No Matter How Loud I Shout Read online

  Now, at last, he is back, a pistol strapped to his waist to counter the nonexistent security measures in his courthouse, and a long list of new programs he intends to try, whether prosecutors and public defenders like them or not. High on his list: sending fewer, not more, kids to adult court and prison. “Appeal me if you want. Take your shot,” he likes to dare.

  Roosevelt Dorn sees himself as a teacher of sorts—in the courtroom on weekdays, in Bible class on Sundays at one of LA’s largest and oldest black churches. He is active in the black community, president of the local chapter of a philanthropic organization of professionals called One Hundred Black Men, and one of a handful of African-American civic leaders who met with Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti to seek assurances that football-great-turned-murder-defendant O. J. Simpson would not be discriminated against, particularly on the question of imposing the death penalty, which Garcetti eventually decided against pursuing. (In casual conversation, long before Simpson’s acquittal, Dorn stated aloud his fear that “O. J. might have been framed.”)

  One of nine children, Dorn was raised in rural Oklahoma, where his parents, a barber and a nurse, preached the gospel of education and the value of determination. Dorn holds himself out as an example of how both qualities can lead to success—even for a black man who grew up in a time and a place where signs announcing “Whites Only” were as common as summer thunder on the plains, and where chopping cotton was the only labor he was expected to seek. When he tells truant child after truant child in his courtroom that “Without an education, you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime of degradation and poverty,” he is speaking from personal experience.

  After joining the Air Force, then settling in California, he worked his way through law school while holding a job as a courtroom bailiff. His main experience as an attorney was as a LA city prosecutor, where he earned a reputation as a tough and uncompromising law-and-order zealot who never showed mercy. Appointed to the municipal bench in 1979, then the Superior Court a year later, his political patron was former California Governor Jerry Brown, a minor oddity given Brown’s liberalism and Dorn’s history of prosecuting antiwar protesters for disrupting college campuses during the Vietnam War. Once on the bench, Dorn requested service in the juvenile delinquency division of the Superior Court—something very few judges request—and made his own brand of child welfare his life’s passion, transforming himself from a conservative prosecutor into a tireless and single-minded advocate for children.

  He assigns blame for the problems of today’s youth, in no particular order of preference, on poor teachers, ineffectual parents, a bloated yet ineffective Probation Department bureaucracy, politicians who champion popular “solutions” to juvenile crime—such as trying more kids as adults—even though ample evidence exists to show such tactics do not work as intended, and television (“the greatest evil in society today”). The answer, he believes, is to yank kids off the streets and force them back into school, where they can learn that they can succeed. Go to school or go to jail is the alternative he offers. The judge fosters his reputation for harshness purposely, he says, “so the minors—and the parents and the lawyers—know Judge Dorn means business.” If people bristle or take offense at his words or his tactics, so be it.

  It is safe to say that Judge Roosevelt Dorn believes in himself far beyond the point of brashness—he is a prophet. His words often seem as appropriate for a Sunday sermon as for a courtroom lecture. And though he packs a gun, he also says, “I fear no man. Man can just kill this body and set me free. I only fear my Father.”

  The lawyers, cops, probation officers, parents, and the delinquents themselves have looked forward to his return with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Anything that shakes things up has to help, many figure. Others, Peggy Beckstrand chief among them, are not so sure of Judge Dorn. “My instructions are to give him a chance,” she told her prosecutors, enthusiasm notably absent from her voice.

  “We’ll give him a chance, too,” Peggy’s counterpart in the Public Defender’s Office, Oksana Bihun, told her PDs during Dorn’s first week. “We’ll give him a chance to hang himself.”

  · · ·

  “All right,” Judge Dorn says, after sentencing a petty thief to probation and arraigning three angelic little girls in white dresses—the oldest is twelve—on charges of armed robbery. “Are we ready on the fitness hearing?”

  John Sloan’s attorney and the prosecutor assigned to Dorn’s courtroom both stand and announce ready, having heard from Peggy Beckstrand that the fitness hearing will go on. Judge Dorn orders his court bailiff to fetch John from the holding tank. While waiting, the judge puts aside a file and begins rubbing his eyes and massaging his forehead again, a habitual and disconcerting mannerism he has adopted while on the bench, as if he is exhausted or suffering from a severe headache. Peggy once asked him about it and he assured her he was not in pain, as it appeared, but that he was merely praying for the wisdom to decide a case correctly. The rubbing gets especially rigorous during fitness hearings. Most Juvenile Court judges dislike the fitness law, because it almost always requires them to do what prosecutors want—send kids to adult court—whether they personally agree with the outcome or not. This was what legislators intended: to rob judges of their discretion in such cases, shifting it instead to prosecutors, who could be counted on to take a harder law-and-order line. Most of the other judges grit their teeth and follow the law, even though personally they disagree with it and the blanket solution it imposes on so many cases. But Judge Dorn openly despises this process. With him, every fitness hearing is a battle.

  The bailiff brings the boy in from the holding tank, hands clasped during the long march to the table. The courtroom crowd has thinned somewhat, but there are still people in every row, and their eyes follow John as he takes his seat, fixing his stare on the scarred gray defense table as soon as he sits down.

  The judge opens his eyes and takes a long, measuring look at the silent, fidgeting teenager before him. He is a short, slim, exceedingly pale Korean-American youth with a shock of black hair tumbling over his forehead. He has a brown jacket on over his county-issue orange jumpsuit. During the brief silence, unaware that Dorn is studying him, John looks over his shoulder at his family, an entire row of parents, aunts, uncles, and a younger brother and sister, all in suits and ties or dresses. They exchange the tiniest of smiles with John. In this grungy courthouse with its unidentifiable smears and odors, the Sloan family appears to have been beamed in from a church pew. The judge looks them over approvingly, with the same expression of satisfaction he wears when he eyes his Bible class. John’s mother is weeping softly again, her children comforting her.

  “Minor is in court represented by counsel,” Dorn says, setting the ancient ritual in motion. “The People are represented. Minor’s parents are in court.”

  The dissection of John Sloan’s life, motives, and actions is about to begin. These are the most scrutinized and tension-filled proceedings Juvenile Court has to offer. The fitness hearing lies at the heart of the most burning debate now swirling through the juvenile justice system—a debate about whether there should even be a juvenile court. The stated goal of a fitness hearing—bald heresy in a system founded so long ago on the notion that there is no such thing as a bad kid—is to save some children, and discard the rest. For good.

  Although the official court record will show the focus of the hearing in the People v. John Sloan to have been on evidence and findings of fact and all the other required legal niceties of a fitness hearing, the underlying truth is that the boy’s fate rests with a simple equation: measure the child against the crime he committed, then divide the total by Judge Dorn’s willingness to break the law. For only a flat refusal to enforce a state law that virtually mandates his transfer to adult court can save John now.

  The real question Dorn will be trying to answer—the one every participant in this process is aware of, though no one will speak it aloud for fear it would constitute inst
ant grounds for appeal—is whether John Sloan is worth the trouble.

  “Call your first witness,” the judge commands, and it begins.

  CHAPTER 5

  Punks

  “Santos needs to read his story first,” Geri tells me one evening. “They told him he was going to County tonight.”

  County. Los Angeles County Jail, the adult lockup. Unless a judge intervenes, older kids like Luis Santos—“Cartoon” on the street—go to County once they are transferred to adult court, so that another juvenile can come claim the bunk, or the mat on the floor, that serves as his bed. After tonight, he will have to fend for himself among the adult criminals stacked into County by the thousand.

  Cartoon looks at me shyly. He has a dark, wry face with a goatee and thick, bushy eyebrows that almost meet over his nose. Another face might look sinister because of that black V over his eyes, but Cartoon’s face is full of mirth and intelligence. “If you don’t mind,” he says, “I’d like to read my story first. It’s about the day I got torcido. Busted, I mean. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. They said the bus could come any time.”

  Cartoon looks around anxiously at the rest of the class. It will be the first and last time he will read to us. He has never written a story before, he tells us. “So don’t laugh.”

  Well, it started like this. I was living with my home girl Smiley at the time. A couple of home boys and home girls were there getting ready for a party we were gonna have there. The home boys were ironing their khakis and Pendletons, shining their Stacy Adamses, and the ones that had hair were putting on Three Flowers. In the other room the home girls were doing their own pedo, I don’t know what, but when they came out they looked fine. Even their hair smelled bueno. Then I spot my home girl Tiny.

  Cartoon’s voice becomes almost a whisper as he reads, remembering the party preparations and his first glance of Tiny behind the other girls. The image of gang members ironing their clothes and dousing themselves with hair tonic as their girls primp and preen lifts all the boys in the room from their dour surroundings for a moment.

  Tiny. This ruka is fine. She has me sprung on everything of hers—her eyes, face, body, laugh, attitude. Everything you can imagine was fine on her. No I’m not overdoing it.

  Well, I go up to her. “Qué vole, mija, como estas?”

  “Fine, I guess,” she tells me. I was determined to ask her to be my hina that night, so I ask her to accompany me to the couch so we can talk some more. She said all right. So we make our way through the now over-crowded room. We finally reach the plastic-covered couch. It has a plastic cover on it because when the home boys drink either they spill beer or they throw up on anything.

  I was making up small talk so I can build up courage to ask her what I needed to ask her. I felt a burst of courage come onto me, so I slowly inched my hand toward hers, which was on her lap. I finally reached her hand. She didn’t seem to mind me holding hands with her, so I decide to tell her right now. I say, “Tiny, would you . . .”

  “CARTOON! CARTOON! Where are you ese?”

  Damn. My home boy Payaso came storming into the room, and I couldn’t finish my proposal to my baby. He ran towards me and said hey, we gotta go take care of something right away. “Quick, come on.”

  So I tell my home girl I’ll be right back. “Okay, mija? But when I come back, we gotta talk seriously, okay?” I felt bad about leaving just like that. I’m sure she did too.

  Well, as soon as I was out the house, my home boy tells me we have to go collect something of ours that someone had, so I agreed. We got in the car. It was weird, because Tiny came to the car window and said, “Cartoon, don’t go.” She insisted, but my home boy drove away. I saw her slowly disappearing in the glare of the street lights. I hate to admit it, but I had a tear in my eye. I don’t know why, but I did.

  My homie said, “So you like Tiny, carnal?” I said yeah, and he said, “Well, after today, you can settle down with her and your baby girl.” (In case I didn’t mention it, I have a baby girl.)

  So we drove off to South Gate to pick up a couple of guns—actually, one gun, also one rifle. We got them and jumped on the freeway. Not only was my heart pounding from the anxiety of what we were about to do, but also because my home boy was going at 70–80 MPH on the freeway.

  He gave me the rundown on what we were gonna do, which was to rob a house. I had the rifle, he had the gun. We got to this old apartment building. We parked the car in the back alley, and walked most of the way. As we walked, I didn’t talk much, I was overwhelmed with fear of what we are about to do. We finally got to the front door of this one apartment. We found the front door open. I took my rifle from my waistband and my home boy took out his gun. And we walked in the apartment.

  There we found ourselves giving three guys orders to get down on the floor, which they did. My home boy went and grabbed a guy by the shirt, pulled him up and took him to the other room. After five minutes, they came back, my home boy with four ounces of yeska, gold chains, and money. As I turned around to see what he had, one of the vatos grabbed my rifle and I was struggling with him as I yelled for my homie to help me. But he had left the premises.

  Cartoon’s reading is interrupted here by a burly detention officer, who opens the door and peers into the library. He eyes each kid, that sizing-up look cops and prison guards always seem to wear. The eyes settle on Cartoon. “Santos. Time to go.”

  A chorus of protests from the other kids draws a glare. I beg for five more minutes, and, after a moment, the man relents, shaking his head as if we were all wasting our time. But Cartoon gets to finish his story.

  It was only I left there with three individuals which I was struggling with for my life. They beat me to the floor. I still had my rifle, they were hitting me with bottles and bats. Finally, they managed to take my rifle.

  I was on the floor, dazed from the beating I had received. One individual placed the rifle in my mouth. At that moment, I saw my little girl, mom, my barrio, and the girl I loved. I knew I was gonna die, so all I did was throw up my barrio.

  I heard one vato say, “Kill him, kill him.” I saw the guy holding the rifle in front of me. I saw his finger squeeze the trigger. All I heard was click. . . . Click, click, click. Nothing. The gun got jammed on me.

  Then they called the police on me. I laid there halfway dead from the beating I received, wondering why the gun didn’t go off, why my home boy left me, but most of all thinking of my baby. Not to mention Tiny. She is always on my mind.

  The police came, arrested me, placed me in the patrol car, took me to the nearest hospital. There I was for three or four hours, doing checkups on me. Nothing broken but my heart. Knowing I was coming to jail to do some hard time.

  Cartoon looks up and says, “The End.”

  The room is silent. Every page of the little college blue book Sister Janet had scrounged up for each kid to write in had been used, even the unlined blue cover page, filled up by this world Cartoon lived in, where the juxtaposition between being too shy to hold a girl’s hand and bursting into someone’s home armed with a rifle is not considered extraordinary, and where making his gang’s identifying hand signal—throwing up his barrio—is an honorable way to die. He has been a gang member since age eleven. He knows no other world. Seventeen at the time of his arrest, he is unfailingly polite, soft-spoken, and articulate, an eleventh-grade dropout with a long record of minor juvenile offenses, all of them impulsive and unplanned, set in motion by others—just like this latest one, this charge of armed robbery he now faces in adult court.

  One by one, the boys in the class begin to applaud his story. Cartoon is beaming now. It is the first story he has ever written. It is the first time anything remotely linked to scholarship seemed enjoyable to him.

  “I didn’t know I could do this,” he says, almost breathless. “Do you think I should write more?”

  I tell him yes, absolutely. I praise his work lavishly. I tell him he has set an example for the class, that he has show
n them, with effort and heart, that they all could tell stories with drama and humor and emotion. He looks like he is about to cry for a moment. He did not expect anyone to like what he wrote, he says. Now he promises he’ll send more stories from County.

  Two detention officers appear at the door then, arms crossed. “Let’s go, Santos,” the first one calls. “You’re outta here.” The almost giddy mood abruptly evaporates. Cartoon leaves, the excitement his story generated fleeing the room like air from a balloon. The other boys fall silent. There will be no more stories read or written this night.

  A short time later, I leave Central Juvenile Hall. It is almost nine o’clock, and a cold snap has gripped the LA Basin, chill and damp enough to turn my exhalations into steam. On the loading dock, I see a line of eight boys waiting in the cold, stripped of their orange juvenile coveralls—along with their legal status as juveniles. They are wearing only white T-shirts and gray cotton trousers, and they are linked together by thick belly chains. They shiver in the dark, shifting from foot to foot, waiting to get into a sheriff’s black-and-white van, bound for the Los Angeles County Jail. I hear one of them weeping, and what had been an abstract concept—this notion of trying juveniles as adults—suddenly hits home. This is how it is done, coldly, clinically, as if moving commodities from one warehouse to another. I spot Cartoon among these eight new “adults.” He was not allowed to bring any personal items with him—not his story, not his letters, nothing—just a stick of deodorant and a toothbrush, whatever he could stuff into the top of his socks. You’re not allowed to carry anything during these transfers, and your clothes have no pockets.

  Something makes Cartoon look up then—he had been staring at his feet—and he sees me peering at him through the chain-link fence. He gives me a wave and a weak smile, and I wonder what will become of him.

  I learn later that a judge sent him to prison for four years. I never heard from him again.