Richard hadn’t killed anybody, so he wasn’t facing the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole. If he received a life sentence, he’d be eligible to go before the parole board in seven years. But Du Bois argued that the Supreme Court decisions about the death penalty and LWOP indicated “evolving standards of decency” that made it increasingly unacceptable to impose harsh sentences on young offenders.
“Proposition 21 enabled the DA—a criminal prosecutor by trade—to unilaterally decide at the outset of any proceedings that the 16-year-old Defendant was irredeemably a depraved ‘criminal’ offender who should be permanently deprived of the rehabilitative and parental reunification objectives and treatment originally provided to all … juvenile offenders,” he wrote.
None of this made much of an impression on Judge Richard Couzens. He pointed out that Richard hadn’t yet been tried, which made it too early to weigh in on the constitutionality of any sentence he might receive. And, he added, “This conduct is very egregious and I don’t think anybody would argue that if it were committed by an adult that the punishment would be cruel and unusual.”
The petition was denied.
In the hall outside the courtroom, Jasmine wept in her sister Juliette’s arms. She rode the elevator down to the lobby with her eyes fastened on the floor.
“He’s my baby,” she said softly. “All I can do is stand by him.”
BACK AT JUVIE
The staff at Juvenile Hall remembered Richard from his previous stay there when he was fourteen, before he was sent to the group home. He’d been a pain in the ass then—the kind of kid who kept asking for things, and if he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d ask someone else. He took up a lot of time, but they’d liked him anyway.
“He was never a bad kid,” one staffer explained. “He’s just a needy kid.”
He seemed different now. The goofy, antic quality was gone. These days, Richard was serious. Withdrawn. The boys who knew him before said he’d gotten boring. He didn’t care about getting laughs.
There were just ninety or a hundred kids in all of Juvenile Hall, most of them boys, even though the facility had been built for three hundred and sixty. Now, with juvenile incarceration rates sinking, only half of the twelve thirty-bed units were open, and each of those was only half full.
Richard knew the Juvenile Hall routine already. Before you leave your room in the morning, fold up your pajamas and blankets and leave them in a neat pile on the bed, what they called “open-air style.” Step outside, put your shoes on, and then stand in front of your cell with your hands clasped behind your back to await instructions. Breakfast is in the common area, at one of the round tables with checkerboard patterns in the center. School is a few yards away, in two classrooms next to the common area.
Those classrooms were the most colorful part of the unit, the walls covered with posters, word lists, number lines—a visual vacation from the drab sameness of the rest of the unit. Richard found it was easier to concentrate there than it had been at school, even with the chaos of the living unit occasionally erupting outside the classroom door. He steadily moved through his coursework, earning decent grades for the first time in his high school career.
On Sundays he went to services, which were held inside one of the classrooms. He liked studying the Bible, particularly the story of Job. In the story, God tests Job’s faith by killing his wife and his children and his servants, destroying his house, his animals, and all his possessions. He makes Job’s skin erupt in boils. Eventually Job is reduced to nothing but raw suffering. “How is this fair?” Job asks. “What kind of God does this to people?”
At the end of the story, God comes to Job in a whirlwind to answer his questions with questions of his own. “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” he asks. He asks Job if he was there when the earth was made, if he knows where light and darkness dwell, if he can bind a unicorn and make him plow the field. “Do you have an arm like God’s, and can your voice thunder like his?”
“Okay,” Job says. “I see your point. God’s knowledge and power are so vast, there’s no point in questioning his choices.” For Richard, the story was a comfort.
Early on in his stay, Richard found himself sharing a fifteen-person living unit with the kid who had robbed him at gunpoint, the one he had thought of as a friend. The boy apologized for robbing him. Richard told Jasmine that he’d accepted the apology because he knew what it was like to have wronged somebody. He, too, hoped to be forgiven.
“Forgive, but don’t forget,” Jasmine liked to say. But now Richard told her to stop saying that.
“To forgive, you have to forget,” he counseled. “Because otherwise you haven’t truly forgiven.”
WHAT IF?
Jasmine tried to stay focused on the positive. Richard was going to learn from this experience, she was sure. “We’re all going to learn something from this,” she said frequently. But once, after saying it, she shook her head.
“I wish it hadn’t gone this far and he could have learned a different way,” she said. “I wish that the courts would give him a suitable punishment so that he can learn from this instead of just being institutionalized.”
Sometimes, her mind couldn’t help flicking through an ever-changing list of what-ifs. What if she’d been able to afford to pay a lawyer to defend Richard when he was fourteen instead of letting him be represented by the public defender? What if she had gotten him tested for ADHD when he was a freshman, like she’d thought about doing? What if she’d been able to find a place to live outside of Oakland, where there weren’t so many bad influences? What if he’d had more activities in his life, more things to keep him out of trouble? What if she’d taken him to sign up for an after-school jobs program like he’d been asking? What if Richard had called her when he was first arrested instead of talking to the police? What if she’d gone down to the police station when she first saw him on the news? She should have gone down there instead of calling. She shouldn’t have just taken their word for it when they told her they didn’t know anything. She should have—
But then she’d stop herself. There had to be a reason why all of this was turning out the way it had.
“God works in mysterious ways,” she said. “He don’t do anything on accident. Everything he do, he know exactly what he’s doing.”
NOT READY
Christmas came and went. School started again. Sasha was accepted into MIT. By February life had slipped back toward normality—a new normal, in which Sasha’s legs were bound in white compression stockings twenty-three hours a day to prevent the development of thick scars at the site of the skin grafts. The compression stockings were more comfortable than the bandages had been, and Sasha’s atrophied leg muscles had regained their strength.
Jasmine wanted to meet with Sasha’s family. She’d been thinking about it since Richard was first arrested. She wanted to tell them how sorry she was, mother to mother, parent to parent.
“I can imagine if it was my baby,” she said. “He didn’t do anything for that to be done to him.
But when Debbie heard the idea, she flinched. She thought about Jasmine often, she said, and she believed in forgiveness. But it was just too soon. She needed more time.
WHAT TO SAY
Richard’s first evidentiary hearing was in March. Sasha took the day off from school and came to court with Karl and Debbie, dressed in a navy blue skirt, a gray vest, a brown striped bow tie, a gray flat cap, a trench coat, purple leggings, and purple high-tops. They carried a book about the history of American socialism.
Jasmine stared at Sasha, whom she was seeing in person for the first time. Emotions swirled inside her. Sorrow and compassion. Confusion and shame. Emptiness.
The hearing was over in minutes. Richard was “held to answer,” which meant that there was enough evidence against him for a judge to set a date for trial. As Sasha’s family filed out of the courtroom, Jasmine dashed over to speak to them.
&nb
sp; “My son’s not like that,” she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth in a rush. “I don’t know what made him do that, and I’m sorry. We’re not hateful people.”
Then she hugged each member of the family: Debbie, Karl, Sasha.
One by one, each of Richard’s relatives came forward to do the same.
When it was over, both mothers were crying. Jasmine kept talking about Sasha. “He just looked so innocent,” she said. “He’s just so cute. He has such a nice family. It’s just not something I can get used to.”
There was so much more she had wanted to say, but she couldn’t find the words. “I don’t know what to say but sorry.”
ALWAYS OKAY
In the elevator, Debbie wiped away tears. “I felt like it was genuine on their part,” she said. “It was good. I’m really glad. It was worth coming here today just for that.”
When asked how it had felt to be hugged by the family of the person who had set them on fire, Sasha just smiled.
“I’m always okay with hugs,” they said.
Afterward, Karl, Debbie, and Sasha rode the courthouse elevator to the ninth floor to meet with Armando Pastran, the deputy district attorney who was prosecuting the case.
Pastran had seen the two families embrace, but he seemed unmoved.
“I’m glad that they showed some remorse,” he said of Richard’s family. “I’d like to see some from the person who did it.”
Pastran had never spoken to Richard, of course. That’s not how the system works. And Richard’s letters were still tucked away in his lawyer’s briefcase.
WE THE PEOPLE
A year after Sasha first posted their nonbinary gender petition, another petition went up on the We the People website. The wording was pretty much identical to the one Sasha had written.
This time, the petition went viral, attracting attention from Reddit, Bustle, the Advocate, and Huffington Post. It earned 103,202 signatures and an official White House response, which said, in part, “We know how important this issue is, and we understand the profound impact, both symbolic and otherwise, of having official documents that accurately reflect an individual’s identity … We cannot overstate the care and seriousness that should be brought to bear on the issue.”
That didn’t mean the White House was planning to change federal policy. The official statement said that proposals to change the way gender is listed on government documents “should be considered on a case-by-case basis by the affected federal and state agencies.” Still, Sasha felt proud. The government had acknowledged the existence of nonbinary gender. Who would have thought it possible?
PRETTY
Michael’s girlfriend, Teah, stood behind Sasha, yanking at the laces of a scarlet corset.
“I wonder, if I keep pulling, if Sasha will just disappear into negative space,” she mused.
It was April. She and Michael and Sasha and Nemo were getting ready for the Gaskell Ball, a Victorian gathering held in downtown Oakland at the Scottish Rite Center, an ornate 1920s-era building on the shores of Lake Merritt. Teah’s mother, Alisa Foster, is a costume designer. She had made Sasha a ball gown as a gift, using fabric donated by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a San Francisco charity and street performance group that calls itself “a leading-edge Order of queer nuns.” The dress had a twenty-three-inch waist. Teah, whose own gown was olive green and trimmed with gold ruffles, measured Sasha’s waist. Just under twenty-five inches. She yanked harder at the corset strings.
“Sasha, how are you even alive currently?” Michael asked. He was wearing a gray vest and pants and a burgundy bow tie.
“Magic.” Sasha grinned. They tapped their own collarbones. “My lungs are up here. The human body is a wondrous thing.”
“I feel a little bit guilty—I’m suffocating you,” Teah said, pulling the corset tighter.
“It’s consensual,” Sasha said. “Anyway, I don’t think that’s suffocation. Suffocation is when you put a pillow over someone’s mouth and nose.”
Just then, Nemo walked in, wearing an Edwardian waistcoat, pleated black pants, a starched white shirt, and a cravat patterned in blue and gray. They had pulled their straight brown hair into a ponytail at the nape of their neck.
“The curves are a good look for you,” Nemo deadpanned, taking in Sasha’s hourglass shape.
Nemo sat down on the couch beside Teah and Michael and watched as Teah’s mother helped Sasha into a royal-blue ball gown with a scooped neck and leg-of-mutton sleeves. A matching blue headpiece rested in Sasha’s hair, a silk rosette over each ear.
“I feel pretty!” Sasha announced, twirling in front of the mirror.
“You’re so beautiful!” Nemo said, conducting Sasha in a brief waltz around the room. “Oh my God!”
Sasha was too tightly bound by the corset to put on shoes, so Nemo sat on the floor to do it for them.
Mitzi, Teah’s small black dog, sniffed at the hem of Sasha’s dress.
“Dog,” Sasha said irritably. “I’m dry-clean only.”
“You’re dry-clean only?” Nemo inquired. “Or your dress?”
“Well, I effectively am my dress,” Sasha observed. “On the outside.”
“Are you?” Nemo asked, interested by the statement. “But you’re also your skin and your necklace.”
Sasha shrugged. “The parts of me that are accessible to the dog are dry-clean only.”
DANCING
They entered together, hand in hand, forearm to forearm. The ballroom’s wooden floor gleamed under their feet. The revelers promenaded in pairs, women in bustled ball gowns in bright candy colors, men in frock coats with waxed mustaches. The outfits were a mash-up of eras and styles—long gloves and short ones, feathers and jewels, flapper dresses, miniskirts, suits, jeans, and at least one man in a kilt with a raccoon-pelt pouch at his waist.
This is it, Sasha thought. I’m here in my ball gown, with my partner, and it’s wonderful.
It was wonderful because the dress was pretty and Sasha was pretty and the room was pretty and Nemo was pretty. It was wonderful because Sasha loved ballroom dancing. And it was wonderful because for that night at least, nobody was going to mistake Sasha for a boy. All evening, men asked Sasha to dance.
“What I want is for people to be confused about what gender I am,” Sasha explained later. That didn’t happen too often—people tended to see Sasha as male. So it was a nice change to be seen as female.
On the stage, a brass band struck up an oompah-pah waltz. Sasha and Nemo danced.
RIPPLES
Darris Young worked as an organizer for an Oakland social justice advocacy group called the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He had been hired while still on probation after doing time, and he was passionate about keeping young people out of prison.
“I did seventeen years, two days, four hours and twenty minutes on a twenty-year sentence as a third striker,” he explained in an interview posted on the Ella Baker Center’s website. “I saw a lot of things that were wrong with the system. Especially, as I started to see the years go by, the people that were coming in were getting younger and younger, and I was like: there’s something wrong with this. Why are we sending kids to prison for things that maybe they should have gotten corrected in their lives? And then I saw a pattern that most of them had started out in the juvenile justice system, which let me know that somewhere down the line, it was failing.”
Darris had followed Richard’s case in the news. When he saw Sasha’s family on TV saying that they wanted Richard to be charged as a juvenile, he felt there was a chance that maybe a different kind of solution could be reached, one that didn’t involve sending Richard to prison.
“Here was a case where so many people thought, Okay, yeah, it’s a horrific thing that happened, but yet here’s a young man that seemed to be salvageable—he didn’t have a long criminal record or anything like that,” he said. “Especially because the victim’s family, they were so forgiving. It seemed like they just wanted to put this behind the
m without causing any more harm to the community at large, because, you know, whenever anyone goes to prison it harms the whole community, it has ripple effects up and down.”
Darris and another organizer, Maria Dominguez, contacted Jasmine to see if she might be interested in something called restorative justice. Jasmine wasn’t interested at first—she’d never heard of restorative justice, and she was already feeling overwhelmed. But eventually she agreed to meet with them to learn more. They couldn’t promise anything—all the parties would have to agree, including Sasha’s family, the district attorney, and Richard’s defense lawyer, Bill Du Bois. But they knew that a restorative justice advocate named Anna Blackshaw had been in touch with Sasha’s family, and so they thought it might be possible to bring the two sides together to keep Richard out of prison.
“Once you send an eighteen-year-old to state prison, there are older individuals there and they are very influential,” Darris explained. “Most of the time, individuals don’t come out of prison better.”
ASS SMACKING
One day in the fall of 2015, two ninth-grade students sat in Biology class at Oakland High School watching a substitute teacher try in vain to control the classroom. The two could not have been more unlike each other. TC was soft-spoken, slight, and of Vietnamese descent. She dressed like most Oakland High students, in a hoodie and sweats, but she wore her long black hair in two girlish braids. Jeff was a rambunctious African American boy with a blond streak in his close-cropped hair. The kind of kid who talks nonstop, unleashing a stream of comic commentary that’s half hilarious, half annoying. The kind of kid who, when the girl at the desk next to him doesn’t want to show him her binder, slaps her hard on the behind.
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