No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  One case in particular still haunts her—the face of the little boy she fought to protect carved into her memory. His name was Peter. He was seven when Peggy first met him. His father had regularly sodomized him for years. He had used a garden hose, among other implements of sexual torture. It was so bad, the kid could no longer control his bowels. When he had tried to tell his mother about it, she refused to believe her son, medical evidence be damned.

  “You’re ruining my life,” Peter’s mother told Peggy once the authorities found out and stepped in. Peggy wished she could prosecute her as well as the father.

  The first time Peggy came by to interview Peter, he hid under his bed. He answered her questions, but he would not leave this refuge, the same place he would retreat to at night, hoping his daddy would not find him pressed against the wall in the darkness, though Daddy always did. After hours of this, of small talk and gentle coaxing, Peggy finally persuaded Peter to come out from the dust motes and shadows. She did this by sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed and offering him a chair, so he could sit high over her, safe and out of reach. He finally slid from under the bed, climbed onto the chair, and sat. It took three more sessions for him to look directly at her and make sustained eye contact, but Peggy slowly won the boy’s trust. They forged a relationship, no small accomplishment when, of the two adults Peter knew best, one used him as a sexual plaything and the other called him a dirty little liar.

  With that, Peter told Peggy everything. Nothing could be more chilling, Peggy would later say, than hearing a child recite his daily agonies, a bright, engaging boy whose life should have been full of promise, not hurt, and who, even after all that abuse, expressed no anger, only bewilderment. What had he done wrong? Peter kept asking. Why was he being punished? Nothing, Peggy kept telling him, you did nothing wrong. Her chest would ache when Peter asked that, for she knew he would never believe in his blamelessness. He would always figure he must have been very bad for his dad to do such things to him. All Peggy could do was to promise those things would never happen to him again, to promise to be his lawyer in the courtroom. His protector.

  It was a tough case, hinging entirely on Peter’s testimony, and when the day of trial arrived, Peggy worried he might not be able to tell his story, that he would see his father sitting at the defendant’s table and freeze up. It had happened before in other cases. Molesters banked on it. So as they walked into court together, she kneeled down and whispered, “You know how old I am?”

  Peter looked at her quizzically. He knew everything about Peggy. She had told him everything. How could she not? How could she ask him to reveal such unspeakable things without giving of herself? “Yes,” he said slowly, “I know.”

  “Well,” Peggy said, “you know how old people forget things sometimes?”

  He smiled then, nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Well, I just forgot everything you’ve ever told me.”

  He smiled again, a stooped little boy who so often looked pained, but who would do anything to help his friend the prosecutor. “Don’t worry, Peggy,” the child said, his brows knitted in genuine concern over her memory loss. “I’ll tell you again.” And he patted her shoulder. The memory can still make her cry.

  The defense lawyer kept Peter on the stand for two days. The father blew kisses at the boy. But Peter held up through it all, and the jury convicted the father on every count. It was the most satisfying victory of Peggy’s legal career.

  A few months later, Peggy was struck by a car as she left court, a glancing blow that left her dazed and sitting on the curb, dim faces looming over her like parade floats as people bent to see if she was okay. Through the haze and bewilderment, the only thought that kept going through her mind was the image of Peter’s stunned and disbelieving father being led off to lockup. “Everything’s okay in the world,” she had muttered to herself as she sat bleeding on that curb. “At least that sonafabitch is still in jail.”

  But then there was delay after delay in his sentencing. Peggy got transferred before she could finish the case and another assistant DA took over. Peter’s father hired a new lawyer, who claimed his first attorney had been incompetent. A judge granted him a new trial. And the new DA on the case, with no emotional investment, no knowledge of Peter, no experience of seeing that somber little boy hiding under his bed, fingered the file and figured it was too tough a case. He dismissed it. The molester walked free and Peter disappeared into the child welfare system. Peggy never heard what happened to him after that, though she could only pray he did not end up back with that father who tortured him or that mother who blamed him for ruining her life with lies. At the time, she considered it her low point as a DA.

  “But, now,” she says, “my job here in Juvenile Court makes me feel that way every day. Too many cases here end up like that. I can’t protect anyone.”

  Peggy has moved from fighting for children who have been victimized by crime to fighting to imprison them. The irony is sometimes overwhelming to her. She knows many of the kids she now prosecutes come from backgrounds not all that different from Peter’s. All too many were neglected, abused, discarded children before they became criminals. For all she knows, Peter has become a juvenile delinquent himself—he is what the experts call “at risk.”2 Yet she does not confuse her job with social work anymore. She sees herself at too much of a disadvantage to feel merciful toward the kids she now pursues. If she cannot save the Peters of the world, she would have to do her best to restrain the Ronald Duncans. This is what Peggy now believes: Lock the little monsters away. Protect the community at all costs. You only have to see photos like those in the Duncan case so many times before you decide murder is murder no matter the age of the killer, no matter how sad the story might be, no matter how much you yearn to help that kid hiding under the bed—because once you start excusing one of them, you can find reasons to give them all a break. That is the stark set of rules Peggy uneasily forces herself to live by every day. And if Judge Dorn or anyone else refuses to see that and to abide by the ever harsher laws and policies being put into place here, it is Peggy Beckstrand’s job to take them down.

  · · ·

  Peggy would have liked to concentrate on the crumbling case of People v. Duncan to the exclusion of all else, but no Juvenile Court prosecutor, least of all a DIC, a deputy in charge, could enjoy that luxury. She had her prosecutors to supervise, filing decisions to make, seemingly endless meetings to attend, and committees to chair. The distractions never stopped, and they were about to double.

  After settling the matter of Ronald Duncan’s trial date, Peggy Beckstrand’s next stop is the hallway outside the two upstairs courtrooms. There is a niche next to the staircase here, with several wooden benches and relative quiet, and it is here that much of the court’s business is decided. Here prosecutors talk to their witnesses for the first time, just minutes before trial, only then finding out if their cases are strong or weak—or if a key witness hasn’t bothered to show up, a constant problem in Juvenile Court. Defense attorneys huddle on the next bench with their small clients or their families, then try to cut plea bargains with the DA on the case. This slapdash process, in which two young, opposing attorneys—most of them a year or two out of law school—sit down on a bench with a pile of files and dispense with half a court docket, ends up deciding more about a troubled kid’s future than any judge or formal court proceeding.3 It is ugly and quick, a convenience for the system rather than a reliable means of healing our youth or pursuing justice. It happens with kids and families watching, standing off to the side, waiting for what amounts to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on the future of a child.

  On this morning, an assistant district attorney looks to Peggy for guidance on an armed robbery case, an unusual stickup involving a sixteen-year-old honors student from a wealthy family from a coastal enclave in South Los Angeles County. The kid has no priors, the assistant says. Unlike most kids in Juvenile Court, John Sloan’s family is intact, supportive, churchgoing, wel
l connected, and desperate to do whatever it takes to keep their son out of a state prison system that would eat him alive. The case is the flip side of Ronald Duncan’s—since he was over sixteen at the time of the crime, John can be sent to adult court, where he could end up doing more time for robbery than Ronald could for murder. The defense lawyer hired by the family wants the DA to drop its effort to have John sent out of Juvenile.

  Peggy shakes her head no without hesitation. There won’t be any deals on this one. Bad enough the law forces her to keep murderers when they happen to be under sixteen. She certainly won’t voluntarily hold back on older violent criminals like John Sloan, not when California’s extremely tough “fitness” law makes a transfer to adult court a virtual lock for prosecutors when a kid is over sixteen. Besides, she has talked to the victim of that robbery—his whole family was traumatized, his little girls are afraid to let him leave the house, afraid he’ll never come home again. One nervous pull of the trigger that day, and this could have been a murder case, she reminds her deputy DA. “We’re going forward with the fitness hearing,” Peggy says flatly, looking the defense lawyer squarely in the eye. “Office policy. We don’t withdraw fitnesses. If your client committed an adult crime, he deserves to go to adult court.”

  The answer is the expected one. The other lawyers nod like old bridge partners and head into court, while John’s mother, who had been sitting nearby listening to the exchange, sits and weeps without uttering a sound, her eyes red and swollen, her hands gripping the purse in her lap as if it were a shield, waiting for a loudspeaker to hiss and spit her child’s name so that she, too, can rise and enter this grimy and forlorn hall of justice.

  It would not always have ended this way. At one time, before LA began to drown in a juvenile crime wave, Peggy and her colleagues did not feel the need to be so inflexible: Prosecutors used to pick and choose only the absolute worst kids to target for the adult system. A few years ago, John Sloan would never have faced transfer into the adult arena and its theoretically harsher punishments. Now, though, prosecutors here file fitness motions on nearly every kid over sixteen who commits a serious crime—over nine hundred of them last year, triple the number five years earlier. And the law is so tough, judges—albeit grudgingly—have become little more than rubber stamps for the prosecution’s wishes. It is a trend mirrored nationwide, a deliberate shift in policy, letting the crime, not the criminal, dictate how a child is treated by the system.

  Starting today, it is also a policy that will further distract Peggy Beckstrand from prosecuting Ronald Duncan, putting her—and the rest of the Juvenile Court—on a collision course with the new supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall, Roosevelt Dorn, judge of the Superior Court and minister of God, whose self-appointed mission is nothing less than rescuing the system, one kid at a time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Judge Dorn

  “My mother and father made a lot of money off of ripping people off, and using scams such as cashing bad income tax checks. But the main cash that my parents made came from selling homegrown marijuana. We had a backyard that was full of marijuana plants that grew at least an average of four feet tall. My mom and dad sat around the house smoking marijuana and having sex all day long; even if I was right in front of them. My parents didn’t care, they would just blow the smoke in my face until I got a buzz and left the room on my own.”1

  Geri Vance looks up uncertainly from the story he is reading, chapter two of his autobiography in progress. He is a handsome teenager with large brown eyes and a receding hairline, a brotherly peacekeeper on the unit, a favorite of both the staff and the other kids at the hall. He is bright and insightful, but there are enormous blind spots in his experience: he has never been to a museum or a baseball game or a public library or a doctor’s office (unless you count the infirmary at Juvenile Hall). He reached sixteen without ever writing much of anything, but our class has opened a door. He is churning out ten and twenty pages a day now, handicapped only by the rigorous schedule of the hall, and the propensity of the staff to confiscate papers at night, promising to return them in the morning, then losing or destroying them. Geri has to hide his best work under his mattress as if it were contraband.

  The room we sit in is dank and musty, like a seldom-used closet in someone’s basement. There is a folding table and chairs. A few bedraggled paperbacks and a row of Gideon Bibles occupy a bookshelf bolted to one pale blue cinder block wall—props that enable the Juvenile Hall staff to label these uninviting quarters the “library.”

  Now Geri hesitates in his recitation, glancing at the other boys, unsure if he should be smiling and boasting about the passage he just read, or ashamed. The other kids are listening intently, their faces neutral, though there is some snickering when he reads the next passage. It describes the day he walked in on his father and a prostitute in bed, and how they reacted to the intrusion by ordering him to fondle the woman’s breasts and genitals. He recalls that he was six or seven years old at the time. It was a scene that would be repeated many times.

  “I knew it was dirty,” Geri writes, “and I ran to my room and felt really bad and confused every time. But I liked it, too.”

  After one bathtub frolic with the prostitute, Geri tells the class, his mother came home and found him playing in his room with his father’s gun, a gang-style bandanna on his small head and a marijuana joint in the corner of his mouth—imitating Dad, he said proudly. Geri’s mother beat him with an extension cord until he bled. Then she took the gun, found her husband in bed with the hooker, aimed the pistol at the father’s head, and pulled the trigger. The gun, it turned out, was not loaded. Geri watched his father knock it from his mother’s hand, then savagely beat her while the prostitute sat naked and giggling, too blasted to get dressed and leave.

  Geri and his mother left instead, fleeing the house that night and living for the next few months on peanut butter and bologna, staying in cheap motels, surviving on his mother’s earnings as a prostitute (or that part of her earnings not squandered on crack cocaine). Geri did not attend school, but stayed in the motel room to watch his younger brother, Joachim, while Mom was out scoring tricks and dope. This lifestyle lasted until Geri was eight or nine, when his mom was sent to prison for cashing other people’s checks, and Geri went to Juvenile Hall.

  “I’ve been in the system ever since,” Geri reads, putting down his paper. “That’s the end of the chapter. I haven’t gotten any farther yet.”

  I look around the table at the rest of the class, hoping to see astonishment or horror registering on some of the faces in the room, these boy with their unlined features and old, world-weary eyes. Instead, I see knowing looks of recognition, kids who had witnessed or experienced the same sort of life, or worse.

  Someone tells Geri, “The Menendez brothers got nothin’ on you,” and everyone laughs. The Menendez case had been much in the news at the time, the two monied brothers from Beverly Hills who killed their parents, then justified their premeditated act by claiming their father physically and sexually abused them. Their uncorroborated story had so confounded jurors that no verdict could be reached—something Geri and my other writing students find perplexing. They, like many kids in Juvenile Court, can make claims of terrible abuse, all of it documented and indisputable, yet it does them no good. In Juvenile Court, being an abused child is no defense.

  “It’s all a double standard. You have to be rich and white for that defense to work,” Elias says. He has previously advanced the theory that the single most important fact in a court case is the color of the defendant, something that virtually every kid in the hall seems to take as a given. Elias nods at Geri. “You think anyone is going to let him off because of what his parents did to him? A black kid? Shit!”

  Geri smiles, embarrassed. “That’s what my public defender told me,” he murmurs. He then reveals to the class his experience in the distant Pomona Branch of Juvenile Court one recent morning. It was an important day for him—his fitness hearing—yet he had
not met his lawyer until an hour before court was to convene. The attorney told him they had nothing to discuss: the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  “You’re charged with murder, you’re over sixteen, you’re a black kid with a gun, and this is Pomona—white, suburban, middle-class Pomona,” the lawyer said, as if explaining immutable laws of physics. “The judge is going to take one look at you and you’re gone.”

  “But I didn’t kill anybody,” Geri insisted.

  “I know. Doesn’t matter.”

  At the hearing, Geri scanned the seats in the courtroom, looking for a familiar face, seeing none. His parents had long ceased being a part of his life; his grandmother was too old and sick to make it. His attorney presented little evidence in opposition to the DA’s fitness motion. There were no expert witnesses, no psychological exams. No one asked Geri about his background, his willingness to reform, the trust and praise he had earned from the Juvenile Hall staff. The whole process of determining Geri’s future—of choosing between mandatory release from the juvenile system at age twenty-five, or mandatory life in prison as an adult—lasted less than ten minutes. Without Geri ever saying a word, the judge pronounced him unfit, then told the bailiff to call the next case.

  “Maybe if I had a different judge, it would have been different,” Geri suggests to the class. “I heard about this judge down in Inglewood, he’s supposed to be good. Really tough, but good.”

  “You mean Dorn?” Ronald Duncan asks. Several of the other kids nod knowingly. They have heard of Judge Roosevelt Dorn.

  “Yeah. I wish I could have gotten him,” Geri says. “Who knows what might have happened?”