No Matter How Loud I Shout (48 page)

“That's not my problem, Counselor,” Dorn says. “I'm not going to release you to go somewhere else.”

“Then, Your Honor, may I ask which jail am I going to be spending the night in?”

Judge Dorn cackles.

The chaos soon spreads beyond Thurgood Marshall Branch and increases exponentially when the District Attorney's Office chooses this moment, a particularly ripe one, to begin papering one of their judicial nemeses. Their target is Juvenile Court Judge Sherill Luke of Pasadena, whose work habits have long been lambasted by prosecution and defense alike, without result.

For more than a year, memos have been sent to the presiding judge about Luke, in which prosecutors blisteringly described the judge as rude, tyrannical, and chronically lazy, with a workday rarely lasting more than three or four hours. He started late, took a long lunch, then followed up with an early departure. Every day. A log kept by one prosecutor for one recent month showed Luke going home every day but one by two-thirty, long before the courthouse workday was supposed to end. Cases were constantly postponed at the judge's whim, inconveniencing victims and witnesses, and costing the county unknown sums in wasted legal fees as attorneys sat around waiting—and billing—for hearings that never took place.

The presiding judge, Marcus O. Tucker, well known as a tireless advocate for children, but not as a particularly efficient or decisive administrator, had taken no visible action on these complaints, even though his own in-house data gathered from every courtroom in the system—a far more objective standard than complaint memos from angry prosecutors—revealed unequivocally that Judge Luke lagged far behind his colleagues in the amount of work he accomplished, trying far fewer cases and postponing far more than the other bench officers of Juvenile Court.
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So, in the midst of the Dorn War—in which prosecutors have cautiously remained neutral—the District Attorney's Office begins papering Judge Luke. Another game is set in motion, the object of which has nothing to do with the welfare of children or the protection of public safety. The goal is simple: Cripple the court. Drive the administration crazy. Use all the procedural tricks imported from adult court in order to drive a disliked jurist from his courtroom.

In the end, the DA's strategy proves to be the better thought out. The court is already reeling from the papering of Judge Dorn, and has been further hobbled by having two other juvenile bench officers on vacation, and
yet another one hospitalized. The massive Juvenile Court of Los Angeles is, in effect, down by 20 percent of its regular capacity, which is on the best of days already strained to the breaking point. Now it can no longer keep up with its cases, and the system literally collapses on itself. The guiding philosophy of the court—to quickly and decisively stop children from destroying themselves and others—once again goes by the wayside, as the normal three- and four-month delays in processing cases expands to seven or eight. Cases that might otherwise have been pursued are dismissed or never filed, letting beginning criminals off the hook, encouraging them to try their hands again at burglary or car theft or robbery or worse.

Timing is everything when lawyers go to war with judges: Judge Luke has far less support than Dorn, and the presiding judge quickly acquiesces to the District Attorney. Judge Luke is replaced and departs for another branch of Juvenile Court, where he hears only uncontested arraignments—hearings so formulaic that the DA's Office doesn't even keep a prosecutor in the room.
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A new bench officer with a more rigorous schedule moves into the Pasadena court, helping to spread the workload around. This lowers the strain on the system, making up, at least in part, for the papering of Judge Dorn, undercutting the public defender's strategy.

Dorn, meanwhile, stands his ground and slowly wins his war. He makes it clear that “Judge Dorn isn't going anywhere.” He goes on with his in-chambers counseling sessions, his focus on status offenders, his insistence on dishing out large blocks of detention time to truant probationers, something the public defenders detest. He humiliates the public defenders further by winning the appeal on the visitation case that provoked the whole papering ordeal in the first place. Finally, after about a month of papering, with the public defenders suffering far more than the judge they are supposedly punishing, it is decided rather anticlimactically that “the point,” whatever it is, has been made. The blanket papering of Judge Dorn ends, much to everyone's relief.

The general consensus is that nothing good was accomplished by this mass exercise of civil rights, this legal siege of Department 240, Thurgood Marshall Branch: The kids, the families, the victims, even the lawyers suffered, as did the image of Juvenile Court in all their eyes. The small reserve of goodwill still in the system drained away a little more. But the crush of cases continues through the summer-hot courtrooms. And Roosevelt Dorn changes not a whit.

Tonight's writing class has a somber mood, the kids falling silent after some brief, excited chatter about an escape earlier in the week, a kid who made it over the wall of Central Juvenile Hall and down to the train tracks, out of sight, on The Outs. It's that tantalizing glimpse of freedom that quiets everyone in the room after a few minutes, the image of that small figure in gray sweats vanishing around a corner they will never see. Security will be tighter for a while now, they know, privileges fewer, the more lenient staff less likely now to allow a Domino's delivery in the night, like in the old days.

A writing exercise yields little more than blank papers matched by blank stares from most of the kids. I'm about to call it a night, but then a new student says he has something he wants to read, a poem he shyly offers up to the table for criticism. It's a surprise, because in two previous classes, this boy hasn't said a word.

Rodrigo Becerra is, at seventeen, bound for a long prison sentence in adult court for attempted murder. He is a classic Juvenile Court career criminal, six arrests over three years—car thefts, high-speed chases, carrying guns in almost all of them, a long-recognized abuse of PCP and other drugs involved in each crime. Despite all this, the Juvenile Court did little for Rodrigo: After his most recent arrest for getting blasted on PCP-soaked marijuana joints
while on probation, the court sent him home on probation yet again. At the time, the probation officer who investigated Rodrigo's case noted how crucial it would be for this boy to get intensive supervision immediately. But the department did not get around to assigning a PO to his case for eighteen days after his release. This turned out to be two days longer than it took Rodrigo, street name “Stranger,” to get high, pull out a gun, and seriously wound a rival gang member by shooting him in the neck, then emptying his gun as his victim tried to crawl down the sidewalk to safety.

In class, Stranger makes a simple announcement, an eerie prologue to his verse: He has no hope in life. Then he reads his poem, written in five minutes there in class, powerful and raw:

I'm a stranger in life

But I'm really well known

To all of my homeboys

Way the back home.

I'm the kind you don't trust.

I'm the kind that steals.

If I steal something from you

I don't care how you feel.

I'm a stranger to no one.

I commit a lot of felonies.

I go to jail brown and proud

And I'm treated respectfully.

I'm a stranger in life

'Cause I ain't got one.

I'm facing a life sentence

So it don't leave me none.

I'm a stranger to my family

'Cause they can't see me grow up.

If I think of how I'm hurting them,

It makes me throw up.

This is a stranger in jail

Sitting in a one-man cell,

Saying to myself, what is this feeling

That I never ever felt?

As he reads, Stranger's voice is so soft, the rest of us must strain to hear over the clatter and rustle that is always in the background at the hall, even in this closed and airless cube of a library room, with its tired collection of paperbacks and chipped Formica table with wobbly metal legs. His face is flat and pale, dark eyes hollow and circled, lips compressed now that he has finished. He holds his paper tightly, his eyes still focused on it even after he is through reading, but he looks up in surprise when he hears the other boys begin to praise his work, every one of them, all impressed that he could compose something so quickly and so well during a few minutes in class. He blushes deeply then and, for just a moment, this lost cause bound for adult court and state prison named Stranger is suddenly Rodrigo again, years melting from his face to reveal the seventeen-year-old boy underneath, a kid who has survived by carefully hiding his hopes and dreams from view so long that he has forgotten he had them, until now.

“I always wanted to write,” he says with a bashful grin. Then the moment passes, as does the smile, quick as a camera flash, and the Stranger is back, sullen and withdrawn, beyond hope, beyond hoping. He is transferred out of the hall before the next class meets.

J
UST
when it seems so painfully clear that the Juvenile Court is the worst of both worlds, combining the gamesmanship and procedural excesses of the adult system with the juvenile system's toothless lack of consequences, just when the denizens of the system are ready to throw up their hands at the fifteen-year-old killers who skate and the sixteen-year-old robbers who get life in adult prison—just when the urge to scrap the whole concept of Juvenile Court and run screaming from the building becomes nearly irresistible, something happens to remind everyone there is a reason to preserve this schizophrenic system. Just when the judges start thinking about early retirement and the prosecutors start wondering about going into entertainment law and the public defenders begin sending their résumés to the top corporate law firms and Peggy Beckstrand starts dusting
off her Peace Corps application, something happens that shows them there is wisdom, after all, in maintaining a separate juvenile system, and in keeping all those onerous legal guarantees handed down on behalf of Gerry Gault.

These reminders always crop up sooner or later—the proud young man who strolls into the courthouse four years after his case concludes so he can show the judge his college degree. The young woman who writes from the Midwest to say she has kept a steady job and has been off drugs for three years. The former gang member who now acts as a mediator between warring gangs, helping to forge truces that keep young people from dying. The father who says in open session that the ordeal of Juvenile Court has brought him together with his son for the first time in years, making his family whole and happy again, a rare fresh start. All the kids who commit just one crime, then go straight for good—the majority in Juvenile Court.

This time, in the wake of the Dorn War and all its attendant confusion and futility, the reminder takes the form of three troubling murder cases and a tireless defense attorney named Sherry Gold.

Gold is a courthouse regular, having first served at Thurgood Marshall as a public defender, and now as a private lawyer on the appointment panel. She draws a sizable portion of the murder cases here whenever conflicts force the Public Defender's Office to bow out—a sign of the respect the Inglewood judges have for her abilities. For the most part, in juvenile as well as in adult court, murders are parceled out only to the most experienced and skilled lawyers on the panel.

Gold is a forceful presence in court, a small, slim woman with unruly blond hair and a persistence rare in the ranks of the low-paid appointed attorneys here. She is one of the few defense lawyers who regularly visit Peggy Beckstrand's office (to most of her colleagues, it is like crossing enemy lines, something to be avoided). But Gold is always there, clamoring for deals and breaks and a fresh look at the evidence—an irritant to prosecutors who, nevertheless, often gets what she wants through sheer determination. She has her own table at a cramped diner across the street from the courthouse, where she long ago ceased having to say her order out loud, and where she can be found between hearings huddled over her legal briefs, or with her head bowed close to a prosecutor, whispering negotiations to settle a case, alternately pleading or bullying, depending upon the strength of the evidence.

Sherry Gold writes a prescription for each of her cases, a kind of motherly
checklist for kids who have never been mothered. When she takes on a new client, the first thing she does, even before the court gets around to it, is to check on the kid's school record. Then, if the boy or girl is out of custody, she gives the parents of her clients assignments: Enroll the kid in school, take him there personally each morning on time, talk to the teachers, pick up the kids after school if at all possible. “Make sure they come right home and do their homework,” she says. “Make sure the teachers call you whenever there's a problem, so you can fix it before it gets worse.”