No Matter How Loud I Shout (47 page)

As he walks downstairs to see about another case, above him in the hallway, Cecil and Danny exchange high fives, then shuffle off with their families. Back home, their clubhouse awaits them. There's a lot of stuff to do.

A
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the Thurgood Marshall Branch's wheezing air conditioner slowly surrenders to the acrid swelter of Los Angeles summer, the courtrooms become close and stifling, traffic noise and exhaust fumes filtering
through fire escape doors propped opened in futile quest for a cooling breeze. Shafts of pallid sunlight alive with eddies of dust enter through these doors, penetrating the customary gloom to leave the lawyers and judges blinking at the smoggy glare, and giving portions of the courtroom still in shadow a sepia quality, as if this courthouse were an ancient place, long disused.

This is the season when the pace of Los Angeles Juvenile Court slows to (some might say from) a crawl. This is when patience withers and the halls of this old courthouse turn clammy with a gummy film of moisture. This is the time the Public Defender's Office chose to begin its crusade against Judge Dorn, the time to blanket him with “paper.”

This power to strike out at a judge stems from a simple right, a seemingly minor rule imported from adult court: Each side in a criminal case has the right to ask once for a different judge than the one originally assigned to a case, simply by filing a one-page form—“the paper.” There are no questions asked, and no exceptions. Judges are assigned cases at random as they come into the system; the rule is intended to be used sparingly. But if lawyers use their paper en masse to target a specific judge, then it becomes a potent bludgeon. It is yet another unintended side effect of the Supreme Court's landmark Gault decision that gave children the same rights as adults, a seemingly minor procedural rule that has placed an increasingly impossible burden on the Juvenile Court.

At first, the papering of Judge Dorn begins on a selective basis, with the assistant public defenders who work in Inglewood requesting transfers of new, incoming cases only when they thought a different judge might grant informal probation, or when a poor school record was at issue—the two points on which Judge Dorn always crushes them.

But Roosevelt Dorn reacts as everyone should have known he would—escalating the conflict, rather than defusing it. This is, after all, a judge who finds it necessary to issue regular, imperial reminders to lawyers: “You are not running this courtroom,
Judge Dorn
is running this courtroom.” His predictable response to being papered is to lash out by sending cases not to the other judges in the building, but to far-flung courthouses around the county, keeping the understaffed public defenders in their cars as much as in the courtroom.

That this combat began over a minor case and a minor question about a social worker's right to visit a client—a question an appeals court initially wavered on, then, after a long delay, summarily settled in Dorn's favor—is quickly forgotten. When the head of the public defender's juvenile section
comes to meet with Dorn in his chambers, no white flags are in evidence. The lawyer, Mark Lessem, emerges and announces that a promise he made months earlier to the presiding judge of Juvenile Court—that he would give Dorn a chance despite grave misgivings—has been fulfilled. Now the gloves would come off. Judge Dorn is far out of the mainstream of judicial thought when it comes to kids, Lessem complains, a judge who represents neither what is typical in the system, nor what is best. He bullies and punishes and demeans, then calls it “working with kids,” as Lessem sees it, and though Dorn could be viewed as pro-defense on some issues, particularly fitness hearings, the problems still outweighed the benefits. “He doesn't want to be a judge. He wants to be a king,” Lessem says after their meeting. “When I went to talk to him, he nearly threw me out.”

On even this point, the warring parties could not agree: Dorn recalls Lessem storming out of the meeting on his own. Afterward and in open court, the judge accuses Lessem of pursuing a personal vendetta against him for reasons unknown. Dorn says he had been approached by attorneys in the Public Defender's Office who told him they were being forced to paper him against their will, even though they knew he always gave a fair trial—comments the judge took to be true, though others suggested this was merely a case of savvy trial attorneys wisely using their downtown boss as a shield from Dorn's wrath. “Sooner or later, they'll have to try a case before Dorn again,” one lawyer sitting in the gallery whispers as the judge reiterates his claim that he is the victim of a vendetta. “Why poison your own relationship with the man when you can blame someone else?”

In any case, after that brief meeting between Dorn and the head juvenile public defender, the papering becomes a blanket. Now, every new case that comes before Judge Dorn—one-third of all the cases filed in the Thurgood Marshall Branch, hundreds a month—have to be shipped out.

Once the blanket is in place, the scene in court becomes almost farcical, a constant state of confusion. No one knows anymore what court they are supposed to be in, when or where. On the defense table, the lawyers keep a thick pile of photocopied forms—the one-page legal motion used to request a different judge. Each time a new case is called, the public defender on duty picks up one of these blank forms, fills in the juvenile's name, and files the paper. There is no consulting with the client—this is about teaching Judge Dorn a lesson, not about what might or might not be best for any particular kid. Most of them, freshly arrested and dazed at their loss of freedom, appear not to really understand what is going on. No one explains it to them.

Each time he is papered, a small, tight smile creeps across Dorn's face, barely making his thin mustache move. If possible, he makes the defense attorney, the juvenile, the family, and witnesses wait all morning for him to reassign the case. If a lawyer tries to prod him into choosing a new courtroom, he merely says, “I haven't decided yet,” and takes up some other matter. When he is finally ready to decide, he consults with his clerk to find the most distant courthouse possible with room on its docket. If he can send a case to Pomona, one of the two satellite courthouses he supervises—and the most distant and inconvenient one available—he does so.

And if the witnesses and victims and family have to travel across town to a new and unfamiliar courthouse along with the public defender on the case, so be it. Dorn has a lesson to impart, too. He makes it a point to apologize to the witnesses and families, then points a finger at the defense table and says, “The Public Defender's Office is forcing me to do this.” It is not precisely true—he could be sending the cases to Commissioner Polinsky or Judge Scarlett, right there in Inglewood—but he achieves the desired effect. After a week of this, the public defenders are as popular as roaches here.

His Pomona ploy does not always work, however. The Pomona Juvenile Court has no judges, just referees and commissioners, and for some hearings, a juvenile has the right to insist that a full judge hear his case. When that happens, Dorn's clerk must get on the phone with one of the delinquency court administrators at the presiding judge's office, who must then contact the other judges, one by one, whining and calling in favors until someone finally says, Oh, all right, send me the file. Several judges make a point of reminding the administrators that they had warned against bringing Dorn back to Juvenile Court, that this kind of blowup would be inevitable once he returned. After several rounds of phone calls, the cajoling process starts to take hours—judges, the ultimate authority in their individual courtrooms, can always say no when asked to take over Dorn's workload—and this brings all other activities in the administrators' office to a halt as the search for court space expands. That, in turn, piles more delays into the system, as other crises go unattended—the missing files, the misplaced delinquents, the riots in Juvenile Hall, the endless stream of memos that keeps the sluggish system moving along—all must line up behind the Dorn War. In the end, Judge Dorn must grudgingly begin to send some of his cases to the other two courtrooms at Thurgood Marshall, exploding their dockets.

The spread of the cancer is then complete. Kids and families wait all day to have their cases resolved. Students miss school. Parents miss work. Witnesses are told to come back another day. Uniformed cops stand around, waiting to testify instead of attending to their patrols. The number of postponements skyrockets.

One young man must wait all morning for a piece of official paper saying he has paid his debt to society, performed all his community service, and completed probation successfully. Indeed, he is an unqualified success story for the system, a young car thief and truant who turned his life around, went back to school, graduated, stayed clean, and is now about to join the Marine Corps.

He just needs that one piece of paper to complete the induction process. He needs it today. He has been waiting seven months for it to arrive in the mail, as promised. Now, after repeated, unanswered phone calls to his probation officer, he has come to court for a final time.

He waits hours in Judge Scarlett's gallery, watching the court wade through its calendar, a tall blond with muscular arms and a smooth, ruddy face that straddles the line between adolescence and manhood. He is rebuffed repeatedly by the court staff when he asks for help. “Are you on the calendar?” the clerk ask. When he shakes his head, she says, “You'll have to wait.” Later, during a lull in the action just before lunch, the young man once again ventures through the little swinging gate that divides the gallery from the lawyers' tables and approaches the clerk. She is nearly obscured behind a duck blind of papers and files, the telephone wedged between her shoulder and ear as if it has taken root there. The clerk looks up at his questioning look and shakes her head again. “Your paperwork is not here yet,” she says, looking away before she even finishes the sentence. “Sorry.” The tone of her voice says she is not.

“I'm the one getting reamed here,” he replies, patience finally giving way to anger. “I've done my time. I just want to get on with my life.”

Despite his angry words and raised voice, none of the lawyers glance up from the files and papers—they are too busy, too caught up in the chaotic mess sweeping the courthouse. At the end of his journey through the system, when he has done everything asked of him, there are no congratulations, no acknowledgments, no one to represent him but himself.

“It's on your probation officer,” the clerk says defensively. “It was his job to submit the report long ago. It didn't happen until today.”

“I haven't seen my probation officer in seven months,” the eighteen-year-old says. He is red in the face. Even his scalp, visible beneath the
Marine-style haircut he has already gotten in anticipation of boot camp, is crimson with anger.

“Well,” the clerk says, dismissive now, accusing, “perhaps you should have.”

“He told me to stop coming,” the kid says.

The clerk offers no apology for her groundless accusation. “Well, we'll get to it sometime today. But I just can't say when the order will actually be entered. Might be a few days before you get it.”

The young man stalks off, shaking his head, pushing through the double doors. No one gives him a second look.

·  ·  ·

Judge Dorn has waged this war before, and he plays to win. With the papering in full swing, forcing him to transfer incoming cases, he steps up his status offender meetings in chambers and he takes on more private-attorney cases. He is prepared to wait out the public defenders, over whom he knows he has one key advantage: No matter what they do, he never has to leave his courtroom. The lawyers must follow the cases wherever he sends them, and Dorn has them driving all over Los Angeles's sprawling jurisdiction, trying to keep up.

The Inglewood public defenders soon find they cannot keep up with the tangle of transferred cases for which they are personally responsible. The court bureaucracy's paper mill cannot keep up with all the changes, either. Witnesses are left wandering. The detention hall buses drop off the wrong kids in the wrong courthouses. The defenders find they have more than one case scheduled simultaneously in courthouses many miles apart, forcing them to spend every spare minute on Dorn's courtroom telephone, trying to get continuances from judges all over LA.

“I knew I'd have to be in three places at once this afternoon,” one public defender tells Dorn sheepishly after one such attempt at telephone juggling collapses.

“Talk to your boss about that,” Dorn says with a grin.

“I know I have other matters in here,” the lawyer pleads. “But I have a hearing in South Central at two.”

“No, you don't,” Dorn commands. “You have three trials in here. You do not leave my courtroom until these matters are finished.”

When a judge is papered, his brethren often close ranks in his defense, refusing to grant the continuances lawyers need when forced to travel between courthouses. The lawyer has been ordered to be at another Juvenile Court branch at two, or else.