No Matter How Loud I Shout Page 16

  Dorn looks up from his desk, his round, jowly face almost cherubic. “But, then, that’s why I’m here. To do something about it.”

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  Roosevelt Dorn’s message is simple: The Juvenile Court is the most important facet of the American justice system. The problem is, most people don’t know it.

  “But they will,” Dorn promises. “The word is going out. I shall see to that.”

  Look at it this way, the judge says, leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled, delivering a lecture he has honed and practiced inside court and out. Virtually every adult with a criminal record, virtually every inmate in state prison, virtually every murderer on death row, started their criminal career in the Juvenile Court. Whatever was done with them at that time, way back before they became serious, violent offenders—way back when they were in the Juvenile Court—obviously didn’t work. Why? “Because our priorities are backwards,” he says, leaning back in his chair, warming to the subject. That is why crime is rampant, why violent juvenile offenses have climbed 50 percent between 1987 and 1991—double the increase among adults—and why the number of juveniles arrested for murder climbed 85 percent in those same years, four times the adult increase. This, Dorn believes, is directly attributable to the juvenile justice system’s focus on the worst offenders, while the first-time delinquents get no attention at all.

  “Instead of spending the time and the money and the manpower on the front end, when children first transgress—and when they can be helped and guided and set straight—we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.” Dorn assumes an expression of extreme disgust at this point. “And then you get the hue and cry from the politicians that we must try children as adults in order to fight crime, sixteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds, who knows where it will stop? When the fact of the matter is, the politicians have never committed the resources we need to stop crime in its tracks at the juvenile level, where it starts.”

  He points to the recent study of the court by the Probation Department—the infamous “Sixteen Percent Study” that found such high failure rates and futility, and showing that the most violent and intransigent 16 percent of juvenile offenders was taking up the lion’s share of the system’s time and energy. That’s all wrong, Dorn says. And making the system even harsher will make things worse, not better.

  “Instead of spending billions of dollars on more and more prison cells for adults, which is bankrupting our nation, we could spend a fraction of that amount here, with these minors, and cut crime in half. Every dollar spent here would save ten dollars down the line in prison costs, there is no doubt about that. Yet, Juvenile Court remains the unwanted stepchild of the system. They’re talking about doing away with it entirely now, which would be a travesty. A disaster. Well, I intend to educate people about what this system is really about, and what it can do. I am the squeaky wheel. I will be heard!”

  Which brings Dorn to his other main theme: openness. The doors to Juvenile Court must be thrown open to the public, sweeping aside the traditional confidentiality that protects the mediocrity and failure from public view. “The public has no idea how important this court is, or the shocking, deplorable conditions that exist in these courthouses. Or, with the right judge and the right program, how well this court can succeed. I want to educate them.”4

  Because he is certain that working with kids is the justice system’s most crucial task, Dorn feels intense bitterness toward most of his judicial colleagues, who, as a group, consider Juvenile Court a low-prestige assignment, even a punishment. The assignments most prized by his brethren on the bench lie far away in the white-collar world of the civil courts, where the pace can be more sedate, the clients, especially the corporate ones, tend to be clean and well pressed, the fight is always about money, usually lots of it, and a judge can easily slide off the bench and into the partnership track at some major LA law firm that knows the value of having a former jurist on the payroll. That is where most of the judicial stars want to be, as far removed from the realities of Thurgood Marshall Branch as they can get. They shun Dorn’s gritty domain, which is why there are only eight Superior Court judges filling Juvenile Court’s twenty-eight delinquency courtrooms, with the slack taken up by appointed commissioners and referees, lawyers who assume the duties of judges to fill temporary shortages that are, in truth, permanent.

  Some of the eight judges on the Juvenile Court bench are highly regarded and hardworking, but the verdict is less than flattering on a few of the others. Two have been criticized by lawyers for years for their less than energetic work habits, one of them infamous for his four-hour workdays, constant continuances of virtually every case before him, and his refusal to try more than one case a day. (By contrast, Dorn regularly holds ten or more trials in a single day, plus thirty or forty other matters—sentencings, guilty pleas, arraignments.) Because there is no effective way to discipline judges—like feudal lords, no one can tell them what to do within their own courtroom fiefdoms—such judges remained unchastised, except when lawyers refuse en masse to practice before them, the practice known as “papering the judge” because of the blanket of legal motions that must be filed to remove him or her from cases. The system is so jammed already that such a move is to the Juvenile Courts what blocking a lane on a freeway is to rush hour traffic: The effect is paralyzing. Sometimes this leads to a change in personnel, a transfer of judges from one outpost to another. Sometimes it just makes a mess.

  The perception of Juvenile Court as an undesirable assignment doesn’t stop at the bench. Some defense lawyers on the appointment list are little more than warm bodies occupying a chair while their clients admit to the charges. In most cases, the only written defense motions in the file are bills to the county for legal fees. These court-appointed lawyers are paid far less than their adult court counterparts, and the level of competency and experience among many can be shockingly low. O. J. Simpson’s lawyers do not walk these halls, nor do any of Los Angeles’s other legal luminaries. (Such lawyers would never work for the meager fees offered by the court—forty-five dollars an hour with a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cap, even on first-degree murder cases, compared to a sixty-thousand-dollar cap on murder cases in adult court.) Instead, Dorn and the other juvenile judges and commissioners find themselves scolding attorneys in open court for their incompetence and lack of preparation—then appointing them again, for lack of any alternative.

  At the same time, the DA’s Office, which has a cadre of investigators, forensic experts, witness coordinators, and victim counselors assigned to adult court, provides no such help to its embattled juvenile prosecutors or the crime victims who troop in and out of court each day—another bald statement of the system’s priorities. High-tech tests of hair, blood, and DNA so crucial in adult court have never been employed in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—not because they aren’t needed, but because the system cannot afford to pay for them. Except for the deputies in charge of each juvenile office, the least experienced prosecutors, sometimes only one year out of law school, often end up staffing Juvenile Court, trying murder cases and making decisions about kids’ futures. Many are skilled and dedicated, but it takes years of trial work in adult court before a prosecutor is allowed to handle a murder case there. Juvenile Court, however, is as much a training ground as a court of law, where errors are more easily forgiven, and problem lawyers more easily hidden from sight.

  The same weaknesses hold true for the Probation Department, the police, every agency that works in the juvenile system—it is an afterthought, Dorn gripes.

  “But I have the answer to these problems. I can’t change the whole system—not yet, at any rate—but I can change how things work in my courtroom. Call it a pilot project, call it whatever you want. But the change starts here. And if it works, then we can expand it systemwide. But there will be change in this courthouse. Be assured of that.”

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  Judge Dorn’s main engine of change, it soon becomes apparent, is hauling more kids into court more quickly for more minor offenses.

  “We must get to these minors as early as possible,” he tells probation officers, prosecutors, parents—whoever will listen. He has his staff send notices out to churches, counseling agencies, police departments—every agency that has contact with troubled and troubling children—telling them that Judge Dorn is back on the bench in Inglewood, and that open court is back in session. He distributes press releases, appears on radio talk shows, grants newspaper interviews, speaks to civic organizations, getting this message out: Parents who have lost control of their kids and have nowhere else to turn can come to the front of the line in Department 240, no questions asked. The status offense is back, and Judge Dorn has a new twist that puts some teeth back in the law, he promises.

  The judge knows that it will take time to restore the line of parents and kids trooping to his door that made him famous during his first tour of duty in Juvenile Court in the 1980s, but he will not just sit back and wait for them to start trickling in. His next point of attack is to take on the constant problem of dismissed cases in Juvenile Court—the daily discovery that witnesses are absent and, therefore, cases cannot be proved. Many of these dismissals involve first-time, minor offenders, the very kids Dorn most wants to save, and though myriad reasons exist for this constant and shockingly immense problem, Dorn’s fury falls squarely on the District Attorney’s Office, which has the legal responsibility of bringing cases to trial.

  Not long after the pizza-robbery dismissal, Dorn has to dismiss charges against a fifteen-year-old named Rafi who shoplifted a Levi’s shirt from a department store, then, once arrested, was found to be carrying live ammunition in his backpack. The case had been pending for six months, but the DA’s Office had never subpoenaed the policemen who arrested Rafi or the store security guards who saw the boy and a friend stuff the shirt into his backpack.

  Deputy DA Sisman did not contact any witnesses until Rafi was sitting in the courtroom on the day of trial. The subpoenas generated by his office in this case, as in others, were never served. The prosecutor’s attempt to remedy this situation consists of using a courtroom phone to call the department store security office, where no one answers. He then announces, “People are unable to proceed.” The boy grins, and Dorn has to boot the case.

  “But Judge,” Rafi’s mother pleads, not understanding how this could happen. “He’s not going to school now. He’s not doing anything but watching the cable. I feel he does need some kind of supervision. He’s not doing anything, and he won’t listen to me.”

  Dorn gives Sisman an icy look, then says, “Mother, at this moment, I can’t do anything because the district attorney has not brought its witnesses into court. I assume they’ll refile. I can’t do anything until he’s under the jurisdiction of this court. . . . Obviously, you need help with this young man, but I’m sorry to say I can’t give it to you.”

  As the boy gives his mother a hateful look, then saunters from the room, Dorn instructs his probation officer to give Rafi’s mother some do-it-yourself forms for charging her own son with a status offense, part of Dorn’s new program of change. For now, though, forms are all the court has to offer the mother, a legal secretary who lives alone with her son and who doesn’t understand what is happening to her boy.

  Meanwhile, Sisman quietly fills out a disposition report on the case and checks a box at the bottom that says “No further action,” effectively killing the case. There will be no refiling. Rafi’s mother is on her own.

  “If this were happening in adult court, Mr. Sussman”—Dorn occasionally mispronounces prosecutor Sisman’s name, and it is not entirely clear this is accidental—“heads would be rolling. What is happening in your office?”

  Sisman says there are reasons for the dismissal problems. Adult DAs have witness coordinators to keep track of subpoenas and witness lists; Juvenile Court DAs have to press overburdened secretaries into service to type subpoenas, in addition to all their other duties, and once typed, the sheriff’s department may or may not get around to serving them in time. About a third of the notices to appear in court are delivered after the court date or are not delivered at all. Those that do get notice that they must appear in court are often treated shabbily, even when they are the victims of crime, subject to the delaying game some defense lawyers play. With enough delays and inconvenience, witnesses stop coming, and defense attorneys win a dismissal of charges. Hundreds of cases are dismissed this way every month in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—twenty-five in Inglewood alone in just two weeks. Kids who are dangerous, and kids who need help, walk free, unrestrained, unsupervised.

  The worst of these dismissals is haunting Peggy Beckstrand’s office this week, a kid named Norvin, fourteen and out of control, who was arrested months earlier for shooting an LAPD officer. Charged with attempted murder, the kid waited in Juvenile Hall while his lawyer requested repeated postponements until, finally, the two crucial witnesses in the case—two policemen—decided to go forward with their plans for a vacation cruise abroad. They were to be gone when the next trial date came up, but they figured it didn’t matter, there would be another delay anyway. After all, it was only Juvenile Court.

  Norvin’s public defender, who had indeed been planning on another postponement, saw the two cops had not come to court and insisted on an immediate trial. The DA was forced to dismiss the case, and, though the charges were refiled immediately, Juvenile Court rules require kids be released from detention in every refiled case—even when a kid is charged with a violent offense. Even a kid like Norvin, whose stated ambition—after his arrest—was to kill a cop.

  Within a week of his release, Norvin was rearrested for participating in a murder. A seventeen-year-old boy who passed him on the street made the mistake of looking at Norvin and his friend with something less than admiration, and they decided he had to die for it. A similar scenario in adult court would have led to public outcry, investigations, firings. In Juvenile Court, the case caused not a ripple. No one outside the system knew about it.

  A few minutes after Rafi’s departure, Dorn has to dismiss yet another case, this one against a gangbanger accused in three armed robberies. Again, none of the eyewitnesses were subpoenaed in what should have been an open-and-shut case. Sisman tried to put his case on anyway, but the one witness he managed to get into court was the wrong witness—he could not identify the boy on trial. Dorn’s hands are tied, and he must watch the boy leave the courtroom, free and clear. The judge is beside himself.

  “I don’t know what’s happening in your office, but something has got to change,” the judge says, loud enough to make everyone in the courtroom drop what they are doing and stare. Sisman starts to protest that he is helpless when witnesses fail to show up as scheduled, but Dorn cuts him off. “What’s happening in this courtroom is a travesty. A travesty for these minors, and a travesty for the People. It is unfair to minors, to parents, and to our citizens. Case after case has been dismissed because the People cannot proceed. I’ve had two today already, and the day isn’t over yet. . . . Your office is programming these children for the cemetery or the penitentiary. You are telling them it’s all right to break the law.”

  “We are having trouble serving subpoenas,” Sisman says mildly.

  “I’ll put a call into Garcetti,” Dorn rails, angered further by the prosecutor’s casual response, referring to the elected District Attorney, Gil Garcetti. “I’ll go to the press. Someone in the DA’s Office isn’t taking care of business. . . . This rarely happens downtown. It happens here all the time.”

  Another prosecutor waiting for his case to come up, Kevin Yorn, from the DA’s special hard-core gang unit, can’t resist standing up to try to defend his office’s reputation. “I disagree with your assessment—” he starts to say, but Dorn cuts him off, waving his right hand as if delivering a karate chop.

  “I did not make my state
ment for you to agree or disagree with me,” Dorn says in a low, menacing voice. “The fact is that it is happening. I can’t believe you can’t subpoena witnesses in Inglewood, but you can downtown. This court needs to be taken just as seriously as adult court. More so.”

  A moment later, he tells his clerk to call Peggy Beckstrand. “I want her in my chambers tomorrow morning. We are going to do something about these dismissals, or I’ll call a press conference. This travesty will end, one way or another.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Juggling Act

  PEGGY is in trouble.

  It is time to go to court to begin the Ronald Duncan murder trial. She has prepared obsessively for this day. Last night, she dragged a rocking chair and a blanket into the bathroom, with all her papers and files, so as not to disturb her husband, Steven, a senior prosecutor in adult court downtown. He is intimately familiar with the long hours and obsessions that come with the job. But even he has not seen his wife so immersed in a case before. He found her still in the bathroom at six the next morning, stiff and shivering in her sleep. She had been pasting photos onto poster board for a courtroom exhibit—the deputy in charge of an entire DA’s Office reduced to working with Elmer’s Glue-All and Magic Markers on the hard tiles of her bathroom floor, because in Juvenile, prosecutors either make their own courtroom visual aids on their own time, or they do without. And Peggy is not one to do without.

  Even so, even after all the sleepless hours and preparation and second-guessing, she believes her case to be in disarray. The sheriff’s investigators who busted Ronald have dodged her phone calls, she says, too busy, they say, with “real”—that is, adult—cases. A crucial witness, Ronald’s friend Marvin, is still missing. Ronald’s new, privately retained lawyer has convinced her that the all-important taped confession to the police, concrete proof of Ronald’s guilt, likely will be tossed out on a technicality. To fill the resulting gaping hole in her case, Peggy now must consider granting legal immunity to a young man named Jason Gueringer, who says he happened upon a blood-drenched Ronald on the night of the murder and gave him a ride home, making him an accomplice after the fact, a felony, though a relatively minor one for which he had never been arrested. Peggy had long resisted offering Jason immunity for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility that Jason might be a liar—that he might be an accomplice to the murder itself, not a mere witness, and had been holding back all this time. Officially, he remains a suspect in the killing, which is why he was never charged with the lesser crime. With the confession, she didn’t need him. Now. . . .