, and has, in essence, already made up his mind about a kid. It is Dorn, after all, who often suggests to parents that they file the necessary papers to initiate a status offense case.

The case of a sixteen-year-old problem child named Rolando exacerbated these fears, hardening opposition to Dorn's program, particularly among public defenders.

Rolando's grandmother brought the boy to Dorn. She had heard about
the judge in Inglewood who ran an open court and who would help families with children out of control. Rolando's grandmother had raised the boy since age three, when the dependency branch of Juvenile Court took him from his mother because of chronic neglect. Like so many other foster children, Rolando started getting in trouble as an adolescent. At age fifteen, he joined a gang in the small city of Lennox on the edge of Los Angeles International Airport (a gang that is, coincidentally, the chief rival to Carla James's Tepa-13 gang).

Within a few months, he had racked up four arrests for vandalism and graffiti. He was released without formal prosecution each time. More recently, he had become a constant truant, and had stolen money and jewelry from his grandparents to finance a new drug habit—more than four thousand dollars' worth, his grandmother estimated. He sold the jewelry on the streets, using his earnings to buy rock cocaine and a particularly dangerous drug popular with juveniles, Sherm—marijuana laced with angel dust, an animal tranquilizer that causes hallucinations and, at times, wild, violent behavior.

Desperate for help and disgusted with the juvenile system's past performance, Rolando's grandmother and grandfather dragged the boy to Dorn and told him Rolando had stolen thousands of dollars from them in the past few months. Dorn questioned the boy, demanding he tell the truth, and Rolando confessed to stealing the jewelry and cash. Dorn then ordered him taken into custody by his bailiff so that the grandparents could go to the police department and file a theft complaint. Then the boy was turned over to the police so a formal theft case could be prosecuted by the DA.

Both prosecutors and the public defenders were incredulous at Dorn's actions in the case. No one actually had the nerve to confront the judge with this criticism, but privately they claimed Dorn had no legal right to detain Rolando
before
charges were filed. The judge had no jurisdiction. They also questioned the seemliness of a judge interrogating a boy accused of crimes, rather than backing off as soon as the grandmother made it clear she was talking about grand theft rather than a status offense. By urging (by some accounts, ordering) the grandparents to file a theft complaint with the police, they said, Dorn had become an advocate, sacrificing his judicial objectivity. And beyond that, because the boy confessed after talking to Dorn, the judge had become a potential witness in the case. He also had left himself open to charges that he used his judicial authority to coerce a confession from the boy, which, if true, would be a violation of Rolando's constitutional rights.

“It's a mess,” Peggy Beckstrand sighed once the police brought the case in for prosecution. “And now we're stuck with it.” Yet even she admitted that Judge Dorn had managed to do something for a child and a family that the system had previously been unable to help. Constitutional questions aside, no one really doubted Rolando's guilt. And for the first time, the kid faced real consequences for his actions. For the first time, he and his family had a chance.

“Dorn's goals are laudable,” Peggy told her staff during one in a continuing series of discussions on how to deal with the supervising judge. “There's no doubt about that. What he wants to do is wonderful. The problem is
how
he does it. He doesn't want to play by the rules. He doesn't really want to be a judge. He wants to be king. And this is going to come up again and again. Wait and see.”

Peggy's words were prophetic, and she didn't have to wait long in order to see them come true.

·  ·  ·

“They're inside me,” Keesha Jordan began complaining at age twelve, at first infrequently, then more often as the years passed. “The voices.”

And they were angry voices, difficult to ignore, chiding her, tormenting her, telling her—with increasing frequency—to do terrible things, unspeakable things. They made her curse her older sister Tina, vile words she didn't even remember learning, tumbling out of her in an unstoppable stream. She felt like a soda bottle shaken by invisible, malevolent hands at such times, frothing, overflowing, out of control. It got so Tina couldn't bring friends to the house—Keesha scared them too much.

Still, she got all A's and B's at school, she never cut class, she didn't hang out with bad kids, didn't do drugs. Keesha never even had a boyfriend, much less experimented with sex. In many ways, she had been a model child. Sure, she stayed locked up in her bedroom most of the time and occasionally had confused, sometimes violent yelling matches when no one else was present. But things could be a lot worse for a kid these days, her mother figured, what with gangs and guns and pregnant teenagers everywhere. Besides, there were more pressing concerns for the Jordan family. Forty years old and on her own, Mrs. Jordan was too busy with Keesha's little sisters, ages two and three, and with getting rid of an abusive ex-husband who had beaten her, Keesha, and the other kids for years. At the same time, Mrs. Jordan was fighting to stay off the drugs that had hooked her in the past. Who had time to take Keesha to some shrink for counseling? And who could afford it if there was time? Keesha's mother worked hard as a stock clerk to support the whole
family, barely making ends meet with the $750 monthly salary she pulled in, most of which went to pay the rent. She was gone many days and evenings, and twenty-year-old Tina had to keep things together. It was easy for Mrs. Jordan to keep saying to herself, Keesha will outgrow this phase, she'll be fine, she has a bright future. Sometimes, she even believed it.

The kids who land in Juvenile Court share certain common characteristics: Most of their crimes are preceded by years of unheeded warning signs, and most of their parents possess high capacities for self-absorption or self-delusion. Keesha was no exception. It took the events of the evening of November 15, 1993, to shock her mother into realizing—too late—that Keesha was not going to simply outgrow her problems. But by then, the juvenile justice system had taken over.

That night, Tina Jordan had been watching television with her two baby sisters in a bedroom of the family's second-floor, two-bedroom apartment. Around six o'clock, shortly after Mrs. Jordan left for work, Tina heard a sound from the living room. Keesha, with whom she had bickered earlier, had taken a two-foot-long machete out of a closet, and was scraping it against the furniture. Tina could hear mumbling, too, as if Keesha were arguing with someone, though no one else was in the living room with her.

The scraping grew louder and more frantic, then suddenly stopped. Keesha appeared in the doorway, tall and strong, her black hair pulled back into a severe bun, the yellow light from the bedroom fixture glinting off her thick glasses. Her eyebrows were knitted in an angry V, and she brandished the machete like a broadsword.

“Get ready to die,” she yelled. “I'm fixin' to kill you!”

She charged the bed as the babies screamed. Tina jumped up and away as Keesha swung the machete like a baseball bat at her sister's head as if to decapitate her. As Keesha moved toward her older sister and the machete whistled through the air again, Tina rolled across the bed, keeping it between her and her sister. She dodged two or three more swings this way, crying and pleading as she ducked and rolled, the long, flat blade getting closer every time.

“Please don't kill me, Keesha. Please, I don't want to die,” Tina wailed, expecting at any moment to feel the machete carve her like the roast chicken they had for dinner a few hours earlier.

Instead, as abruptly as she had begun the attack, Keesha stopped pursuing Tina with the swinging blade. She took a position blocking the doorway of the bedroom. “If you want to live, then you'd better call the police,” she muttered, and turned away, distracted by the voices only she could
hear. Tina retreated to a corner of the bedroom, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911, the little girls still wailing on the bed beside her.

Eight minutes later, three Los Angeles police officers arrived at the apartment. They found Tina and the babies still barricaded in the bedroom. Keesha, wearing a nightgown with an old brown cardigan on top, sat in an armchair, her legs pulled up, the handle of the machete wedged between her thighs, the blade pointing straight up. She rested her chin on top of the point of the machete, so that one vigorous nod of her head would plunge the machete deeply into her neck.

“I have nothing to live for,” she said, rocking in the chair, hunched and withdrawn. “I'm ready to die.”

Fearing she was about to thrust the machete into her throat, one of the officers, armed with a stun gun, fired. The policemen were the ones stunned, however, as they watched in disbelief—and Keesha looked on with mild interest—as the stun gun's dart, which delivers a powerful electric shock, bounced off the machete blade and fell harmlessly to the floor. The officer tried again, with the same result, as if the machete were a magnet. Keesha began to grow agitated then. The officer held his breath, spread his legs, and fired again, twice in rapid succession, and though one of the darts again struck the blade and fell to the floor, the last shot finally lodged in Keesha's chin. She convulsed from the surge of voltage, dropped the machete, and sprawled onto the worn carpeting, where two policemen pounced on her and put handcuffs around her scarred wrists. Sobbing, Tina emerged with the babies and begged the policemen to take Keesha away.

After a checkup in a hospital emergency room, the police booked Keesha into Central Juvenile Hall on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Once there, an intake officer read the police reports, interviewed Keesha, and talked to Mrs. Jordan, who had rushed over from work. Then he wrote up a detention report for the court, Keesha's entrée to the system. The hurried report failed to mention Keesha's need for psychological testing and treatment, and she received none when admitted to Central Juvenile Hall.

The intake officers—as well as the police—have the option to interrupt the juvenile intake process and take an obviously disturbed child like Keesha to a psychiatric hospital for an emergency commitment, so long as there is evidence she is ill, and that she poses a danger to herself or others. Keesha clearly fit this profile, attempting both homicide and suicide in the space of an hour. Her blunt, expressionless face that night, and her talk of disembodied voices instructing her to do terrible things, made her mental problems obvious to all around her.

But seeking a mental commitment requires additional effort, time, and paperwork. The police or probation officer who brings the child to the hospital must wait around for hours, with no guarantee that the medical staff will take the kid. The hospital wards are crowded and there is enormous pressure to turn away indigent patients like Keesha if there is any question at all about the need for a mental commitment. If refused admission, Keesha would then have to be escorted back to juvenile intake to start the process all over. That's a great deal of time to spend on one new case. For all of Los Angeles County, with its thousands of square miles and its sixty-plus police departments and sheriff's stations making up to two hundred juvenile arrests a day, there are but twenty intake officers out in the field—for all three daily eight-hour shifts. Budget cuts have decimated their ranks, leaving most of the intake process to the juvenile halls, where the probation officers cutting the reports are in no position to get up and leave to take a child to the hospital. The cases and kids never stop stacking up at the halls.
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