No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  And if the witnesses and victims and family have to travel across town to a new and unfamiliar courthouse along with the public defender on the case, so be it. Dorn has a lesson to impart, too. He makes it a point to apologize to the witnesses and families, then points a finger at the defense table and says, “The Public Defender’s Office is forcing me to do this.” It is not precisely true—he could be sending the cases to Commissioner Polinsky or Judge Scarlett, right there in Inglewood—but he achieves the desired effect. After a week of this, the public defenders are as popular as roaches here.

  His Pomona ploy does not always work, however. The Pomona Juvenile Court has no judges, just referees and commissioners, and for some hearings, a juvenile has the right to insist that a full judge hear his case. When that happens, Dorn’s clerk must get on the phone with one of the delinquency court administrators at the presiding judge’s office, who must then contact the other judges, one by one, whining and calling in favors until someone finally says, Oh, all right, send me the file. Several judges make a point of reminding the administrators that they had warned against bringing Dorn back to Juvenile Court, that this kind of blowup would be inevitable once he returned. After several rounds of phone calls, the cajoling process starts to take hours—judges, the ultimate authority in their individual courtrooms, can always say no when asked to take over Dorn’s workload—and this brings all other activities in the administrators’ office to a halt as the search for court space expands. That, in turn, piles more delays into the system, as other crises go unattended—the missing files, the misplaced delinquents, the riots in Juvenile Hall, the endless stream of memos that keeps the sluggish system moving along—all must line up behind the Dorn War. In the end, Judge Dorn must grudgingly begin to send some of his cases to the other two courtrooms at Thurgood Marshall, exploding their dockets.

  The spread of the cancer is then complete. Kids and families wait all day to have their cases resolved. Students miss school. Parents miss work. Witnesses are told to come back another day. Uniformed cops stand around, waiting to testify instead of attending to their patrols. The number of postponements skyrockets.

  One young man must wait all morning for a piece of official paper saying he has paid his debt to society, performed all his community service, and completed probation successfully. Indeed, he is an unqualified success story for the system, a young car thief and truant who turned his life around, went back to school, graduated, stayed clean, and is now about to join the Marine Corps.

  He just needs that one piece of paper to complete the induction process. He needs it today. He has been waiting seven months for it to arrive in the mail, as promised. Now, after repeated, unanswered phone calls to his probation officer, he has come to court for a final time.

  He waits hours in Judge Scarlett’s gallery, watching the court wade through its calendar, a tall blond with muscular arms and a smooth, ruddy face that straddles the line between adolescence and manhood. He is rebuffed repeatedly by the court staff when he asks for help. “Are you on the calendar?” the clerk ask. When he shakes his head, she says, “You’ll have to wait.” Later, during a lull in the action just before lunch, the young man once again ventures through the little swinging gate that divides the gallery from the lawyers’ tables and approaches the clerk. She is nearly obscured behind a duck blind of papers and files, the telephone wedged between her shoulder and ear as if it has taken root there. The clerk looks up at his questioning look and shakes her head again. “Your paperwork is not here yet,” she says, looking away before she even finishes the sentence. “Sorry.” The tone of her voice says she is not.

  “I’m the one getting reamed here,” he replies, patience finally giving way to anger. “I’ve done my time. I just want to get on with my life.”

  Despite his angry words and raised voice, none of the lawyers glance up from the files and papers—they are too busy, too caught up in the chaotic mess sweeping the courthouse. At the end of his journey through the system, when he has done everything asked of him, there are no congratulations, no acknowledgments, no one to represent him but himself.

  “It’s on your probation officer,” the clerk says defensively. “It was his job to submit the report long ago. It didn’t happen until today.”

  “I haven’t seen my probation officer in seven months,” the eighteen-year-old says. He is red in the face. Even his scalp, visible beneath the Marine-style haircut he has already gotten in anticipation of boot camp, is crimson with anger.

  “Well,” the clerk says, dismissive now, accusing, “perhaps you should have.”

  “He told me to stop coming,” the kid says.

  The clerk offers no apology for her groundless accusation. “Well, we’ll get to it sometime today. But I just can’t say when the order will actually be entered. Might be a few days before you get it.”

  The young man stalks off, shaking his head, pushing through the double doors. No one gives him a second look.

  · · ·

  Judge Dorn has waged this war before, and he plays to win. With the papering in full swing, forcing him to transfer incoming cases, he steps up his status offender meetings in chambers and he takes on more private-attorney cases. He is prepared to wait out the public defenders, over whom he knows he has one key advantage: No matter what they do, he never has to leave his courtroom. The lawyers must follow the cases wherever he sends them, and Dorn has them driving all over Los Angeles’s sprawling jurisdiction, trying to keep up.

  The Inglewood public defenders soon find they cannot keep up with the tangle of transferred cases for which they are personally responsible. The court bureaucracy’s paper mill cannot keep up with all the changes, either. Witnesses are left wandering. The detention hall buses drop off the wrong kids in the wrong courthouses. The defenders find they have more than one case scheduled simultaneously in courthouses many miles apart, forcing them to spend every spare minute on Dorn’s courtroom telephone, trying to get continuances from judges all over LA.

  “I knew I’d have to be in three places at once this afternoon,” one public defender tells Dorn sheepishly after one such attempt at telephone juggling collapses.

  “Talk to your boss about that,” Dorn says with a grin.

  “I know I have other matters in here,” the lawyer pleads. “But I have a hearing in South Central at two.”

  “No, you don’t,” Dorn commands. “You have three trials in here. You do not leave my courtroom until these matters are finished.”

  When a judge is papered, his brethren often close ranks in his defense, refusing to grant the continuances lawyers need when forced to travel between courthouses. The lawyer has been ordered to be at another Juvenile Court branch at two, or else.

  “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 p
residing 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.1

  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.2 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.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lost Causes

  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.

  JUST 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.