No Matter How Loud I Shout (10 page)

And it is that quaint designation of a shotgun murderer as a “delinquent” that is the source of Peggy's obsession with the case, for to her, Ronald Duncan clearly demonstrates everything wrong with the juvenile justice system. It has nothing to do with facts or evidence or law or coerced confessions. The issue is birthdays.

The murders occurred nine days before Ronald turned sixteen.

“Nine days,” Peggy mutters to herself at least once a week. Each time, she examines the calendar again, hoping, somehow, she has miscalculated. She sent away for a true copy of Ronald's birth certificate, hoping for some discrepancy. It is sitting on her desk back at the office. But the nine days stand. And that inconsequential number of days means Ronald Duncan cannot be tried or imprisoned as an adult.

No matter what Peggy does in court, no matter how compelling the evidence, Ronald Duncan's punishment will never fit his crime. Through luck or design or simple accident of birth, he would remain swathed in the protections of Juvenile Court, which in California meant he would have to go free by age twenty-five. Period. There could be no appeal, no exception: That was the law in California. Are you sixteen or over at the instant the trigger is pulled? Then go to adult court, face life in prison without parole. Fifteen years, 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes when the crime goes down? You're a kid, stay in Juvenile Court. Count the days till you're free.

The arbitrariness of it, the illogic, drove Peggy to distraction, as if there was any cognitive difference between a sixteen-year-old and a kid who was
fifteen years, 356 days old. The fact that in forty-two states of the Union outside of California, Ronald would have been tried as an adult, and would be eligible for a life sentence (or, in a growing number of states, a death sentence), only enraged Peggy—and the juvenile system's growing legion of critics—all the more. Indeed, Ronald's case already had become a rallying cry, cited in Sacramento and in Washington as an example of needed change.
¹

“We have to live with this,” Peggy complains at a staff meeting with her attorneys at the end of the day, “simply because someone, somewhere, decided decades ago, based on absolutely no scientific evidence, that only a sixteen-year-old can commit the crimes of an adult. And that someone who falls nine days short of the mark ought to remain in a system designed to reform wayward kids, not control and punish armed robbers and murderers. It makes no sense. It makes me sick.”

Of course, fretting over Ronald getting a relative wrist slap for murder presupposed he would be convicted, something Peggy could no longer afford to count upon. She had at first considered the case a slam dunk: she had one witness who swore a blood-drenched, shotgun-toting Ronald flagged down his van on the night of the murder; there was a friend from school who swore Ronald admitted killing his employers the day after the murders; and then there was the centerpiece of her case, Ronald's taped confession to the police.

But here was the problem: The same Juvenile Court that could not impose adult penalties on Ronald gave him all the same legal tools an adult enjoys—and imposed on Peggy all the same legal burdens. The case would still have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Ronald's lawyers were even now brutally attacking the credibility of the school chum and the van driver, who they claimed was no unwitting accomplice, but the actual killer. Worse still for Peggy's case, thanks to the bumbling police reference to capital punishment, which juveniles cannot receive in California, the defense had a very good shot at preventing her from using Ronald's confession in court. It could be “suppressed,” to use the legal term—along with Peggy's entire case.

“We spend millions of dollars to prosecute juveniles with taped confessions,” she rants at her staff meeting, trying to instill some fury in her small cadre of burned-out prosecutors left glassy-eyed at the end of each day by the sheer number of kids they prosecute. “We're wasting all this money on trials and proceedings and making sure everyone's rights are observed, even when we know, absolutely, that the kid did it. In fact, we spend
more
when we know they did it. It makes no sense. We've already decided to treat him as a juvenile, God help us. He's already won. Yet we still spend all this time and money proving the case, defending the case, litigating the case. And then there's nothing left over for the kids who really need help, who come in here on a car theft or a burglary and who get sent on their way with nothing more than a pat on the back, go on home to your gangs and screwed-up families. And then we're all so surprised when they come back on another charge. Or when they turn into Ronald Duncan. The system is stupid. Completely stupid.”

Her prosecutors sitting around the file-strewn conference table stare back at their normally reserved boss with eyes wide, but no one says anything. They know she is nearing her breaking point, ready to quit. Most of them have already concluded that the Juvenile Court system is hopeless anyway, and they, too, are simply counting the days until their one-year tours of duty—their juvenile sentences—end, so they can move up the ladder at the DA's office.

After their year is up in this least desirable of all prosecutorial assignments, they know they will have served more time in the juvenile system than most kids do.

·  ·  ·

“God, I hate this job,” Peggy mutters to herself after the meeting, an angry mantra spoken as she stands in her file-choked office, her aspirin bottle empty, her cup of tea long gone cold, head spinning with all that she must do. She rubs her pale face with hands so cold she brings gloves to work with her, though the temperatures have been in the seventies this week. She is tired of the green attorneys who work for her, tired of the defense lawyers who delay and confuse, tired of the cops who don't return her phone calls. Most of all, she hates the chaotic piles of files scattered throughout her office, because no matter how fast she deals with them, no matter how many young predators she puts away, more take their place. She thinks often of quitting. She even wrote the Peace Corps a few years earlier, figuring she could chuck the whole thing for a while in some distant outpost—only to find out she had no qualifications for such volunteer service. All she knows how to do is be a lawyer, the one thing the Peace Corps doesn't need.

Peggy used to have a simpler, cleaner mission in the DA's office, one she vastly preferred: She prosecuted sex crimes. Sexual assaults, molestations, rapes. Half the job was putting abusive, terrible people away, all of them adults, something she could do zealously, with a kind of angry
joy she never quite mustered prosecuting juveniles. The other half of the job was looking out for the shattered victims of these crimes, shepherding them through the ordeal of testifying in court. In many of her cases, the victims—her star witnesses—were children. Peggy found she became as much a social worker as a prosecutor in this job.

One case in particular still haunts her—the face of the little boy she fought to protect carved into her memory. His name was Peter. He was seven when Peggy first met him. His father had regularly sodomized him for years. He had used a garden hose, among other implements of sexual torture. It was so bad, the kid could no longer control his bowels. When he had tried to tell his mother about it, she refused to believe her son, medical evidence be damned.

“You're ruining my life,” Peter's mother told Peggy once the authorities found out and stepped in. Peggy wished she could prosecute her as well as the father.

The first time Peggy came by to interview Peter, he hid under his bed. He answered her questions, but he would not leave this refuge, the same place he would retreat to at night, hoping his daddy would not find him pressed against the wall in the darkness, though Daddy always did. After hours of this, of small talk and gentle coaxing, Peggy finally persuaded Peter to come out from the dust motes and shadows. She did this by sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed and offering him a chair, so he could sit high over her, safe and out of reach. He finally slid from under the bed, climbed onto the chair, and sat. It took three more sessions for him to look directly at her and make sustained eye contact, but Peggy slowly won the boy's trust. They forged a relationship, no small accomplishment when, of the two adults Peter knew best, one used him as a sexual plaything and the other called him a dirty little liar.

With that, Peter told Peggy everything. Nothing could be more chilling, Peggy would later say, than hearing a child recite his daily agonies, a bright, engaging boy whose life should have been full of promise, not hurt, and who, even after all that abuse, expressed no anger, only bewilderment. What had he done wrong? Peter kept asking. Why was he being punished? Nothing, Peggy kept telling him, you did nothing wrong. Her chest would ache when Peter asked that, for she knew he would never believe in his blamelessness. He would always figure he must have been very bad for his dad to do such things to him. All Peggy could do was to promise those things would never happen to him again, to promise to be his lawyer in the courtroom. His protector.

It was a tough case, hinging entirely on Peter's testimony, and when the day of trial arrived, Peggy worried he might not be able to tell his story, that he would see his father sitting at the defendant's table and freeze up. It had happened before in other cases. Molesters banked on it. So as they walked into court together, she kneeled down and whispered, “You know how old I am?”

Peter looked at her quizzically. He knew everything about Peggy. She had told him everything. How could she not? How could she ask him to reveal such unspeakable things without giving of herself? “Yes,” he said slowly, “I know.”

“Well,” Peggy said, “you know how old people forget things sometimes?”

He smiled then, nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

“Well, I just forgot everything you've ever told me.”

He smiled again, a stooped little boy who so often looked pained, but who would do anything to help his friend the prosecutor. “Don't worry, Peggy,” the child said, his brows knitted in genuine concern over her memory loss. “I'll tell you again.” And he patted her shoulder. The memory can still make her cry.

The defense lawyer kept Peter on the stand for two days. The father blew kisses at the boy. But Peter held up through it all, and the jury convicted the father on every count. It was the most satisfying victory of Peggy's legal career.

A few months later, Peggy was struck by a car as she left court, a glancing blow that left her dazed and sitting on the curb, dim faces looming over her like parade floats as people bent to see if she was okay. Through the haze and bewilderment, the only thought that kept going through her mind was the image of Peter's stunned and disbelieving father being led off to lockup. “Everything's okay in the world,” she had muttered to herself as she sat bleeding on that curb. “At least that sonafabitch is still in jail.”

But then there was delay after delay in his sentencing. Peggy got transferred before she could finish the case and another assistant DA took over. Peter's father hired a new lawyer, who claimed his first attorney had been incompetent. A judge granted him a new trial. And the new DA on the case, with no emotional investment, no knowledge of Peter, no experience of seeing that somber little boy hiding under his bed, fingered the file and figured it was too tough a case. He dismissed it. The molester walked free and Peter disappeared into the child welfare system. Peggy never heard what happened to him after that, though she could only pray he did not end up back with that father who tortured him or that mother who blamed
him for ruining her life with lies. At the time, she considered it her low point as a DA.

“But, now,” she says, “my job here in Juvenile Court makes me feel that way every day. Too many cases here end up like that. I can't protect anyone.”

Peggy has moved from fighting for children who have been victimized by crime to fighting to imprison them. The irony is sometimes overwhelming to her. She knows many of the kids she now prosecutes come from backgrounds not all that different from Peter's. All too many were neglected, abused, discarded children before they became criminals. For all she knows, Peter has become a juvenile delinquent himself—he is what the experts call “at risk.”
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Yet she does not confuse her job with social work anymore. She sees herself at too much of a disadvantage to feel merciful toward the kids she now pursues. If she cannot save the Peters of the world, she would have to do her best to restrain the Ronald Duncans. This is what Peggy now believes: Lock the little monsters away. Protect the community at all costs. You only have to see photos like those in the Duncan case so many times before you decide murder is murder no matter the age of the killer, no matter how sad the story might be, no matter how much you yearn to help that kid hiding under the bed—because once you start excusing one of them, you can find reasons to give them all a break. That is the stark set of rules Peggy uneasily forces herself to live by every day. And if Judge Dorn or anyone else refuses to see that and to abide by the ever harsher laws and policies being put into place here, it is Peggy Beckstrand's job to take them down.

·  ·  ·

Peggy would have liked to concentrate on the crumbling case of
People
v.
Duncan
to the exclusion of all else, but no Juvenile Court prosecutor, least of all a DIC, a deputy in charge, could enjoy that luxury. She had her prosecutors to supervise, filing decisions to make, seemingly endless meetings to attend, and committees to chair. The distractions never stopped, and they were about to double.

After settling the matter of Ronald Duncan's trial date, Peggy Beckstrand's next stop is the hallway outside the two upstairs courtrooms. There is a niche next to the staircase here, with several wooden benches and relative quiet, and it is here that much of the court's business is decided. Here prosecutors talk to their witnesses for the first time, just minutes before trial, only then finding out if their cases are strong or weak—or if a key witness hasn't bothered to show up, a constant problem in Juvenile Court.
Defense attorneys huddle on the next bench with their small clients or their families, then try to cut plea bargains with the DA on the case. This slapdash process, in which two young, opposing attorneys—most of them a year or two out of law school—sit down on a bench with a pile of files and dispense with half a court docket, ends up deciding more about a troubled kid's future than any judge or formal court proceeding.
³
It is ugly and quick, a convenience for the system rather than a reliable means of healing our youth or pursuing justice. It happens with kids and families watching, standing off to the side, waiting for what amounts to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on the future of a child.