by Edward Humes
The same defense lawyer also quietly begins feeding information about Dorn’s behavior to the more job-secure, civil-servant public defenders, particularly an incident in which Judge Dorn locked up a petty thief in Juvenile Hall on questionable legal authority.2 Other lawyers follow suit. It is around this time that both the Public Defender’s office and the District Attorney’s Office begin amassing long lists of anecdotal evidence against Dorn, at the instructions of their superiors downtown, in hopes of finding sufficient material for a formal complaint of misconduct—just as had been done five years earlier during Dorn’s first tour of duty in Juvenile Court. DAs assigned to his courtroom must return to their office and write a report every day critiquing Dorn’s rulings and demeanor, then hand it in to Peggy Beckstrand; the public defenders must do the same for their boss. It becomes a race, then, to see which office moves first in publicly opposing Judge Dorn, an open secret in the halls of Thurgood Marshall Branch. If Dorn is aware of this—and he probably is—he gives no hint of it, nor does he give any ground.
The battle almost comes to a head after Judge Dorn flies into a rage when a new prosecutor on Peggy’s staff resolves a scheduling conflict by asking a colleague to finish a trial for her. All that remained to be done was to call a final witness, then rest the case. But when Dorn convenes the trial and sees a different DA in his courtroom, he begins screaming about shoddy, unprofessional prosecutors, and threatens to have the absent deputy DA arrested for contempt. Then he dismisses the case, a strong-arm robbery in which the victim had been threatened with death if he testified (but where the evidence ended up falling short due to witness problems that had nothing to do with which DA happened to be in court that day). Finally, at Dorn’s insistence, Peggy has to trudge over to the courtroom, where Dorn first gives her a silent treatment, then screams at her in open court and on the record, telling her she runs an unprofessional shop, and lecturing her like a probationer. No prosecutors will be excused unless they are in the hospital or carrying a note from their doctors, he declares. Peggy has to jam her hands in her pockets to keep her own temper in check. Dorn will not let her speak. Her place is to listen to him, he says.
Back at the office, her gut reaction is to go to war over this encounter, but upon reflection, she decides being humiliated publicly by a Dorn tirade, however unpleasant, is not sufficient cause. Instead, she sends a memo downtown, and her immediate boss in the DA’s Office, Tom Higgins, ends up coming to Dorn for a quiet meeting in chambers. In the process, this senior prosecutor observes a young girl sitting in the courtroom in handcuffs, accompanied by a policeman. She is a runaway being brought to Dorn as a status offender in need of one of his in-chambers lectures. This, Higgins concludes, is blatantly illegal—status offenders may not be handcuffed, since they have committed no crimes—and if a sufficient stink was raised, it could doom Dorn’s most beloved project, his effort to bring status offenses back into the Juvenile Court mainstream. The potential legal liability to the county is also enormous—if a child in illegal custody was to be injured, the lawsuits would fly. Peggy’s boss now has some damaging ammunition to bring into chambers with him, and he feels sufficiently comfortable, once he has the judge on the defensive and sputtering about misunderstandings by the police, to tell Dorn that his outburst at Peggy was both childish and unprofessional. Dorn admits no wrongdoing, but assures Higgins that measures will be taken to prevent any more improper handling of status offenders, and the meeting closes on a conciliatory note. Dorn wants to work with, not against, the District Attorney to make the system work better, he promises.3
Afterward, relations between Peggy’s staff and the supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall take a notably cordial, even jovial turn, and most of the courthouse regulars begin to speculate that it will take some hotly contested fitness case, probably a murder or other violent crime, to provide the impetus to push either the DA or the Public Defender over the edge into a direct conflict with Dorn. Something where the stakes are truly high.
In the end, though, the fuse is lit by nothing more than a fifteen-year-old wristwatch thief, and a simple question over visits. Judge Dorn had ordered a juvenile facility to bar the public defender’s in-house social worker from visiting the young man. Such visits are normally a routine process no other judge had ever tried to impede, but Dorn does not see it that way. Attorneys from the Public Defender’s Office point out that Dorn is interfering with their representation of a client and, by extension, violating the kid’s rights. But Dorn will not relent. He says in open court, “No. You cannot take anyone to see the minor. Not without an order from the court.”
It is a line in the sand. The Public Defender’s Office could say Fine, may we please have your permission to talk to our own client? Or they could fight.
The head of the public defender’s juvenile section downtown sees this as the opportunity he has been waiting for. He has long regretted his office’s agreement not to pursue a formal complaint against Dorn five years earlier once it was made clear Dorn would depart Juvenile Court. He has watched with increasing distaste Dorn’s harsh sentences and attempts to reform the system through reviving the status offense, and he thinks Dorn is neither representative of judges in the system, nor a model who should be emulated. Now he gives a two-word command to his lawyers in Inglewood: “Paper him.”
That’s all it takes to declare war on Judge Dorn and, in the process, cripple the entire Los Angeles Juvenile Court.
PART THREE
A Child’s Disposition
In the last 70 years many dedicated men and women have devoted their professional lives to the enlightened task of bringing us out of the dark world of Charles Dickens in meeting our responsibilities to the child in our society. . . . The court now . . . invites a long step backwards into the Nineteenth Century. In that era there were no juvenile proceedings, and a child was tried in a conventional criminal court with all the restrictions of a conventional criminal trial. So it was that a 12-year-old boy named James Guild was tried in New Jersey for killing Catherine Beakes. A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was executed. It was all very constitutional.
JUSTICE POTTER STEWART, in a lone dissent denouncing the Supreme Court’s 1967 Gault ruling requiring Juvenile Courts to grant children the same rights as adults
It is, to begin with, absurd to think that one must be mature enough to drive carefully, to drink responsibly or to vote intelligently, in order to be mature enough to understand that murdering another human being is profoundly wrong. . . . We discern neither a historical nor a modern societal consensus forbidding [it].
THE SUPREME COURT, 1989, sanctioning the death penalty for some juveniles
CHAPTER 13
Thirty-one Flavors
Like many cities in Southern California, Inglewood seems more municipal fiction than actual place, a roughly rectangular set of boundaries visible only on maps, surrounded on all sides by the tar and concrete fist of LA. Technically, it is a city unto itself, but to the casual observer passing down Hawthorne Boulevard or Manchester Avenue or Seventy-eighth Street, this home to the Fabulous Forum where the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Kings play is indistinguishable from the rest of the continuous urban sprawl. There is no buffer or break or green space dividing it from the rest of the world, no clearly defined border, no separate identity beyond the City Hall letterhead and the slightly different shade of blue the police officers wear. And, certainly, its boundaries offer no relief from the big-city crime statistics that plague the Los Angeles Basin like a fever chart and which, more and more, are the work of small hands. The events of January 26 show that as clearly as blood pooled on a hot sidewalk.
It is just after 7:00 P.M., a balmy night, LA in winter, a waning moon peering through the day’s rising smog. Four teenagers in a gray Oldsmobile Cutlass cruise down West Seventy-eighth Street, passing rows of two- and three-bedroom bungalows with drought-choked lawns and ground-floor windows caged by bands of black wrou
ght iron. The Cutlass glides to a halt next to a man who is standing on the sidewalk talking to his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend. They are outside her house, holding hands, her daughter playing at their side. Their smiles fade as they turn toward the stopped car just in time to see the tinted windows on the driver’s side, front and rear, lower in tandem. From inside, they hear a coldly indifferent voice, still creaking with adolescence: “What’s up, cuz?”
The man on the sidewalk has the survival instincts of a lifelong gang member. He begins to scramble for cover even before the muzzles of two semiautomatic weapons materialize from the car’s gloomy interior and jut out the windows, gleaming blue-black in the frosty streetlight glare. When those muzzles start to jerk and flash, spewing a dozen bullets in the space of a handful of seconds, the man eludes injury. His girlfriend, though, has not been honed by a life on the streets. She takes a bullet in the leg and falls to one knee. At the same moment, her two-year-old daughter, Kyiara Nicole, yelps and emits an odd, wet-sounding cough. Her tiny chest has been pierced by a single bullet. Mother scrambles to her feet, scoops up baby, and runs bleeding into the house, screaming for help, dimly aware that the crashing of gunshots has stopped, replaced by the retreating sound of a car engine racing. Kyiara’s grandfather comes running through the house and into the living room, but it is too late. The toddler who loves puzzles and kittens and the Zoe character on Sesame Street and her granddad’s whiskery face doesn’t cry, doesn’t speak. She just looks up at him for an aching moment, eyes wide, bewildered, a plume of red blossoming across the front of her shirt like those time-lapse photos of flowers blooming. Then, as he and her mother both reach out to her, Kyiara Nicole crumples and dies on her own living room floor.
A half hour passes. The ambulances and squad cars have arrived, the insect buzz of their radios filling the night air, neighbors gathered outside like a Greek chorus, kids straining to see inside the house, restrained by festoons of yellow tape. Less than a mile away, the same gray Oldsmobile reappears, this time pulling up to a crowd of ten schoolkids hanging on a corner. As far as anyone can tell, the schoolkids are not gangsters or hard-core criminals, just young people passing time, idle and harmless. The same two windows snick down with an electric hum. The same two muzzles rise and spit more bullets, and a boy and girl go down, wounded in the legs and back, while the other kids duck and scatter. The fusillade stops, and someone emerges from the car, a pale teenager with wild hair, who appears to the kids on the corner to be somewhere between fifteen and seventeen years old. He leaves the door to his car open; rap music with the bass turned way up thumps incoherently from inside the car. Wild Hair strides purposefully toward one particular girl, Tila French, a fourteen-year-old junior high school student who has fallen to the ground, a pile of books cascading from her backpack. Tila sees Wild Hair coming, the big gun carried loosely at his side, and she tries frantically to escape by crawling under a parked van. She is halfway underneath—that’s how the police will find her body, wedged at the curb amid the oil stains and flattened cigarette butts and her own blood—when the kid with the gun stops, standing directly over her. With his feet planted, arms extended straight out in front of him, the gun in both hands, just like on the TV cop shows, Wild Hair yells, “You’re not goin’ anywhere, bitch.” Then he calmly pumps three bullets into Tila’s body. The last is an execution-style coup de grâce to the head, delivered as the other children, Tila’s friends and schoolmates, watch and scream and wonder if they are to be next. But Wild Hair just jogs back to the car, which vanishes around a corner, its billowing exhaust fumes mixing with the stink of gunpowder, blood, and fear.
It is the worst night of violence the city of Inglewood has ever seen. Even in a region long jaded by daily carnage, these killings top the LA nightly news on at least a couple of stations, though only in a way reminiscent of a Guinness Book entry—so many killed, so many wounded, a new record for the city. The true horror of it is not conveyed in the brief television and newsprint accounts—the fact that children are killing children, violently, inhumanly, forcing one another to duck bullets, spraying whole crowds in order to take out a single intended victim, transforming urban American teenagers into the psychological equivalents of war orphans. Still, there is immense pressure to do something, anything. The chief of police announces publicly that Inglewood’s 112,000 citizens should stay indoors after sundown until an arrest is made. It is an unprecedented declaration of unofficial martial law, which puts the detectives on the case on an untenable time clock. Their city is being held hostage—an arrest must be made. Fast.
And so, five days after the murders—and against the recommendation of a dubious Peggy Beckstrand, already struggling to convict Inglewood’s other notorious murderer, Ronald Duncan—the detectives arrest a wild-haired kid named Hugh. One of the kids on the street corner has tentatively ID’d him as the shooter, and a jubilant chief of police pronounces the case solved. For the first time in recent memory, TV cameras appear in Inglewood Juvenile Court to record the great moment of Hugh’s arraignment (which they miss because, as so often happens here, the bus fails to bring the boy from Juvenile Hall). Even so, the impression is left that it will be only a matter of time before the other three killers are caught. Rest easy, Inglewood.
There’s only one problem: Hugh, the kid Peggy Beckstrand has been asked to help lock away for the rest of his life, just might be innocent.
THE Thurgood Marshall Branch of Juvenile Court is as ordered and calm as a swap meet today as Peggy Beckstrand makes her way across the street to resume the Baskin Robbins murder trial. She has just returned from a sleepless weekend of worry—over the rocky case and her decision to give immunity to an accomplice, along with all the other distractions and duties of a job she no longer loves or wants.
Lugging a heavy wad of files, she has to wade past a throng of black-clad gang members sitting on the steps outside the courthouse, hooting and mugging for a group of reporters and news crews milling about the unfamiliar terrain of juvenile justice, awaiting the arraignment of Hugh, the boy accused of Inglewood’s worst-ever murder spree. She silently gives thanks that they are not here for her Ronald Duncan trial, though she knows there is somewhere among them one persistent reporter from a small local paper who is assembling a story on the Thirty-one Flavors case. After talking at length with Ronald’s lawyer, this reporter seems convinced Peggy is letting an adult killer, Jason, go free in order to pursue young Ronald in Juvenile Court, and that favoritism among the brethren of law enforcement may lay behind her decision to grant immunity to the godson of a policeman.
Inside, the building is jammed with anxious parents and milling children, a routine mob, no more and no less angry and furtive than usual. A blue-suited security guard keeps walking the crowded hallways and issuing futile commands for everyone to stay in the building’s lone waiting room, which cannot possibly accommodate the hordes on hand today. Everything is running late: the buses from the hall are late, which means court starts late, which means the lawyers, who need to interview their clients before court begins, are running late.
Peggy pushes her way through the smeary glass door on the west end of the building and down the first-floor hallway, as packed and loud as an airport terminal at Christmas. Halfway to the sanctuary of the courtroom, a defense attorney approaches her to discuss two separate murder cases she wants dropped—one young gangster charged with a drive-by murder, the other, a former foster kid who may or may not have participated in a fatal assault. From a prosecutor’s point of view, both cases stink, not because the kids necessarily deserve breaks, but because the evidence is iffy and the defense lawyer is one of Inglewood’s best—two more balls for Peggy to juggle in the midst of her trial. “Let’s talk later,” the DA says, pushing on through the clogged hallway.
Sharon Stegall rushes by next, announcing over her shoulder, “You’ve got to do something about that sorry excuse for a prosecutor. . . . He’s messing with my cases.” Then she is gone, swallowed by the crowd
before Peggy can reply. She knows the dismissal problem has been getting worse in here and that she needs to make a change, but she has no time—yet another ball to keep in the air. One too many. It is this wearing pull in every direction that grinds down the best-intentioned professionals of Juvenile Court, leaving them in constant danger of being swept away by an undertow of major crises and petty details. Peggy has finally settled on the most common solution to this dismal reality: She has put in for a transfer. Ronald Duncan, for better or worse, will be among her final legacies to Juvenile Court, and all her bottled anger and frustration at the system is finding its expression in this trial, making her seem far more brittle and exposed in the courtroom than people here are used to seeing.
Peggy finally makes it to Judge Scarlett’s court, letting her back rest against the wooden doors that ease closed behind her, muffling the roar in the hallway. She stares vaguely at the crime scene photos on their poster board display, left over from last week’s proceedings and still leaning facedown against one wall of the courtroom, those terrible pictures of Chuck and Ada, their heads exploded by shotgun blasts, their receipts from a day of selling ice cream pillaged from their car. She had kept the posters handy to use in her closing arguments, another day or two to go. But first she has to get past today, something she has been dreading: Today she has to put Jason Gueringer on the stand, her new star witness, tainted by past lies, new admissions, and an airtight grant of immunity—the cop’s godson who is going to get away with murder.