No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  The kid turns to Sherry, sneering with contempt, unaware that he has been blessed through sheer luck of the draw with one of the best court-appointed attorneys working at Thurgood Marshall. “I wanna real lawyer,” he hisses. “You work for the state. My mother’s gonna hire a real lawyer.”

  Sherry Gold tries very hard not to say “Good.”

  · · ·

  Three weeks, three murder cases, all filed against innocent kids, all dropped by prosecutors when the errors were pointed out by defense lawyers. In a place where presumption of innocence often seems turned on its head, these cases are extraordinary. And yet there is no uproar, no demands for reform—as the inability to try fourteen-year-olds as adults has sparked—no rethinking of the slow dismantling of the juvenile justice system now under way here and nationwide. The public remains ignorant of these confidential proceedings, and within the system, no one seems to blink at these developments.

  Yet, as everyone involved in these three cases agrees, any one of these kids could have gone to prison unjustly had they not received exceptional lawyers to represent them—representation that was never available in the original, informal Juvenile Court, and which still remains tough to come by in the current second-class system. Even allowing such kids to be transferred to adult court—something many lawyers barely try to fight because it is a battle so rarely won—could have been disastrous for these kids. Theoretically, they would have had just as much chance of disproving the charges in adult court as in Juvenile, but the stakes are so much higher there, the climate so much harsher, the pressure to plead guilty to some lesser charge to avoid a life in prison so great, that the outcomes could have been very different. Prosecutors and defense lawyers know that, unlike the judges hearing cases in Juvenile Court, the juries who decide adult cases rarely have any sympathy for defendants accused of being gun-wielding gang members, no matter how shaky the prosecution case may be. Prosecutors depend on this factor; defense attorneys fear it. As Geri Vance’s lawyer told him: Black kid with gun? You’re their worst nightmare, pal. I know you say you’re innocent, but take my advice: Take the deal.

  At the same time the three erroneous murder cases are coming apart at Thurgood Marshall Branch, another case raises even more questions about the wisdom of pushing more and more kids into adult court, though for very different reasons. This time, there are no problems with the attempted murder case against Mark Lancaster—this seventeen-year-old is clearly guilty, the evidence overwhelming. And yet his case is no less troubling than the other three, providing yet another unheeded lesson about the juvenile justice system.

  A few days before Leon and Hugh were arrested in their murder cases, Mark Lancaster spent all day drinking beer with friends and smoking primo—marijuana joints laced with cocaine. A chronic truant, he was failing all his classes and had been abusing alcohol and drugs, even sniffing glue, for years. His parents, now in their fifties, with two older daughters with college degrees and solid, independent lives, weren’t sure what to make of Mark, who once had been such a good student, and who even now had them convinced he was a health nut far more interested in vitamins and exercise than drugs. With his odd, choppy haircut, ratty ponytail, and scruffy brown mustache perched unappealingly above pale lips, Mark had been drifting toward nowhere for years, though he had never been in trouble with the law.

  But that day of drinking and primo was different. He left his friends and went for a walk, finding himself standing in front of a gas station. He approached an attendant and asked for change. Then, when the man’s back was turned, he abruptly plunged a sharpened screwdriver into the attendant’s back. Mark always kept this little homemade weapon in his pocket, though he never told anyone why.

  The blade hit bone and bounced off, clattering to the ground and causing little more than a slight cut and bruise, though a difference of a few inches could have been fatal. Mark tried to run, but another attendant and a customer at the gas station caught him, then turned him over to police. Mark told detectives he had wanted to kill the attendant because he recognized him as the murderer of his best friend years before. Mark told them his friend had been shot in the back while trying to steal a six-pack from a liquor store, and that the gas station attendant looked just like the man who did it.

  “I wish I had killed him now,” Mark told the police. “If I had a gun, I would have killed him.”

  The police quickly ascertained that the gas station attendant had never worked in a liquor store. They could find no record of a shooting such as the one Mark described, nor had he ever mentioned it to his parents or other relatives. The police decided it was just a cover story. Mark later admitted that he had stabbed the wrong person—“Something in my head just snapped”—and that he was sorry, though he insisted that his friend really had been killed in a beer robbery. He must have still been high on the primo, he said, and mistook the attendant for the killer. No one believed him, though. The police said he did not seem high at all when they arrested him. Peggy Beckstrand authorized a fitness motion to ship him to adult court for attempted murder.

  At the hearing, a psychiatrist testified that Mark should remain in Juvenile Court to receive treatment for his drug and alcohol problems. His crime was neither sophisticated nor particularly grave, the doctor suggested, having been rather feeble, poorly planned, and causing no serious injury. He was probably still high from drinking and doing drugs earlier in the day, the doctor suggested.

  But Commissioner Gary Polinsky found the doctor’s report infuriating. “You’re accepting his word that he was under the influence, when there is no evidence of that,” the commissioner spat, surprising the psychiatrist, whom he normally receives warmly. “What can you see here other than that he is a conniving, cruel individual who attempted to stab somebody in the back? That’s the interpretation that I see here. . . . He’s done nothing but lie, and has shown no remorse.”

  Mark’s parents, both in their fifties, sit in the courtroom wearing red windbreakers, worry lines mapping pale faces. Mr. Lancaster, a former warehouse manager, has cancer, heart disease, and a bad back. He sits motionless, listening, and Mrs. Lancaster holds his hand and bites her lower lip. When the doctor is through, they get up and testify for their son, one by one, describing him as a good but troubled boy. It does no good. Mark avoids looking at them, stroking his mustache, biting a nail, disconnected from his surroundings, the same pose he maintains when a visibly disgusted Polinsky finds him unfit to be tried as a juvenile, and orders him shipped to adult court. “Is this not a hideously violent case?” he asks the boy’s lawyer, then cuts her off, saying, “And what in the world mitigates that besides this story he concocted?”

  As a juvenile sentenced to CYA for attempted murder, Mark Lancaster would have served about four years in juvenile incarceration under current CYA guidelines. In that time, even though there are long waiting lists for therapy programs at CYA, Mark could have received drug and alcohol abuse treatment (Los Angeles County has no secure facilities for juveniles with substance abuse problems—CYA is the only available option). At CYA, Mark also could have received remedial education classes—enough to get him a high school diploma, possibly more.

  Instead, under state laws designed to punish rather than rehabilitate, Mark’s case is transferred to adult court, where the penalties on the books are harsher. But once there, a prosecutor in Superior Court takes a quick look at the file, sees an irrational stabbing with no serious injury, and a kid with no prior record who has been in Juvenile Hall for a couple of months awaiting trial. Then he compares this case with the carjackings, shootings, and other hard-core adult crimes he has to handle. There is not much to weigh: He pulls Mark’s new adult court attorney aside and offers a deal. Plead guilty to assault, and get sentenced to time served. Mark can go home that day, case closed. No harsher punishment. No more time behind bars. No drug abuse programs. Just go home to your parents.

  Mark takes the deal. Like many kids transferred to adult court for crimes that fall short
of murder, his sentence is far shorter than it would have been had he stayed in Juvenile Court.

  Exactly the opposite result intended by the get-tough law has been achieved. Society is no safer, and neither is Mark.1

  CHAPTER 16

  The Ins

  The writing class is full tonight, four new faces in the room to replace the recently departed, kids shipped out to begin their sentences, hustled onto buses with the abruptness of a gavel swing. We never know when a seat in the class will be emptied; there are no warnings to precede these departures, no chances to say good-bye. The system is so backlogged a kid can sit in the hall for weeks or even months after a judge officially pronounces sentence, their lives on hold, their names on The List. No matter how long the wait, when the transport van finally arrives, there is at most a few hours’ warning, often just a few minutes, allowing some scant farewells followed by a frantic stuffing of their most treasured personal possessions into socks and waistbands—a photo from home, a stub of a pencil (prized contraband), a girl’s love letter, read and reread so many times it looks like buttery parchment, the ink blurred, the folds ripped and fuzzy.

  One by one, the original class members have vanished this way, here writing one week, gone the next. Chris and Louis got CYA; Elias and Robert, state prison; Ruben, finding in the class a new confidence in his ability to express himself, wrote a heartfelt letter to his prosecutor, who was so moved he agreed to knock seven years off the boy’s adult sentence for murder. Others, though, disappear without word or explanation, some sentenced, some simply transferred to other branches of Juvenile Hall. We rarely hear what happens to them. On the brown metal library table, a small pile of poems and essays sits untouched, typed up with my now useless comments attached, the authors gone. I have learned to make each class self-contained, to treat each kid as if I will never see him again. Each class starts from scratch.

  Once again, the class almost was canceled tonight, saved only through Sister Janet’s pleas. There is tension throughout the hall this week—not the usual drill-sergeant-versus-reprobate antagonism, but something far more serious, electric in its intensity, an expression on some of the counselors’ faces when they stare at their young charges that is new, yet unmistakable. The expression is hatred.

  The reason: A probation counselor at another facility has been murdered during an escape attempt, bludgeoned to death with a metal table leg swung by a sixteen-year-old boy with convictions for auto theft, concealed weapons, and burglary. It is the first time anyone has died in the line of duty at the Los Angeles County Probation Department since it was founded in 1903, the first time the department’s director has stood at graveside and handed a folded flag to a widow, the first time probation officers in LA have so keenly felt the dangers inherent in trying to contain and control dangerous, violent children with nothing but their wits and bare hands. The escape and murder happened at the Dorothy Kirby Center (in the cottage next to Carla James’s), not at the higher-security Central Juvenile Hall. Still, distrust has flowed from the Kirby facility throughout the system, old assumptions about juveniles and security going out the window. Probation officers are now demanding personal alarms and aerosol cans of caustic pepper spray to control kids in the halls, the camps, and at Kirby. For now, though, all the staffers at the hall have is increased vigilance, and the kids feel this new pressure. The man who died, working the graveyard shift alone in a twenty-boy cottage, had always been known for his benign breaking of the rules, for bringing in candy and pizzas, for cutting the kids extra slack. There has always been someone on the staff of every juvenile facility who fills this role, the kindly counselor every kid likes—even the high-risk offender unit at Central Juvenile Hall had such people on staff. Until now. Now, for the moment at least, there is no slack, only hard stares and suspicion.

  This new oppressive atmosphere has quieted everyone in the class—except for one newcomer, Little Criminal, fourteen years old with an eleven-year-old’s smooth face, large-eyed and angelic. It is unusual to see such a young kid on this unit of hardened offenders, but he informs me with no small amount of pride that he is in for one count of murder, four counts of attempted murder, and enough other charges to fill several typewritten pages, all committed in one night of violence when he was still thirteen. He hadn’t liked the way some eighteen-year-old kid in a pickup truck had looked at him. A gang member since age nine, Little Criminal took out a semiautomatic pistol and, once that was emptied, a shotgun, and killed the kid, wounding four of the dead teen’s friends in the process. Little Criminal feels no more remorse for what he did than he feels for the dead bodies in the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action flicks he likes to talk about, which is to say he has no regrets at all, except for the fact of his getting caught. And even that is a source of pride, since taking the rap as a juvenile assured that his older homeboys would avoid going to adult court for his crimes.

  I have never met him before, but something about Little Criminal is familiar to me, and I realize what it is when he starts to explain how he could have killed everyone that night, and he’d still get out of CYA at age twenty-five. “It’s like, it doesn’t matter how many people you waste, one’s the same as five,” he says, and I realize this is the same kid who so impressed—and disturbed—District Attorney Gil Garcetti when he visited Juvenile Hall earlier in the year.

  “You talked to the DA a while ago about that, didn’t you?” I ask him.

  Little Criminal shrugs. He isn’t sure who the tall guy in the suit was, but he was somebody important, yeah. “So that was the DA, huh? He didn’t like my questions, but he said I was right, no matter how many people you kill, if you’re my age, you get back on The Outs at twenty-five.” The boy is smiling at this prospect, too young, perhaps, to fully appreciate just how long eleven years can be. He only knows he’s doing better than most of the others in this wing of Juvenile Hall, with their adult trials and life sentences. Later, in a five-minute writing exercise, he hands in this poem:

  Am I a criminal?

  That’s what people say.

  I don’t believe them, but

  Its on my mind day by day.

  The thought of being a criminal

  Scares me at night

  Thinking of humanity, wanting

  Me locked up tight.

  If they can define criminal

  To themselves, one day

  I can say to them

  Little Criminal’s no criminal.

  It’s just what people say.

  “It’s about when I get out,” Little Criminal explains. “See, my record will be clean then. That’s the law, too.”

  · · ·

  Geri, meanwhile, is unusually quiet. He has written some new chapters for his autobiography—I see the dog-eared pages poking out of a folder he is clutching. But he shakes his head no when I ask him to read. He just hands me the papers without comment.

  When I look over the passages he gives me, I find them chilling, a no-holds-barred description of himself at age twelve, after the dependency court shuffled him around for a while, then gave him and his little brother Joachim to his grandmother. He describes his mind-set at that age, and I see that it is the same as Little Criminal’s current outlook, conscienceless and cruel. It is not the Geri I have seen here in class. Somehow, it seems, he has changed since then. At least, everyone who has worked with him says so. Yet, having seen this other side of him, I can’t help attaching a question mark. The curse of the juvenile system is never knowing for sure when it succeeds. Here, you can only know failure with certainty, the sound of handcuffs clicking shut on young wrists.

  When no one else volunteers to offer up their work aloud, I read Geri’s new chapters to the class for him:

  I went to a toy store inside of the Central City Mall and bought a video machine called Nintendo . . . but the damn machine didn’t work. This made me very upset and mad. . . . Without thinking, I went to my grandmother’s room and searched for her gun. The last place I remembered seeing it wa
s inside of a shoe box underneath the bed. I searched through every shoe box until finally, I found it. It was a shiny nickel-plated twenty-five automatic handgun with a pearl white grip engraved with a red rose. This was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen in my whole life . . . as if it was a work of art created by the most famous artist in the whole world. . . .

  Now I felt invincible about going down to the store and putting in work. I strolled down the street in a rage. . . . I thought about walking straight up to the clerk, then opening fire on him right there and then. But naw, that would have been stupid. The only results that I would have received from that would have been life imprisonment. As I continued to walk and think about this master plan, One-Time (the police) pulled up on the side of me and pulled out their weapons, ordering me to put my hands in the air and to go face down to the ground. . . . They took me to the station and booked me, but later on released me to my grandmother. . . . She had turned me in to the cops once she found out the gun was missing. I was glad I didn’t go back to the hall, but I wasn’t so happy about the whipping that I received when we got home.

  In the silence that follows this reading, I find myself wondering if Geri realizes that, as long as he is in the system, and probably for years afterward, one overarching question will color how others perceive him: Will the boy who would gladly kill a cashier over a video game, and who later would participate in an armed robbery of a motel (no matter the extenuating circumstances) ever rise to the surface again, displacing the affable teenager sitting here now? When it comes time for a judge to sentence him later this month, I wonder, does he understand that question will be foremost on the jurist’s mind? It will be there, just under the surface, an unspoken colloquy between prosecutor, defender, and judge: Why should I take a chance on this kid, and run the risk of a media storm and voter recalls and pickets if he should just happen to walk out and kill someone? Doesn’t matter if most of the time taking a chance with a kid like Geri pays off, the judge could well reason, because it’s the one in a thousand screwup that will make the papers. Why take a chance when sending him to prison would be so much safer, so much more politically apt, so much more in step with public opinion?