No Matter How Loud I Shout (49 page)

At first, there is resistance to this parenting of the parents, these dicta from some pale, freckled Jewish woman with her blond hair and blue eyes and steamroller intensity. But Gold is patient, and she always explains the bottom line: When you have months to wait before a case comes to trial, putting in effort at home and in school before some angry judge gets around to
ordering
the same things can make an immense difference at the end of the case. He's been in school for months, Your Honor, Sherry Gold can say, hoping no one will notice that his enrollment occurred two weeks after his arrest. Appearances are everything: A kid who would otherwise have gotten probation gets off completely under the Sherry Gold prescription. Another who might have gone to camp but who suddenly has excellent report cards and a mother who knows all his teachers by name may get to go home on probation instead. A felon bound for CYA might have a shot at camp. All it takes is the appearance that the boy or girl in question is contrite and making an effort to change. No one has to know it's being done under orders from defense lawyer Gold.

“If you do what I tell you to do,” Gold promises one mother, sealing the deal, “you'll have to come to court a lot less, and when you do come, the judge will be congratulating you instead of ragging on you for ignoring your child's education.”

Most of the time, this simple ploy works. Some of the parents, previously worn down by their child's misbehavior, even become inspired enough to scrape up a coat and tie for their kid, which Sherry Gold calls the easiest—though most often ignored—method available for shedding months from a sentence in Juvenile Court. And for some of the kids and parents, what begins as a way to put one over on a judge ends up becoming an end in itself—the kids start liking school, the parents begin to enjoy being involved, the family starts to pull together.

When it comes to more serious cases, Sherry Gold does something else only a few of her fellow appointed attorneys seem to do: She performs her own investigation. For many of the lawyers here, case preparation consists
of reading the police and probation reports, then trying to cut a deal. But Gold, a former city prosecutor who knows well how the police can sometimes cut corners on juvenile cases, always tries to eke a few dollars out of the tightfisted court for private investigators. Failing that—and even when she does get a PI—Gold does investigative legwork herself, interviewing witnesses, visiting crime scenes, challenging the police version of events in a way seldom done in Juvenile Court. The results can be startling—and troubling.

When the case of
People v. Leon Jones
came to her, the murder charge against the gangly seventeen-year-old truant and runaway seemed open and shut.

Late one January evening in the city of Hawthorne, the police received a report of a shooting. It happened on the same troubled turf that just one week earlier had claimed the life of one of Sharon Stegall's probationers—Li'l Dondi—and sent another of her kids into hiding. This time, two patrol officers pulled up to find a hard-drinking nineteen-year-old by the name of Larry Roberts lying belly-up on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, most of his face removed by a shotgun blast, charred blue wadding from the spent shell embedded around his lips like a second mustache. His left hand was still in his pocket, as if he was reaching for something, though no weapons were found on him.

Witnesses in the neighborhood said Roberts had been hanging outside his apartment building with ten or so friends, drinking forty-ounce bottles of Old English 800 beer wrapped in rumpled paper bags. Then he began arguing with three young men who were leaving an apartment complex across the street. Depending upon who was telling the story, Roberts either picked a fight because he didn't like the way the passersby looked at him, then got his buddies to rush the outnumbered threesome, or one of the three interlopers picked a fight with Roberts for “talking shit.” Either way, there was no dispute about how it ended: Larry Roberts saw one of his foes produce a gun, yet refused to back down, thrusting his hands in his pockets and saying, “Fool, let's scrap.” The man with the gun started yelling, either in fear or rage, then pulled the trigger. The shooter, witnesses agreed, was a tall, muscular, light-skinned African-American man in his early to mid-twenties wearing a beanie on short hair. After shooting Roberts, he ran off with his two friends while all the other homeboys scattered like bowling pins.

After stretching the inevitable yellow tape across the sidewalk where Roberts lay and canvassing the neighborhood, the police launched a
search for this gunman and his two friends. They were able to trace two of them to a woman's apartment across the street, where they had been seen earlier in the evening. The woman was Carol Jones, Leon's older sister. She initially said she knew nothing, but when investigators found out she was using an alias and had been observed with two of the three suspects, she caved in and admitted two of the men had visited her before the shooting, and that one of them was her seventeen-year-old brother. He had just moved in with her after living with an uncle for several months. When she heard the gunshot, she had run outside to see if Leon was okay, then began to fear he had been involved.

The police tape-recorded their interview with Carol Jones, but the machine didn't work. They taped a second interview, then wrote a report based on their recollections, without listening to the tape. A particularly damning comment stood out in this report, concerning a phone call Carol received from Leon minutes after the shooting: “She asked him why he shot that guy. He told her, ‘The guy said, “Shoot me!”' Then Leon told Carol he loved her.”

The police took this as a virtual admission to murder, leading investigators to conclude that Leon, who had no prior criminal record, had been the shooter. They identified the other man who visited Carol with him as Frank McClure, a twenty-five-year-old man with five arrests and one conviction for unlawful firearms violations who, nevertheless, legally owned six handguns. They discounted him as the killer, but sought him as an accomplice. The third man remained unidentified. Thirteen days after the murder, the police found Leon hiding at the home of his fifteen-year-old girlfriend—mother to Leon's two-year-old son. He denied killing anyone, told numerous lies about his activities that night—he claimed to be playing basketball at the time of the shooting—and was booked for first-degree murder, a sure ticket to adult court and life in prison. One witness—the dead man's best friend—said he thought Leon looked like the shooter. An intake officer at Juvenile Hall pronounced him a threat to the community and ordered him detained in the high-risk offender unit.

When Sherry Gold first met Leon, he was surly and scared, insisting he was innocent, as most of her clients do, a tired refrain she at first did not take seriously. The case against him looked cold. His fitness hearing was scheduled in a couple of weeks, a normally automatic process in a murder case. At first, this appeared to be no exception.

But then Sherry began to have doubts. A quick check of his background showed a great deal of tragedy, yet no hint of criminal behavior.
His father—whose relationship with his mother had never been more than casual—hanged himself (or, as some in the family theorized, was hanged
by
someone else). Five-year-old Leon found the body. Five years later, officials from the state Children's Protective Service removed Leon from his mother's home because of her constant drug abuse and neglect of her children. Like George Trevino, Leon was then raised by the dependency branch of Juvenile Court. He was shunted between four different foster homes and various relatives, never in one place long enough to feel wanted, constantly switching schools and failing at each one, running away, consumed with anger at his mother for letting him be taken from her.

Juvenile Court is full of kids with backgrounds like Leon's. Crime can come easily to them. Yet Leon had never been arrested before, a mild surprise to Sherry Gold. After getting him to open up to her, to talk about his background—and then finding out through court records that he had been scrupulously truthful about his past—Gold decided he was a nice kid with problems, but that he was no killer. She decided she believed him when he swore he was innocent.

So she and a private detective went back to the neighborhood to reinvestigate the shooting. It was far easier than she expected: they quickly found five witnesses who said Leon definitely was not the gunman who killed Larry Roberts. He was just there, they said, a bystander. Even the best friend of the dead man, who had supposedly ID'd Leon, said he wasn't sure about who did the shooting.

All of the witnesses said the shooter was light-skinned with short hair. Leon is a very dark-skinned African-American, with a shaved head, shiny and bald. “No way it was him,” one of the witnesses said.

And then there was the taped interview with his sister, Carol, in which, according to the police reports, she said Leon admitted to murder. When Sherry played the tape, she found Carol had said nothing of the kind. She hadn't asked why
Leon
had shot the man, as the police report said, but merely why it had happened. And Leon had answered,
He kept saying, shoot me
—something all the other bystanders heard as well. Truculent and unafraid, perhaps intoxicated, Larry Roberts had stood there and bellowed repeatedly, “Go ahead, shoot me,” a challenge he apparently never expected to be met. But Leon had never told his sister that
he
did the shooting.

When Sherry presented her findings to Peggy Beckstrand, the prosecutor agreed to hold back on her motion to send Leon to adult court, embarrassed by the apparent shoddiness of the official investigation. The
sheriff's homicide detectives on the case then had to reopen their inquiry. One month after busting Leon, they somewhat reluctantly admitted there had been a mistake.

They ended up arresting the other man with Leon that night, Frank McClure, and the third man, who they learned was named Kevin Davis. After protesting his innocence, then failing a lie detector test, Davis abruptly confessed to the murder himself, saying he acted alone, and that Leon just happened to be with him. He swore he shot in self-defense, certain that his victim was reaching into his pocket for a gun. Leon tried to stop the confrontation, Davis added, by urging the drunken Roberts to run away.

The confessed killer told police he originally had planned to give himself up and take his chances in court. But Leon and McClure urged him not to, promising to lie on his behalf.

When Peggy Beckstrand saw that updated police report cross her desk, she was unnerved. Had the investigation not been reopened, Leon could easily have been sent to adult court on a murder charge. A less pushy, less caring attorney might have failed to do the investigation Sherry Gold conducted. And in the old Juvenile Court, before it was transformed by Gerry Gault's dirty phone call and the adult court rights it brought, where there were no attorneys and the police reports were gospel, Leon most certainly would have been convicted of a murder he did not commit, while the real killer remained free.

This time, the system has worked. Peggy drops the murder charge against Leon, and files a new petition accusing him only of being an accomplice after the fact, for lying about the shooting to police and covering for the real killer. Instead of a potential life sentence in adult court, he faces at most three years in juvenile custody. The judge on the case even asks Sherry if she wants to move for his release from custody then and there, but she says no.

“He's got nowhere to go,” she says. “I tried to get the foster care system to take him back again, but they dumped him. They don't want him anymore.”

In the end, Commissioner Polinsky overrides a Probation Department recommendation that Leon go to CYA, sending him to camp instead. Leon ends up at Camp Kirkpatrick, where the specialty is sports and the teams routinely compete well in citywide and even state championships. Leon's love is basketball, for which he has considerable skills, though his constant moves from school to school and home to home never allowed him to excel. At Kirkpatrick, though, he has that chance. He makes the
camp team, hoping to parlay his talents on the court into a college education, maybe more, he writes in a letter to Sherry Gold.

It's the first time in a long time, she notes with satisfaction, that Leon Jones has even thought about the future.

·  ·  ·

At exactly the same time Leon is being falsely accused of murder, another, far more sensational murder case—the vicious drive-by killings of a toddler and a fourteen-year-old during a night of violence in Inglewood—is also being turned on its head. This is the case of Hugh, accused of crimes so ruthless that virtual martial law had been declared in Inglewood prior to his arrest—a case that had already troubled a doubtful Peggy Beckstrand. Now, another defense attorney willing to put in the extra time and energy to conduct his own investigation, rather than simply making the court appearances and taking whatever deal the DA has to offer, has found an innocent kid gasping beneath the horrendous charges. As in Sherry Gold's representation of Leon, this lawyer's fee will never match the hours he's invested in the case.

“I can't really think about that—it's not very often that you get an innocent kid here,” the lawyer, Gregory Humphries, explains, breathless after a meeting with skeptical prosecutors who cannot bring themselves to believe yet another false charge of murder has made its way into their office in the space of a few weeks. “This is not just a kid who says he's innocent. He really
is
innocent. And with him looking at adult court and a life sentence in prison, you don't cut corners.”

Humphries sighs, hefting his jammed briefcase, a short, curly-haired man in a corduroy jacket and brown running shoes, dressed not to project lawyerly power and authority, but for crawling around crime scenes and interviewing witnesses on the fly. “The pressure on this one,” he says, heading for the stairs, “is enormous.”