No Matter How Loud I Shout (45 page)

Outside Judge Dorn's courtroom, a large family is assembled—mother, father, aunts, uncles, an assortment of kids. They are here for Hugh, the boy accused of Inglewood's recent murder spree, who is due for arraignment. The bus bringing him from Juvenile Hall has finally arrived—five hours late, and long after disappointed news crews departed for other stories.

Hugh's mother is telling Assistant Public Defender Leslie Stearns that her sixteen-year-old could not possibly have done the shootings. “We know exactly where he was,” she is saying, tears running down her face. “He was in Ventura, selling magazine subscriptions. He's not interested in gangs. He's interested in making money. Can't we take him home?”

Peggy overhears this conversation. The woman had called her earlier and said the same thing. Once again, Peggy is struck by the certitude in the woman's voice. Not simply that her son is innocent—most every parent that gives a damn about their kid thinks that, at least at first—but that she knows, for a fact, where he was and what he was doing. It is one of the reasons she has begun harboring grave doubts about this case. That, and the way Hugh was arrested. After he was tentatively ID'd by a witness to the street corner ambush of the schoolchildren, Inglewood detectives met with Peggy to discuss what to do next. Figuring Hugh had to be in hiding, they decided to get a search warrant for his house, hoping to find a cache of weapons—perhaps one of the guns used to kill fourteen-year-old Tila French and two-year-old Kyiara Nicole. But when they arrived the next morning, they found no murder weapons—just Hugh, sitting calmly at his kitchen table eating Rice Krispies and getting ready to go to school. He had not been hiding at all. Not sure what to do, the policemen decided to arrest Hugh then and there, a dearth of evidence notwithstanding. This, in turn, forced Peggy to file charges she thought were premature.

But defense lawyer Stearns is not nearly so impressed with talk of Hugh's magazine alibi. Everyone claims innocence at this stage, and it is hard not to be jaded. She merely nods and tries to comfort the family, but makes it clear that the hearing today is just an arraignment. Nothing substantive will happen today, she says, and no matter what happens, they could be sure Hugh will not be coming home today, not with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder over his head. This provokes louder weeping from Hugh's mother and his aunt. Stearns leaves them then, returning to the courtroom to frantically comb the file Peggy's office just turned over, looking for an excuse that would allow the public defender to dump this case and give it to a private, appointed attorney. “It's really a sick case,” she whispers. “We're looking for a conflict, any conflict.”

And it turns out there is one: a kid named Stuart—who survived the street corner shooting and who identified Hugh as the killer—is represented by the public defender, an obvious conflict of interest. The same law office can't represent a killer and the witness against him. By coincidence, Stuart is in court this very day for violating his probation for robbery
by not going to school. Now he's in the holding tank, waiting to go to boot camp. The public defender begs off the case. But there is another problem.

“Wait a minute,” Peggy tells Judge Dorn's bailiff, when she realizes that Hugh and the star witness against him are about to cross paths in the holding tank. “We've got to keep them apart.”

She dashes outside, heels clicking on the tile floor as she heads to the holding area in the back of the building. Someone could easily get hurt or intimidated—or be persuaded to change his story, she fears. Breathless, Peggy manages to get down there just as Hugh is being brought off the bus and Stuart is about to be herded on. At Peggy's urgent, whispered command, the witness is pulled aside and out of Hugh's sight, and the two manage to pass one another without ever knowing it.

“Jesus, that was close,” she tells the confused deputies. They have no idea that any sort of relationship exists between Hugh the alleged killer and Stuart the witness, and could just have easily put them in a room together without a thought. Peggy is about to explain this to the guards, but then she glances at her watch and realizes she is late for Judge Scarlett's court.

“Helluva way to try a murder case,” she mutters, then disappears around a corner.

·  ·  ·

Little else is done that day in the Ronald Duncan trial. Judge Scarlett has some unrelated matters to clean up, and they leave him in a dark mood, unusual for this even-tempered veteran of the juvenile bench. First comes a twelve-year-old boy with four arrests under his belt (including an armed robbery), six months of truancy, six months of inaction by the Juvenile Court, a mother who sent him to court by himself, and a lawyer who thinks he ought to go home on unsupervised probation. (Scarlett gives him formal HOP but, given his age, there probably won't be much difference.)

Then comes a teenaged girl who tried to murder her mother with a butcher knife—an angry attempt to fulfill the mother's constantly shouted prophecy that the girl would turn out just like her father. The father, Scarlett is told, is a serial killer. Now Mom is wailing in court that she wants her daughter back home. (Scarlett puts her in a foster home, but he knows this is a temporary fix at best—juvenile law is purposely biased in favor of reuniting families, no matter how dysfunctional.)

“What a mess,” Scarlett mutters after the family leaves his courtroom.
“As long as we keep returning these children to the environment that contributed to their violating the law in the first place, we should never expect to solve anything. Everyone in the courtroom knows it. But I do not have that power.”

After fourteen years on the juvenile court bench, Scarlett believes the law needs to be changed so that judges can remove such children from their dysfunctional homes for years, perhaps permanently—not based on the severity of a kid's crime, as is the current practice, but on the basis of a kid's need. This is a radical notion, given the law's preference for keeping families together, and it is also a politically and racially volatile issue, because minorities are proportionally overrepresented in Juvenile Court, and therefore could be disproportionally affected by such a policy change.
¹
Even for an African-American judge with a strong record as a defender of civil rights, such opinions are frowned upon. Scarlett recalls well what happened to former mayor Tom Bradley when he voiced similar beliefs many years ago, long before juvenile crime had arced out of control: Bradley was roundly denounced by even his most ardent supporters, and quickly backed off his statements.

When Scarlett finishes these other cases and finally resumes the Duncan trial, there is time only for some minor cleanup testimony, followed by Peggy's announcement that she rests her case. If Jason's testimony hasn't closed the deal, she figures, nothing will.

The next morning, the defense takes its turn. Ronald Duncan is the first and only witness.

The first time he testified, the focus had been on one legal issue—whether his confession to the police should be admitted or tossed out. Now, though, he could tell his whole story. His parents lean forward in their seats, eager, waiting, watching Ronald take the stand and his oath to God. Then he sits down and begins stroking his sparse goatee, assuming a look of intense concentration.

Cooper's first question gets right to the point. “Did you kill Chuck and Ada?”

Ronald shakes his head and gives a drawn-out and truculent “No,” sounding like a small child denying a predinner raid on the cookie supply.

Cooper's next question, however, is an odd one—an open-ended request for Ronald to describe his knowledge of the murders. This violates a cardinal rule of courtroom examinations—questions must invite specific responses, not wide-ranging narratives that can take unexpected, sometimes legally impermissible turns. When Peggy objects, Cooper asks for
a break, and the lawyers and Judge Scarlett retreat into chambers for a quiet discussion. Cooper informs the others that he asked such an open-ended question because of his own ethical concerns—he wants to avoid the possibility of eliciting perjury from a witness, something he is barred from knowingly doing. This is a tacit but nevertheless extraordinary acknowledgment by Cooper that his client might be about to lie. The only way off the ethical hook for Cooper is to let Ronald tell his story through an open-ended narrative. Peggy shrugs. Scarlett says, Okay, get on with it.
²

When court is reconvened, Ronald tells his story. The courtroom is full again, mostly with lawyers and Ronald's family, his parents hanging on every word. “Now we'll hear the truth,” his mother says to no one in particular.

Ronald starts his story of innocence by claiming that he did not wear his Baskin Robbins shirt that night. Therefore, the bloody polo shirt found by the side of the road could not be his. Or if it is, he has no idea how it was bloodied or how it could have gotten there. He says he walked home from work that night, rather than accept a ride from Chuck and Ada, and came nowhere near the murder scene. Halfway home, he saw a familiar blue van approaching, and flagged Jason down.

It was then, Ronald says, smoothing the front of his orange jumpsuit as he speaks, that he learned Jason had murdered his employers.

“When I got inside, he looked at me and said, ‘I did it.' I said, ‘Did what?' ‘I did
it.
' And I looked down behind the seats and saw a plastic bag full of money.”

Ronald knew, then, what had happened. Two people he claims to have loved had been killed, their money piled at his feet. When Ronald pauses, Cooper asks, “Then what?”

Ronald shrugs, as if the answer should be obvious. “My first thought was, Break me off.” Ronald laughs then, as if the memory of it is amusing.

“What does that mean?” Cooper asks.

“It means, give me some. I got about two hundred dollars.”

There is no mistaking the look of distaste on Judge Scarlett's face then, an expression mirrored by virtually all of the other people in the courtroom, except for those related to the witness. Ronald is oblivious to the effect he is having, which only makes it worse. Later, he would happily describe this scene in the Juvenile Hall writing class. It never occurs to him—on the stand, or in the class—that most people might expect a different reaction from him in that moment of discovery in the van, perhaps horror or sorrow or an impulse to call the police. It never occurs to
him that there is anything wrong with
Break me off.
Even Ronald's father flinches when he hears this, the look of a man suddenly awaking from a dream etched across his face.

Cooper prods Ronald along with another “Then what?”—the question of a lawyer who does not want to suborn perjury. Ronald thinks a moment, then recalls how on the day after the murders, he again saw Jason, who instructed him, “If anything comes down, don't say anything. And I said, Don't worry, I'm covering myself.” Once again, Ronald grins, the stand-up guy, taking the heat for his older friend.

Later, he says, his schoolmate and fellow tagger Marvin asked him if he killed Chuck and Ada. Contrary to Marvin's testimony about Ronald confessing to the crime, Ronald swears he told Marvin no, he didn't kill Chuck and Ada. He just robbed them—a lie, he says now, intended to earn him respect. “Gang kinda respect,” Ronald explains. “To get a rep. To get more respect from our bigger homeboys . . . But I never said I murdered anyone.”

There it is, then, Ronald's defense: Marvin got it wrong, Jason is the real killer, never mind my confession.

Cooper finishes up quickly then, and Peggy begins her cross examination. She has the look of someone performing a particularly unpleasant laboratory dissection.

First she confronts Ronald with all his many inconsistencies—how he was seen leaving for work in the Baskin Robbins shirt he claimed he didn't wear, how he failed to explain why his pants were inside Chuck and Ada's car on the night of the murder, crumpled and bloody, and how he neglected, during his direct testimony, to mention the blood on his backpack and how he once claimed to have been knifed on the way home from work in order to explain that blood.

“It slipped my mind,” Ronald says tightly. “I'm under a lot of stress right now.”

But when Peggy asks the next question, it is her voice that is quaking with stress, not Ronald's. “You didn't jump up from the backseat and shoot Chuck in the head behind the left ear and blow his brains out of his face?”

“No, I did not,” Ronald says in a steady, clear voice.

Ronald has his chin propped on his hand again, a posture of insolence, the look of a kid seemingly certain he will elude justice. It makes Peggy furious, her hands clenched and white, her voice tremulous. “How did your friend Marvin know details of the murders if you didn't tell him?” she asks.

Ronald doesn't know.

“Does Marvin have any reason to lie?” she asks.

Ronald shrugs. “Not that I can see.”

As Ronald testifies, smiling and sarcastic, both hands now propping up his chin, Judge Scarlett gradually inches farther and farther away from the witness stand, until, by the time Peggy finishes, he is as far from Ronald as possible without physically leaving the bench.

Peggy winds up her questioning by asking why he would say to Jason, ‘Break me off.' Ronald's reply is smug and simple, a hateful child's response. “Why not?”

Peggy sits down and Cooper quickly puts his case to rest then. Scarlett glances at the clock, then at Deputy DA Wendy Derzaph, the prosecutor normally assigned to his courtroom, who has four other trials on his docket this day. The judge tells Peggy to make her closing argument, a process that is often an all-day affair in adult court murder cases, but which she accomplishes in about five minutes.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” she says. There is the blood on Ronald's shirt, his pants, his book bag. There is Marvin's testimony that Ronald admitted to the crimes, in telling detail. There is Jason's testimony that they planned the crime together, and that he drove a blood-drenched and moneyed Ronald home from the scene. There is Ronald's stream of lies in the case.