No Matter How Loud I Shout Page 15

  On the day of this meeting, a pair of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies stop a white Chevy Blazer headed toward Venice with four men and one woman inside, all of them dressed down in bandannas, oversized baggy pants, Pendleton shirts, and big, black engineer boots. The deputies make the passengers get out, and they saunter and slouch insolently, knowing they are untouchable (the delegates, expecting the police to be trawling the streets, have scrupulously avoided bringing guns or drugs to the meet, another Mexican Mafia instruction). The girl particularly impresses the police, so young, yet appearing as hardened as any veterana, coldly protesting being stopped and reluctantly giving her name as Sylvia Mercado. She barely looks sixteen, but something about the look on her face, the bandanna pulled tight down on her skull, the unfrightened look in her eyes, makes her stand out. The deputies have to let the car go—the driver and passengers had broken no laws—but in keeping with the unwritten policy to harass gang members whenever possible, the officers snap photos of the whole carload of them. All of the gang members pick up their shirts for the photographer, Sylvia included, displaying the large tattoos across their stomachs, announcing their membership in Tepa-13.

  Back at the station, one of the patrol deputies mentions the incident to an officer who specializes in gang work. “We ran into this girl, she is without doubt the most hard-core gangster any of us has ever seen.” The patrolman pulls out the packet of Polaroids they had taken and shows the gang expert. “Look at this kid. Name’s Sylvia Mercado.”

  “That’s not Sylvia Mercado,” the other cop says. “That’s Carla James. I investigated her on a drive-by last year.”

  The revelation that Carla is using an alias, dressing like a gangster, going to a major gang convention, and sporting a huge tattoo—in short, violating just about every condition of her probation—sets in motion a two-week hunt by Deputy Probation Officer Sharon Stegall, who finally nails the girl during one of Carla’s infrequent visits home. When Carla showed up one morning, her mother quietly phoned Sharon while the girl showered and, a short time later, probation officer confronts probationer. Sharon forces Carla to display her tattoo, which provides instant legal grounds for arrest.

  “You have the right to remain silent, do you understand that?” Sharon tells Carla as she snaps on the handcuffs. “You have the right to an attorney. And you have the right, apparently, to be stupid.”

  “It’s my body,” Carla says quietly. “I can wear my barrio if I want to.”

  · · ·

  A few weeks later, I catch up with Carla in the Sylmar branch of Juvenile Hall, where she is waiting to learn what the Juvenile Court has in store for her next. She has assumed her usual position of responsibility in her unit, a trustee who helps the staff maintain order, distribute meals, assign tasks, break up fights. Outwardly repentant, she insists she wishes to clean up her act, and has even filed the necessary paperwork to have her tattoo surgically removed, though somehow she never gets around to actually scheduling the operation. She says she wants a private doctor to do it, not some “county hospital butcher.”

  We sit in an empty hallway on a couple of plastic chairs, out of earshot of the staff, and Carla relaxes a bit, admitting that she is more ambivalent about quitting the gang life than she has let on.

  “You have to tell them what they want to hear,” she says. “I want the time to pass in comfort, so I do everything they want, I get all the privileges I can. You’re crazy if you don’t. That’s how the system works. They want me to have learned my lesson. So I say, I learned my lesson. Wouldn’t you?”

  When I don’t answer, she shakes her head. The people in the system, she says—the adults—don’t understand her world. It’s not like when you were kids, she says, and the baddest, toughest kid in school maybe carried a switchblade. Everyone has guns now. Everyone is more mature. And none of you understand about gangs. It’s not all about shooting and committing crimes. It’s about honor and loyalty and working for something bigger than yourself. In a gang, you feel welcomed, they open up to you, you are part of something, you are committed, you have power. Here, they don’t understand that. They just think we’re all monsters.

  But what about the drive-bys, I ask, and the people who get shot, who die? Isn’t that why people think gangs are monstrous? “You’ve been involved in drive-bys, on both ends of the gun. How can you justify that?”

  “That’s different. A drive-by isn’t like a murder, where you get up in someone’s face and stab them or something. That’s too cold-blooded. I could never do that. That’s wrong.”

  I admit to being confused by this, and Carla looks at me as if I’m hopelessly dense.

  “In a drive-by,” she explains, “you don’t see what happens. You just pull up, blam, blam, blam, and you’re gone. Maybe you hit someone, maybe not. It’s not like you aim at someone in particular. You leave before you even see what happens.”

  “But if someone gets shot in the heart, they’re just as dead as if you did it looking them in the eye, aren’t they?”

  “It’s not murder,” Carla insists. “I can’t believe you don’t understand this. If you don’t see it happen, how can it be murder?”

  I ask, What if her brother died in a drive-by? Would that be murder?

  She considers this and, to her credit, admits she hadn’t thought about it that way before. Perhaps, she says, there’s more to it than she has realized. “Look, I’m not saying drive-bys are good, or that I like them or anything. I don’t. I’m just saying they’re not the same as cold-blooded murder, and that the courts shouldn’t treat them the same.”

  Then she brightens. “But let me tell you this. If my brother did get shot, I’d have to go out looking for who did it. I’d have to get revenge. I’d have to do a drive-by myself to get back at the gang that did it. And I know that wouldn’t be murder.”

  Part of me wants to just leave it like that, but I have to ask the question. “If it wasn’t murder, Carla, what would it be?”

  Carla smiles. “Justice.”

  FOUR years, this minor has been before the court, and nothing has been done with him. Nothing!”

  Judge Dorn is on a tear this morning, at war, it seems, with every faction in his courthouse. So far he has lambasted a defense attorney for being late, incompetent, and inattentive, threatening to cut him off from the gravy train of future court-appointed cases. Then he threatened to dismiss a gang murder case because a grizzled police sergeant had refused to give the public defender access to a key witness whose life was at risk. “I will not tolerate defiance of my orders,” the judge bellowed, refusing to let the cop speak. “Turn over the information. Now!” Then, despite the fact this ruling favored the defense, he still managed to infuriate the entire Public Defender’s Office later in the morning by eliminating previously common sentences of informal, unsupervised probation for minor offenders—then refusing to transfer cases to other judges who allowed what he calls “wrist-slap sentencing.” And when one PD persisted, insisting on her legal right to request a different judge—to “paper” Dorn—he punished her by shipping the case out to the most distant branch of Juvenile Court available, Pomona, a minimum one-hour drive, even though the judge downstairs had space for the case on his docket.

  Later this same morning, Dorn had probation officers grumbling because he decided they should make progress reports to him about his probationers every two months (and sometimes more often), instead of once or twice a year as other judges require—a way of forcing POs to monitor kids far more closely (and work far harder) than many care to. “Get used to it,” Dorn rumbled when he saw one PO roll her eyes. “You will supervise Judge Dorn’s minors properly, or I will have your department chief in here to explain why not.” This is a favorite threat of Dorn’s—he figures a bureaucrat will give him almost anything to avoid being summoned to court for a verbal drubbing, something he has already used to get new paint, new upholstery, and new furnishings for his long-neglected courthouse.

  Next, word went out fr
om Dorn’s office that he was hosting an enormous meeting of police chiefs, probation officials, principals, school superintendents, and youth counselors in early February, where he would announce a plan to reform juvenile justice, pressing all those in attendance into service. The DA and the public defender, rather pointedly, were not invited, though both offices immediately began recruiting spies after obtaining bootleg copies of the guest list. They wanted to be ready for whatever Dorn had in mind.1

  After that, the judge capped off his busy morning by upbraiding his favorite whipping boy, Assistant DA Hyman Sisman, for mistakenly sending a crucial witness home when he was needed to finish a case. Dorn refused to grant the prosecutor a brief postponement so he could summon the witness back to court, and instead acquitted two kids who had beaten and robbed a pizza deliveryman, danced a jig over his supine form, then ran off to count their victim’s money and eat the pie with extra pepperoni they had ordered from their home telephone. “I have to acquit you only because the People did not do their job,” Dorn announced for the entire courtroom to hear. Then he turned to Sisman. “Next time, when you state that you are ready to proceed, Counsel, make sure you are ready to proceed.” The two boys, boldly attired in gangster baggies, hopped from court like school kids headed for recess, while the detective on the case—Mark Fuhrman, who would later become infamous for his racist tapes and his role in the O. J. Simpson case—wished them a sarcastic congratulations, then stalked off in disgust.

  In short, Dorn is enjoying the sort of morning that makes it possible for public defenders to call him too harsh a judge, for prosecutors and cops to label him far too lenient, and for everyone else in the system to wonder just what the judge will do next.

  His next target is the Probation Department once again—and its performance in the four-year-old case of one Eric Davis. “Nothing has been done with this minor,” he bellows again.

  Eric is a diminutive seventeen-year-old car thief turned carjacker whose criminal career has only flourished while under the supervision of the Juvenile Court and its investigative arm, the Probation Department.

  Dorn is leaning forward, a look of revulsion on his face. He loads enough astonishment into his silky baritone to suit a first visit to the Grand Canyon. As he speaks, he shifts his stare between Eric and the thick Juvenile Court file on the boy, a mass of pink, yellow, and white forms indecipherable to the uninitiated, but a clear road map of failure to Judge Dorn.

  “This is a classic example of what’s wrong with how we deal with so-called ‘minor offenders,’ ” Dorn says. “He’ll be eighteen in a few months, and he’s headed nowhere. Or worse.”

  No one in the courtroom says anything to this, though Dorn looks each principal in the case in the eye, daring them to respond. The system’s performance in Eric’s case is as indefensible as Eric’s own behavior. That this is taken for granted by the prosecutors, defense attorneys, and probation officers present in the courtroom, that no one feels compelled to argue otherwise, speaks volumes.

  “Look at this record,” Dorn says, refusing to just brush it aside, as other judges in Juvenile Court often do. He has decided to make an example of Eric. “October 1989, the minor is thirteen, he attacks another boy with a baseball bat, arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. He is never brought to court. The Probation Department, in its infinite wisdom, puts this minor on unsupervised probation. For an assault that could have caused serious, serious injury. Outrageous! That is why I will not allow unsupervised probation to be abused any longer.”

  Gleefully overturning long-standing practice by his brethren on the bench, he had particularly irked the public defenders since his return to Juvenile Court by consistently refusing to grant informal, unsupervised probation to minor offenders, called “654 probation,” from the California code section that authorizes it. In recent years, 654 had become a mainstay of the system. It did nothing for kids—essentially, the car thief or graffiti tagger or shoplifter granted 654 went home and, if he or she avoided arrest for six months, the case would be dismissed. It would be as if nothing had happened. In essence, 654 is a labor-saving device for the Probation Department and the rest of the court bureaucracy—with a high failure rate because, by definition, it provided no services or counseling to the kids who committed the crimes. Yet, most judges grant it with regularity—except Judge Dorn.2

  “Waste of time,” he says. “Lost time! Six-five-four never did any good for a minor. That’s the time when we need to work with them, when they need all the attention we can give. Before it’s too late!”

  Dorn looks up over his glasses at the boy, who is doing a poor job of concealing a smirk. His public defender nudges him with an elbow, but he just pulls away. The judge returns to the file.

  “Five months later, he’s back, this time for grand theft auto. He goes home on probation again, supposedly under supervision this time. Still nothing done. The Probation Department does not even check his school record, which was atrocious. He should have been put in custody then and there.” Another glare from Dorn. Eric shakes his head, pained and impatient.

  “Age fifteen, he’s arrested again, this time for carrying a gun—a misdemeanor,” Dorn says, picking at another of his pet peeves, the California legislature’s flaccid refusal to buck the gun lobby by making possession of a concealed weapon by a juvenile a felony. Switchblades, daggers, brass knuckles—those are felonies. But not guns, the weapon of choice in juvenile homicides and assaults.3 By keeping gun possession a misdemeanor, the amount of time the court can keep a child under supervision shrinks drastically.

  “Finally, the minor goes to camp for six months,” Dorn recounts. “But then he comes home and is right back to his old tricks. Which brings us to today.”

  Eric is in court this day for car theft and resisting arrest. He and a friend led police on a wild, high-speed chase through Los Angeles in a stolen car. Two youths had taken the car at gunpoint from a terrified woman a few hours earlier while she waited for a red light to change. Eric would have been charged with the far more serious crime of carjacking, but the woman could only identify Eric’s friend. She didn’t get a good look at the other kid in the car. The likelihood that Eric was the second carjacker was great—his size and general appearance matched the woman’s recollection—but that did not make for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So Eric pleaded guilty only to theft. The reduced charge gave his probation officer the chance to recommend that he stay home on probation. In the months following his latest arrest, the PO reported to Dorn, Eric has been doing well in school and seemed to have turned his life around.

  Dorn tosses this recommendation aside with disgust. “This probation report is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” he says. “Look at this: misspellings, poor grammar. Even the minor’s name is incorrect. The probation officer did not even take the time to verify the minor’s school record. Is this young man in school or not?”

  Silence. Eric’s attorney looks at him, but he says nothing. The judge turns toward the boy’s mother, who sits in the back of the courtroom wearing blue sweatpants and a black leather jacket, a small gold hoop earring quivering in one of her nostrils. She had told the Probation Department that her son was a good boy whose only problem was that he had friends who stole cars and offered him rides, a statement Dorn openly mocked. Now his eyes drill into her, forcing the woman to look down at her lap. He repeats his question, louder. “Is this boy in school or not?”

  “He’s not enrolled,” the mother finally mutters. “He hasn’t been in school for five months.”

  “He’s not enrolled,” Dorn parrots in disgust. “He hasn’t attended for five months—since the day of his arrest in this case. And yet the probation officer reports that the minor is in school and his attendance and grades are good. In other words, the minor just lied. And the probation officer simply took his word without checking. Incredible.”

  After a moment, he says the probation recommendation would be ignored. “Camp is the place for this young man,”
Dorn rules. “And that is where he is going to go.”

  Eric appears stunned—given the ease with which he had fooled the probation officer, he expected to get off, as always. Eric’s mother begins to mutter angrily and incoherently in the back of the courtroom, but Dorn silences her with a stony stare. “The mother obviously has no idea what is going on with this minor. No idea. She is ordered to take at least ten parenting classes.” Now it is Mom’s turn to appear stunned. She whispers to no one in particular, “Can he do that?” A lawyer sitting nearby shushes her before she can make Dorn angrier.

  The judge turns back to Eric. He does not look six months shy of his eighteenth birthday. He looks more bar mitzvah age than voting age, especially with the expression of disbelief now plastered on his face, in place of the studied gangbanger cool he normally tries to affect.

  “Four years have gone by, and you are still on the same path, young man. But this time, you’re going back to camp under Judge Dorn’s supervision. There is going to be a change in your life. Crime is not the answer. Crime will only get you that quick trip to the state penitentiary or the cemetery. I don’t want to see that happen to you. I love you as much as your mother. All right then, good luck, young man.” The bailiff rises and leads the boy out.

  “If I had handled that minor’s case four years ago, when he was thirteen, he might be applying to college now,” Dorn says later, sitting in his chambers during a break. “It is a tragedy that no one thinks it’s worth the court’s time to help a youngster who is assaulting other children or carrying firearms. That is a cry for help. But that boy got none, and now here we are, and here he is, almost eighteen, headed for the state prison next time if he doesn’t straighten up. And it could have been prevented. It’s just another example of the slipshod way some people are used to doing business around here. You see what’s going on in this courtroom, what I’ve been handed to work with. It’s shameful.”