by Edward Humes
THE evidence before Judge Dorn is clear.
Three weeks earlier, John Sloan departed the department store where he worked as a clerk, and met his buddy Richard. They had plans to cruise the night streets of the coastal city where John lived, as they had done many nights before. This time, though, they were not looking for girls or parties or places to hang. They were in search of a likely victim to rob and terrorize.
The two teenagers had planned it well, they thought. They were even dressed down like gangbangers in dark, baggy clothes, though the dangerous image they hoped to project seemed somewhat deflated by their mode of transportation for the evening. True gangbangers would have picked up a G-Ride—the hottest car they could steal, the “G” standing for “gangster”—but John had only his yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a cutely underpowered gift from Dad.
In John’s waistband, though, he could feel the comforting, fearful weight of the .380 blue steel revolver he had scored for a hundred bucks on the street in LA. John had asked around at school and soon learned how to find a gun seller who catered to juveniles, a nameless man who tooled around certain neighborhoods with a trunkload of stolen weapons, dealing everything from Saturday night specials to AK-47s for gangbangers and anyone else with cash to burn and someone to kill. The dealer even threw in bullets, five of them, when John handed over the cash. A computer check of the serial number on the gun John picked up would later show no recorded owner, which meant it was stolen somewhere between the manufacturer and the distributor. Crates of weapons get walked off the docks of UPS and other shippers all the time, many of which then end up in the hands of kids—one of the gun industry’s great, unreported scandals. Guns can be shipped with no more security than soap powder. Even for a kid like John, with no criminal record and no real street savvy—other than what he picked up from TV and music—finding firepower had been shockingly easy.
“How about over there?” Richard suggested, pointing to a parking structure that served a shopping center and a post office. It was a Sunday night, past 10:00 P.M., and the place was deserted. But there was a man driving into the structure, probably to mail some letters. He was alone. Perfect.
“Let’s check it out,” John agreed, stopping a block or so from the garage. Force of habit made him lock his car—thinking more about his stereo than of getaways—and the two boys dashed into the parking structure. They hid behind a green Pontiac near the post office.
Each boy wore surgical gloves copped from John’s dad. Doctors always had rubber gloves around the house. The boys also had bandannas tied around their necks and pulled up over their noses Old West bandit–style, the old-fashioned kind that bikers and cowboys like to stuff in their back pockets. John’s hands were shaking, even though he was certain he would never be caught. He was too smart. Always had been, all the way back to his days in the private elementary school, when his recitations of memorized Bible passages earned him red ribbon after red ribbon.
Even back then, the pressure had been there. The red ribbons were not a source of praise at home—they were expected. Like the A’s on his report card. He was the oldest child, the standard-bearer, the perfect son.
“Let’s get him right at the car,” Richard suggested, as they watched a middle-aged Hispanic man pull in and park. John nodded. They would wait until the man was out of his car, vulnerable and exposed.
Things had gotten so complicated. His father was the original self-made man, having moved to America with his Korean parents at age seventeen. Just about John’s age. The elder Sloan went right to work, earned enough money to put himself through medical school, then established a thriving practice and bought a home in one of Southern California’s finest, safest, shiniest communities. Now it was supposed to be up to John to carry on the family’s good name.
For a long time, he had earned the grades, joined in the church activities, watched over his younger siblings. He impressed teachers as a shy, sensitive, bright kid. He was a gifted artist, could draw anything. At night, he and his mother would read the Bible together before bed.
“Should we wait until he mails his letters, or get him right away?” Richard hissed.
“Let’s wait,” John said. He wanted just a little more time to think.
This was the problem: John saw himself as an American kid, born to French fries and skateboards and reruns of Gilligan’s Island. But his parents were traditional Korean immigrants, with values that set them apart no matter how badly John wanted his family to assimilate. They couldn’t understand that he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps, that he was sick of being the perfect son, that their expectations for him, once a source of pride, now seemed like an imposition.
A recent high school consolidation of three small campuses into one large one had made things worse for John—his new campus was racially polarized, making the immigrant heritage he wished to forsake all the more relevant. Anglos hung with Anglos at his school, Hispanics with Hispanics, Asians with Asians. Bigotry was fashionable. There had been fights, even something close to a race riot. John had been picked on by some Latino kids he took to be gangbangers. Only kids with gang alliances seemed secure and unafraid, he observed, their lives fraught with purpose and belonging. Somewhere along the line, he realized he wanted to be part of that.
That was when he met Richard. Firmly on the loser track, John’s new best friend was a zero in school, chronically truant, with an arrest record for theft. Kicked out of John’s high school, he attended a continuation school—a two-hour-a-day scholastic warehouse where the emphasis is on logging time in “independent study.” But to John, Richard was freedom. Here was someone who didn’t give a shit about his family, about school, about the future. Another child with an immigrant father, he was openly contemptuous of tradition. And from his brief stay in Juvenile Hall on his theft charge, Richard claimed to know all about gangs—how to dress down, how to throw your weight around, how you have to band together with others who have the same color skin to protect yourself. Learning to imitate the dress, manner, and attitudes of gangsters was not only fashionable, but an ego boost for John.
In the space of a few months, John became an uncommunicative C student, the honor roll a thing of the past. Teachers and counselors started putting him in the “at risk” category when they discussed his performance—at risk for failure, or worse. They urged him to live up to his potential, but he preferred to hang with Richard—at first learning from him, then leading him, and finally outdoing him. He didn’t need money—he had plenty of cash available to him—yet there he was in that parking garage, stalking prey, ready to rob at gunpoint.
“All right, let’s do it,” John whispered, and they sprang up, raced around the Pontiac, and confronted a middle-aged man as he was opening his car door. John had his revolver out—he didn’t even remember drawing it from his waistband—and saw that it was pointed at the man. He saw his victim’s eyes grow wide with fear, and for the first time, John understood the truly seductive nature of gangbanging: the genuine power. This guy was about to piss his pants. Because of him.
“This is for real,” John yelled. “We’re not playing, Mexican motherfucker.”
“What’s going on?” the guy blurted, as if there were any doubt. Then he pleaded, “Look, I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me.”
Richard, holding a switchblade in his gloved hand, took a halfhearted swipe at the man, not coming close to connecting, but still making him jump back. He said, “Give us your wallet, Mexican motherfucker.”
The man handed his wallet over. This, John thought, was almost too easy. Then, realizing the man could simply hop in his car and follow them once they left, John demanded his keys. “Don’t worry, we’re not gonna take it,” he said contemptuously. “We don’t need no fuckin’ low rider anyway.” He hurled the key ring toward the other end of the parking garage to keep his victim at bay once they left. Everything had gone perfectly, exactly as he had planned.
It wasn’t until John flip
ped open the guy’s wallet that everything fell apart. It wasn’t a wallet, after all. It was a leather case of some kind. And inside it, bright as a new penny, shone a large gold badge.
Now it was John who had to worry about bladder control. He had to stop himself from yelling, Oh my God, we’re robbing a cop. He saw himself arrested, fingerprinted, and jailed, his mother and father peering at him through a visitor’s window, eyes hollow with reproach. It no longer seemed a very amusing prospect.
There was only one thing to do: He and Richard both backed away, then turned and ran as fast as they could, the pounding of their footsteps echoing in the empty garage.
· · ·
While Judge Dorn considers the case against John Sloan, Joseph Gutierrez paces and sighs in the crowded hallway outside, the fourth time he has come to Juvenile Court as a witness to armed robbery. He cannot sit inside and watch. Some hearings are closed to the public and, in any case, as a subpoenaed witness, he is not permitted to watch others testify, for fear he would be influenced or change his story. Each time, he has missed a day of work. Each time, he has been told to sit down and wait and to keep out of the courtroom. Each time, after hours of waiting, he has been told there has been a delay in the People v. John Sloan, that he has to go home and that he must come back again—not a word of explanation or apology offered.1
“This is how witnesses are treated in Juvenile Court,” he gripes to a uniformed policeman waiting to testify. “Like we’re the criminals.” The cop nods absently, then returns to reading the paperback book he brought with him: Presumed Innocent.
“I’ve missed three days of work,” a woman whose Mercedes was stolen six months ago pipes up from her seat on one of the second-floor benches. “Now they tell me the case has been transferred to another court, one that’s closer to the kid who stole my car. They want to make things more convenient for him! And I’m supposed to go to another courthouse and start the whole thing over.” She is rummaging in her purse as she speaks, talking more to herself than to anyone else in the hallway. Then she stands to leave. “This sucks. I’m thinking of just forgetting the whole thing. They can deal with that kid without me.”
But of course they can’t. If she fails to show up, there will be no case, and the boy who stole her car will be set free. That is why defense attorneys delay and transfer and insist on needless hearings—hoping witnesses will grow disgusted and stop coming. Defense lawyers in Juvenile Court use quirks in the law that force prosecutors to prove the obvious—that, for instance, a kid driving a stolen, hot-wired car did not have permission from the owner to shatter a window, hack the dashboard, maul the ignition, and drive away. That means calling the owner and forcing him to wait for hours or days for thirty seconds of testimony that consists of: No, he did not have permission to wreck and take my car. In graffiti cases, the owner of a wall emblazoned with gang insignias must be called to state the obvious: that he did not give permission to the vandals who defaced his property. If that property is a freeway overpass, then the state of California must appear to say it didn’t authorize the six-foot neon message “FUCK HOOVERS,” scrawled above the 405 freeway. Needless to say, the state of California often has better things to do than show up at Thurgood Marshall Branch. Private property owners in gang-dominated neighborhoods are understandably reluctant to testify in open court as well. No matter—the public defenders have a policy of insisting on such testimony, a legal loophole that wins dismissals of half such cases. Half.2
“We’re not social workers,” one of the defenders explains. “We can’t worry about what happens after we win. If we get a kid off and he goes out and kills someone, that’s not our fault. The prosecution should have done a better job.”
Gutierrez has heard this logic before. He shakes his head. “This place is like some huge dysfunctional family,” he says, still pacing. “I’m the victim. That kid shoved a gun in my face. And I can’t even go in there and watch what’s going on.”
The cop sitting nearby looks up from his book again. “You don’t really want to,” he says quietly. “It’ll just make you madder.”
A short time later, Joseph Gutierrez is called into court to describe the night John Sloan robbed him.
· · ·
“Were you scared, Mr. Gutierrez?” the prosecutor asks.
“Of course,” the man on the witness stand says, recalling that moment in the parking garage when he thought he might die.
The government’s primary witness against John Sloan has been on the stand about five minutes so far. He glances uneasily at Judge Dorn, who is rubbing his eyes again. The judge’s eye-rubbing can communicate a host of different emotions and tempers; at this time, it seems a gesture of impatience, even annoyance. The witness says, “Of course I was scared.”
“What happened after that?”
The gold shield Joseph Gutierrez carries is not a policeman’s badge, but a city electrical inspector’s, he tells the court. John and Richard apparently could not tell the difference. But though he was no cop, he says, his initial fear at being braced at gunpoint had turned to rage once the bandits left him standing there. He had gone on to do something extraordinary, something cops are paid to do, but ordinary citizens like himself usually avoid.
“I ran and got my keys . . . and I went to the trunk of my car and I got out my .45 Ruger automatic. . . . I cocked the gun and loaded it, and started the car and took off in the direction that they had run.”
Joseph Gutierrez had simply gone out to mail some letters that Sunday night at a post office near his home. The area is one of LA’s most beautiful and affluent, climbing a high, verdant peninsula overlooking the rocky froth of the South Bay, its neighborhoods stocked with estates that have housed such diverse luminaries as Ronald Reagan and Tom Petty, not to mention more millionaires per capita than any other Southern California community, Beverly Hills included. Gutierrez had moved his family to one of the more modest slices of this area as a hedge against crime.
“It doesn’t get any safer than this,” he had proudly boasted to his wife and daughters when they found a home they could afford there.
That sense of ease and security evaporated when John Sloan and his friend popped up from behind a dark green Pontiac, wearing gloves and bandannas, slinging a gun and racial epithets, seemingly full of hatred and violence.
They had caught him half in and half out of his car, reaching for the letters on his front seat, exposed and helpless. He had frantically looked around the parking garage for help or escape, seeing neither. There was no one to call to, nowhere to run, just an impossibly long moment of agonizing silence, a frozen tableau in which Gutierrez simultaneously thanked God that his wife and children were safe at home, prayed that he might see them again, and wondered what the hell two Asian gangbangers were doing in this neighborhood. When they called him Mexican motherfucker, he thought, I’m going to die right here, in some empty garage, just for a couple of letters. Just because their forebears came from across the Pacific, his from below the Rio Grande. But then, when they ran off, his own anger took over. He found the racist taunting particularly galling because his wife was Asian-American; he had always made it a point to teach their children not to judge people by color or ethnicity. He felt this was a hate crime, that he was targeted simply because he was Hispanic, that the real goal of the robbery was not to gain money, but to humiliate a Mexican-American. And without really thinking through the possible consequences, he had pursued them, gun in hand.
As he fetched his keys, he saw through the open-air parking garage where they were running, their bandannas now down around their necks, a yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia the only car in sight. Gutierrez rounded the corner and froze the two assailants in his bright headlights while John was still fumbling with the car door he had stupidly locked. Gutierrez leaned out of his car window and trained his weapon on them, then told them to lie facedown on the sidewalk. When they obeyed, he took John’s gun away and made his captives put their hands behind their heads. A
passing motorist called the police on his car phone a few minutes later.
“Did you get a good look at their faces?” the prosecutor asks.
Gutierrez looks at John, whose position in the courtroom is almost dead in front of the witness stand. John does not meet his eyes—he has barely looked up from the tabletop in front of him throughout the proceedings. “Yes,” the thirty-seven-year-old city inspector says. “Many times. . . . That’s the one with the gun.”
“No more questions.” The prosecutor sits back, satisfied. He is certain he has more than met the legal requirements for booting a kid out of Juvenile Court—requirements that amount to little more than proving the kid’s age, and that the offense he is charged with committing is on a laundry list of twenty-four crimes for which the California legislature has authorized transfers to adult court.3 In a fitness hearing, the prosecution need not prove guilt, and innocence is no defense (the theory being that no harm is done if a child is transferred to adult court and later found innocent—the switch in courts matters only if he is convicted and sentenced). Legally, John walked into court presumed to be unfit for Juvenile Court, one of the few legal presumptions in the criminal justice system that does not favor the defendant. The law virtually handcuffs Judge Dorn to the prosecution, which is why he hates fitness hearings so much.
John’s attorney, Angela Oh, must attempt to undo this legal presumption if John is to avoid an adult-style punishment, and to do so, she launches a novel line of inquiry. She asks Joseph Gutierrez if he thought John and his accomplice were punks.
The witness looks confused. “What?”
“There was something about this interaction that suggested to you that these were a couple of punks, really, right?” the attorney asks.
Judge Dorn is looking amused and interested at this, and the prosecutor gets nervous, seeing where the defense is headed. For the defense to win a fitness hearing, the focus cannot be on disproving the charges—a trap some attorneys fall into—but on a legal test that examines five factors: a kid’s past criminal record, the time left to rehabilitate him, the results of past attempts at rehabilitation, his criminal sophistication, and the gravity of the crime.4