No Matter How Loud I Shout Read online

  CALL the calendar,” Judge Roosevelt Dorn intones at exactly 8:30, the first words he utters each morning after climbing the bench and settling into his huge leather chair, the day’s files spread out before him like the tarot. Few Juvenile Court judges (or adult court judges, for that matter) in Los Angeles start so punctually, and Dorn’s recent arrival in Inglewood has shaken the courthouse crowd from its previously torpid pace. The murmur of a dozen separate conversations in the courtroom gallery evaporates. The bailiff begins reading the names of the cases to be heard that day, one by one, checking off a box on his list every time a boy or girl answers Present.

  The courtroom is jammed, as it is every morning, standing room only, a constant rustling of coats, of settling into lumpy chairs, of heads poking in the door wondering if this is where they should be. Every tenth name or so, no one responds, and Dorn immediately orders an arrest warrant issued. Dorn’s predecessor was not so harsh, the defense attorneys grumble to themselves. But Dorn is a stickler for punctuality, and for many of the kids, this will be the first time anyone has expected them to be on time for anything. If the child shows up later in the day (as opposed to blowing off the hearing entirely, which happens in about one in ten Juvenile Court cases),2 he or she will be taken into custody and locked up for a few hours, until the judge feels his message has been conveyed. “You’ll not come late to Judge Dorn’s courtroom again,” he says to one of these latecomers, accused of emblazoning his spray-painted “tag” on several freeway overpasses.

  “Yes,” one attorney in the audience whispers to a colleague. “Next time he’ll know not to show up at all.” The lawyer starts to snicker, then falls silent and shifts uncomfortably when Dorn, who could not possibly have heard the remark, flicks a cold, prescient glance in the lawyer’s direction, the teacher who can always detect the spitball’s origin, even with back turned.

  When the calendar call is through, the procession of cases begins in earnest. Lawyers line up in what once was a jury box (juveniles do not get trials before their peers, for obvious reasons), and compete with one another to have their cases called first, waiting to leap up and announce “Ready!” before anyone else, a kind of verbal elbowing to the head of the line. It is childish and raucous and the lawyers who get shoved aside pout and complain. Hearings for the kids in custody are supposed to have priority, but because the Probation Department is frequently tardy with both its buses and its intake reports—a child’s entry into the system, the crucial passport to delinquency—this rule is often broken. Newly charged children are arraigned, their trial dates set. Older cases go to trial or, more often, get delayed, dismissed, or resolved through a plea bargain negotiated in the hallway, in which case the witnesses who wait through the morning are sent on their way, their days wasted for nothing. Perhaps they’ll return for the next court date. Perhaps not.

  “Call the first case,” Dorn says, then closes his eyes for a moment. A very thin boy with thick spectacles is escorted from the lockup in back of the courtroom to the defense table. He sits with legs dangling from his chair, tapping the toes of his black, laceless Juvenile Hall–issue sneakers together in a slow fidget, gazing mournfully at the various players—the public defender shuffling papers for the forty-two cases she has to handle that morning, the assistant district attorney whispering to a witness in another case, the judge with his glasses now perched up on his forehead so he can scrub at his face with the palms of his hands. Dorn seems to be trying to massage away the weariness he feels from an early-morning start on the telephone, wrangling with county bureaucrats for a fresh paint job and an asbestos check for his ancient courthouse. The dingy courtroom with its cracked linoleum and sighing water cooler is still filled with parents, children, babies scrabbling and being shushed, surly teenagers with enormously baggy pants and tattoos snaking across their knuckles or up their arms, police officers sitting with arms crossed, knowing they will wait all day to testify in cases that will almost certainly be continued to another day, crime victims warily eyeing the juveniles accused of victimizing them. During a lull in the everyday din, when the cacophony of voices in the hallway and the courthouse’s booming public address system briefly fall silent, you can hear the faint sandpaper sound of the dry skin of the judge’s hands against his face. The boy begins to tap his sneakers together in syncopation with the rubbing. No one looks at him, speaks to him, or even seems to recognize that he is present, except for the khaki-uniformed bailiff hovering nearby, guarding against escape, or worse.

  The boy is before Dorn for arraignment, his first appearance in court, a formulaic and purposely uneventful ritual. The hearing consists of a brief reading of the charges and an even briefer discussion of the contents of the court’s juvenile intake form, a notoriously superficial, sometimes inaccurate two-page sheet that represents the system’s sum total of knowledge about a child as he enters the court process for the first time. This is what the intake officers on duty at Juvenile Hall and in some police stations produce after each delinquency case is opened. With this, the judge must decide what to do with the child while the case slowly runs its course.

  “It’s a 245, Your Honor,” the probation officer assigned to Dorn’s courtroom informs the judge, referring to California Penal Code Section 245, assault with a deadly weapon or instrument. Tired of a bully at school, this skinny boy smashed a pipe over his tormentor’s head. Then, still raging, he allegedly turned on a teacher before he was restrained. It is the boy’s fourth such violent outburst in recent months, though the only one that caused major injury. The court and its investigative arm, the Probation Department, declined to act in the three previous incidents. Money and manpower is too scant to give much attention to “minor” offenses, so the system waits for someone to be seriously hurt before heaving into motion like an aged zoo lion. The boy is a twelve-year-old-bundle of anger.

  Judge Dorn reads the brief summary available to him. It seems the boy once was an enthusiastic student, but a troubled home, the departure of his father, a mother who is more interested in dating than in raising an adolescent, have all taken their toll. Judge Dorn can see the boy needs help, stability, a caring guardian. He knows the biggest predictors of juvenile delinquency are a one-parent home and a failed educational experience. Studies of juvenile delinquents have confirmed this for years, as if he needed researchers and academics to tell him what he observes every day sitting on the bench: Virtually every delinquent he sees falls into one or both of these categories. But while the case is pending, the law—the boy’s rights of due process—bar Dorn from doing much of anything, unless the public defender pleads him guilty on the spot. But the public defenders have a policy against doing this—first they must try to disprove or at least delay the charges. They say they are lawyers, not social workers, and their first duty is to attempt to win an acquittal—even when, strictly speaking, getting their clients off may not be in the kids’ best interest. Their hard line in attempting to disprove every allegation and to exploit every legal technicality is what provokes the prosecution’s lock-the-monsters-away hard line, and vice versa. And so, Dorn is left with but two options: He can release the “Pipe Kid,” as a prosecutor referred to the boy in the hallway, and let him go home with his parents, or he can send him back to Juvenile Hall during the months it will take to resolve his case, on the theory that the boy is too dangerous to be free. The hall is just a temporary holding facility (though the new era of serious violent juvenile crime, combined with court backlogs, have made it far less temporary than originally intended, with stays now lasting months and even years instead of days or weeks). Services for the emotionally disturbed kids housed in the hall are minimal at best, consisting mainly of prescription drugs dispensed every night before bed, which have the additional benefit, to the staff, of making troublesome kids more manageable. The Pipe Kid cuts such a pathetic figure that Dorn is leaning toward sending him home instead, but then the mother brings him up short.

  “I can’t have him at home anymore,” she i
nforms the court, the large gold earring in her nose quivering as she speaks, her voice high and petulant. Her boyfriend sits next to her in his gray Budweiser T-shirt, staring at his hands folded across an ample fold of belly. Mother looks barely older than her son. “He won’t listen,” she fumes. “I just can’t have him now.”

  The boy’s head seems to turtle into his shoulders as she speaks, so eager is he to disappear. Someone in the audience clucks her tongue, and the mother glares in the direction it came from, though she can’t quite locate the source of the disapproval. The judge nods without looking at her or the boy. “For the protection and rehabilitation of the minor, and for the protection of society, the minor is ordered detained,” he announces, using that singsong voice people involuntarily adopt when they repeat the same phrase over and over, long past hearing the words. Then he returns to studying files at his bench and rubbing his face. The mother nods in satisfaction.

  “We call kids like this NFC,” a ponytailed narcotics investigator whispers to another onlooker in the courtroom gallery. “I see ’em all the time. You take a look at what they’re doin’, who their parents are, and you know: This poor kid’s NFC. No fuckin’ chance.”

  Three minutes after entering the courtroom, without ever uttering a word, without interrupting the DA’s conversation with his witness or the defense attorney’s shuffling of files, the boy leaves, escorted back to the holding tank. No one spoke with him or acknowledged his presence. There is a deliberately fostered anonymity to this, furthered by the practice of never calling the child by name, even as he or she sits mutely in court, life laid open for legal dissection. In Juvenile Court, a child is referred to simply as “the minor.”3

  Small, slumped, confused, the minor avoids the eyes of the mother who doesn’t want him as he rises to leave. Before he can exit with the bailiff, Judge Dorn has called the name of the next case on the docket. A fifteen-year-old girl, visibly pregnant, rises in the audience and takes the chair at the defense table, the seat still warm. Dorn sighs and studies the file.

  This is what most Juvenile Court hearings look like: Little substance, much legal ritual, all flow control—the judge sits at his bench like an air-traffic controller, keeping things moving. It was not always this way, but the Supreme Court’s landmark Gault decision has transformed Juvenile Court from an informal forum on children into a formal court of law where the focus is more on procedures and legal technicalities than on the welfare of children and the protection of society.

  A peek into the future: Six months will pass before the Pipe Kid will see his case resolved, an eternity for a twelve-year-old. He will celebrate his thirteenth birthday in lockup, his trial postponed and rescheduled three times. The public defender representing him will play Juvenile Court’s delaying game, hoping one of the People’s main witnesses—the victim or the investigating officer—will fail to show up one morning, in which case the charges must be dismissed, a common occurrence here. The tactic will fail this time, though; the witnesses will show up for the third time, only to be told they can go home for good: The boy will finally plead guilty. Then he will be shuffled off to the foster home Dorn would have sent him to right away had the law permitted it. But by now, Pipe Kid is so angry at the system that he runs away after a few weeks and commits another assault and a robbery, and the process must start over again. This is the futile pattern that absorbs so much energy and time in Juvenile Court.

  Perhaps more than anything else, time is the enemy here. Every day, Dorn’s docket, like most juvenile judges’, is swollen by a workload many times greater than judges in adult court deign to tolerate—fifty or sixty cases a day is not unusual. No one judge can deal meaningfully with such a tidal flow of human tragedy—on a busy day, and given the ninety-minute lunches and frequent breaks most judges take, the average time left per kid falls between four and five minutes.

  On this day, Judge Dorn will see a total of thirty-two kids—four of them charged with armed robbery, one with attempted murder, two assaults with a deadly weapon, seven children charged with graffiti vandalism, four auto thefts, four petty thefts, three probation revocations, one case of witness intimidation, one case of resisting arrest, one disorderly conduct, three batteries, one concealed weapon charge, and one girl fighting transfer to adult court for her crimes. The kids facing these charges range in age from twelve to seventeen. By the end of the day, Dorn will have dismissed three cases because the People were unable to proceed when witnesses failed to show up (one of the missing was a police officer), sent three kids home on probation, sent another to a foster home, placed four more in the county-run detention camps, refused two recommendations to send kids to the California Youth Authority prison system, accepted four plea bargains, held one full-blown trial, continued ten other cases to various dates the following month, and arraigned three girls and two boys on newly filed charges. In one morning—a rather light one by Juvenile Court standards—Dorn has resolved more cases than most adult courts in Los Angeles do in a week.

  And he is just one judge in a vast system. Taken as a whole, the ten branches of Los Angeles Juvenile Court, in twenty-eight courtrooms, each a separate fiefdom with different standards, different philosophies, and wildly different outcomes for similar cases, will handle nearly eleven hundred delinquency hearings of one kind or another this day. The most common order issued in Juvenile Court during this tidal flow of hearings is a postponement, putting off action until another day, creating months of delays in a system that is supposed to arrest the downward spiral of young people with the speed and efficiency of a hospital emergency room. But there is one courtroom that, more often than not, avoids becoming an assembly line, one of the few in Juvenile Court in which postponements do not outnumber other orders from the bench: Judge Roosevelt Dorn’s.

  · · ·

  On his first day back in Juvenile Court, Judge Dorn banged on the courthouse door for a full minute before someone finally let him in. The hapless marshal who came to unlock the steel door shortly before 8:00 A.M. on this first business day of the new year had to stand there in silence as the diminutive, portly man in the gray business suit chewed him out for not having the building open on time. No one who worked in this particular branch of Juvenile Court had ever laid eyes on a judge this early in the morning before, but Dorn would brook no excuses.

  “Things are going to change from this day forward,” he bellowed, then stormed upstairs to inspect his new courtroom. The marshal could hear the judge’s voice booming as he ascended the stairs, speaking aloud to no one in particular. “My God, the condition of this courthouse is shameful. Shameful!” A few minutes later, the court administrator was scurrying in Dorn’s wake, peering into graffiti-scarred bathrooms and around grimy corners, taking notes as the judge pointed out what needed to be painted, moved, removed, waxed, and otherwise rendered tolerable by Dorn’s unyielding standards.

  “There may be a budget problem with some of these things,” the administrator meekly suggested. The courthouse had been deteriorating for years without effort or care from the county. This place had not been a priority in an era of tax cuts and budget crises.

  “I don’t want to hear about budgets,” Dorn shouted. “This is where young people come for justice. This is where we must show them we care. And this building looks like a place where nobody cares what happens inside! Well, that, my friend, is going to change.”

  A demanding dictator who does things his way only, Dorn arrived with a reputation for compassion married to unrelenting harshness, preaching love for his juvenile charges in his huge orator’s voice one moment, then sentencing them to long stays in Juvenile Hall for minor infractions. “You belong to Judge Dorn, now,” he was fond of saying with an ominous chuckle. Those who remembered his last tour of duty in Juvenile five years earlier recalled the surliest kids walking out of his courtroom saying, Yes, sir, and Thank you, sir, even as they were locked up for offenses the other judges routinely dismissed. Dorn once revoked a boy’s probation and sent hi
m to boot camp for six months for refusing his mother’s order to take out the trash. “I’m putting you back in control, Mother,” he said, eyes locked on the stunned teenager before him. “Next time, if you tell him to take out the garbage, he had better jump.”

  In years past, Dorn’s high-handed ways and harsh sentences provoked the Public Defender’s Office so thoroughly that its lawyers flatly refused to try cases in front of him, creating a huge backlog in Juvenile Court. At the same time, his reluctance to sentence delinquents to the Youth Authority—California’s problem-plagued prison system for juveniles—and his even greater abhorrence of seeing children tried as adults made him almost as unpopular in the District Attorney’s Office. When his court calendar dried up for lack of attorneys willing to practice before him, Dorn invoked a little-used provision of state law and declared “open court,” inviting any parents having trouble with their children to bring them in themselves, so he could set things right.

  And desperate parents came in droves, not just from the area his courthouse served, but from all over Los Angeles. Judge Dorn made their children wards of the court, his rulings of questionable legal merit but his paternal domination welcome to mothers and fathers with nowhere else to turn. Teachers in some of LA’s toughest schools swore Judge Dorn’s kids did better than any other problem students. In the end, though, Dorn was finally dragged screaming to a new assignment in adult court downtown, with critics charging improprieties, conflicts of interest, and a tendency to appoint a favored few defense attorneys who saw things his way. Dorn denied doing anything wrong besides forcing bureaucrats to roll up their sleeves, work a full day, and save some kids in the process, and he waged a four-year battle to return to the branch of Juvenile Court he once ruled in Inglewood. Adult court’s purpose was to warehouse criminals, he complained, but in Juvenile Court, lives could still be changed for the better.