No Matter How Loud I Shout (17 page)

Deputy DA Sisman, meanwhile, slips out of the room at his first opportunity and crosses the street to his office, to complain to Peggy and to ask permission to appeal the ruling. Dorn watches him go, but he is unworried, confident in his vision of justice. He congratulates Angela Oh for a job well done, wearing a sly smile, as if the two of them are sharing a secret.

But the judge seems to avoid meeting the eyes of a large, forlorn man standing shell-shocked in the back of the courtroom—a man who has a very different opinion about the gravity of being robbed at gunpoint, a man who will never again feel secure in his neighborhood and whose daughters still cry when he leaves the house.

Instead, Judge Dorn grabs a file and says, “Call the next case,” then, a moment later, as a new set of attorneys step forward to begin the ritual anew, the bailiff asks the victim of John Sloan's armed robbery to please leave the room while court is in session.

·  ·  ·

“God, that makes me furious,” Peggy Beckstrand says when Sisman briefs her a short time later. “What's he saying, that just because armed robberies are a dime a dozen, it's okay? We're going to say it's acceptable behavior now for a kid to stick a gun in someone's face and threaten their life, because that's what everyone's doing? Can you believe a judge actually said that?”

She is up and pacing now, voice raised, hands waving, already framing in her mind the legal issues at stake. “There's no way we can lose an
appeal on this. We've got to get a transcript.” Then she looks hard at her prosecutor, and asks one question in a slower, more subdued voice. “You requested a stay, right?”

Suddenly, Sisman looks away, and Peggy senses this case is not going to be appealed successfully after all. She sounds like an exasperated schoolteacher lecturing a wayward student when she says, “Hyman, we just had a meeting about this, about making a proper record at a fitness hearing. We knew this was going to come up with Dorn. Tell me you asked for a stay.”

After a silence, Sisman says, “No, I didn't. The minor pleaded to the 211.”

“You let him plead?” Peggy is astonished. This is what Dorn must have been smiling about in court—he knew the prosecutor had made a fundamental error that left the ruling impregnable, no matter the legalities. “You didn't object?”

Sisman shakes his head. Unlike a defendant's broad right to appeal anything and everything, prosecutors have a small window of opportunity to try to overturn a trial court's unfavorable rulings. Sisman needed to stand up immediately and request a stay of all proceedings, which Dorn would have been compelled to grant. But by participating in John's guilty plea, Sisman gave up that opportunity. John's lawyer had cleverly locked in his conviction as a juvenile by immediately copping to the charge while Sisman was still reeling from Dorn's decision—and before any appeal could wrest jurisdiction away from the Juvenile Court. Trying him as an adult now for the same crime would constitute unlawful double jeopardy. Dorn and the defense attorney had outfoxed the prosecutor.

“Coming to me now,” Peggy says, “is like saying in adult court, the jury acquitted him, let's appeal.”

They discuss it further, and Peggy decides to pass the case on to the DA's appellate section to see if there is some way around this hurdle, but she knows it is hopeless. Sisman trudges out, dispirited—and under orders to reread his DA's manual, which clearly explains what he should have done in court that day. Even as other kids that same day were handed over to adult court on identically serious charges, John Sloan was guaranteed a far easier ride. Judge Dorn's perception of what was right had won out over what the statutes dictate.
⁶

And with that, the war between the DA and the Juvenile Court judge had begun in earnest.

George Trevino clasps his hands behind his back as if they are bound by invisible handcuffs—the required posture for detainees in Juvenile Court—and trudges ahead of the bailiff, walking from the stuffy, crowded holding cell he knew too well to the courtroom he had seen far too many times. In that moment, he would give just about anything to trade places with someone like John Sloan, to have had the same opportunities, the home, the family. Most of all his family.

George spends much of his downtime—there is a lot of it in Juvenile Hall—trying to imagine what that would be like, having a mom and dad and his own bed that could never be taken away. Even as he walks that dismal hallway with its lumpy linoleum and odor of sweat and disinfectant—surroundings so familiar to him he had come to notice their absence more than their presence—he turns his thoughts once more to the sanctuary of What if?

What if he had never been a 300 kid? George used to ask God why he had to live with that unlucky designation, praying for deliverance, but that had been a long time ago. As the years passed, he tells me, huge blocks of his early childhood had melted from his memory. He now could no longer remember being small or playing with toys, or even if he ever had any toys to play with. His mother's face, his brother and sister—all had slipped into some black hole in his head. Thinking about that is too painful. The idea
that your family could disappear, not just in reality, but inside you, too, was paralyzing. If he let it consume him, he would just sit and weep for hours. So he fills the vacuum with daydreams instead, about having a home with a mother and father in it, people who made sure he was dressed and fed, who praised him when he did something well, yelled at him when he was bad. As he emerges from the holding tank door to stand blinking in the courtroom, George wonders what it would be like to have a mom or dad who cared enough about him to yell. Strange, George thinks, that he would crave such a thing, but he did. Most kids didn't know the riches they had. George knew.

At age six, when a policeman found him abandoned in the filthy Dodge van that was his only home, his mother a fugitive later imprisoned for manslaughter, George Trevino became a “300 kid.” That's what they called him, right there in court, one of those unintentionally dehumanizing verbal shorthands so common in the juvenile system. As he walked into court today, he heard the judge and the probation officer discussing his case in hushed voices. “Oh, he was in the 300 system before this happened,” the judge said with a knowing, sad sort of finality, and everyone kind of nodded as if to say, Oh, that explains it.

The 300 kid is a synonym for a foster child, a dependent child, a beaten, battered, and abused child. The term is drawn from the California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 300, which empowers the Juvenile Court to protect abused and neglected children, to take them from their homes and put them in foster care as dependents of the court—with the court becoming, in essence, the child's new parent. Some families are eventually reunited. Some, like George's, are never made whole again. George was raised by the state.

And the state made George what he is today: While under the Juvenile Court's guidance and protection—as a victim, not a victimizer—a bright, law-abiding A student with a penchant for writing poetry was destroyed. For ten years, he was shunted from one temporary home to another. He was separated from his older brother and younger sister. He was entrusted to neglectful, drug-addicted guardians. He was allowed to roam the streets, to experiment with drugs, to drop out of school—all the while in the care and custody of the state. With each move, his pitifully meager possessions were packed into a disposable green Hefty trash bag, the foster child's luggage, which George was bright enough to see as a metaphor for his entire life. He considered himself a prisoner.

“I always wondered what it was that I had done wrong,” George says, “but no one would ever tell me. I just figured they thought I would turn out like my mother, and they were just getting a head start.”

And when the inevitable finally came to pass, when this increasingly angry, rootless kid took solace in the streets and got involved in crime, the system geared up with all its power and programs to do what it always does in such cases:

It is preparing to abandon him.

T
HAT
George Trevino's juvenile fitness hearing is occurring in another courtroom on the same day as John Sloan's is a good measure of how common this once unheard-of procedure has become: In Los Angeles Juvenile Court, a total of five kids will be sent into the adult system today. Nationally, the toll for this day alone will be forty-seven children branded unsalvageable.
¹

“This case is more than sad,” Juvenile Court Commissioner Jewell Jones says—off the official court record, just discussing it with her staff while awaiting George's arrival from the holding tank. “It's a classic indictment of the system. He did not get what he needed, and that wasn't his fault. And now we're going to send him out.” She pauses, fingering the boy's thick file absently, then sighs. “Oh, this one is giving me a terrible time.”

“Would it help if I bring in the psychiatrist to testify?” George's court-appointed lawyer, Anna Noriega, asks before the hearing commences. “He's got a lot of good things to say about George. But I don't want to waste his time or the court's if it's not going to make a difference. I'll just submit his report.” The respected child psychiatrist who evaluated George said the boy would respond well in a stable, structured environment—something the Juvenile Court, in all the years it controlled George's fate, never managed to give him.

But the commissioner shakes her head. “Lord knows I think most of these kids would be better served in the juvenile system than in adult court,” she says. “But, unfortunately, that is not the criterion I must use to decide this case. The criteria are so rigid. I'm afraid I'll have a hard time finding him fit.”

Noriega nods. “Then I won't call the doctor. It's just that it's such a very sad case.”

“Yes,” the commissioner says just as the black metal door to the holding
tank opens and a tall, pale boy in green slacks and a sweatshirt enters the courtroom. “He was a 300 kid, you know.”

·  ·  ·

When George Trevino's mother abandoned him and he became a Section 300 ward of the Juvenile Court,
²
the system had a goal: find him a stable, loving home as soon as possible. At age six, it was not too late for George.

But he never knew that stability. The social workers kept moving him from one temporary foster home to another. His mother, wanted for a variety of theft and drug charges, refused to come to see him or to tell the dependency court where she lived. An aunt who stayed in touch with George's mother while she was a fugitive kept promising to visit him, then failed to show up, bitterly disappointing George time after time. Predictably, his behavior grew worse. He began to lash out at his foster parents at various group homes, who would then ask that he be removed. Between the moves, he had long stays in MacLaren Hall, a lockup for abused and neglected kids—the closest thing to an orphanage in Los Angeles. He had caretakers, but no one to love or who loved him.

George's hopes rose again when an aunt and uncle in Colorado offered to take him, but the state agencies responsible for approving out-of-state placements dragged out the process so long, it eventually fell through. George fell into a deep depression after that, and he became very hard to handle, his temper explosive. “He sees himself as intrinsically bad and worthless, and feels tremendous guilt,” his social worker wrote when he was seven. Another tantalizing chance at a new life—and a marked improvement in his behavior—came a year later, when the dependency court inexplicably abandoned its opinion that George's mother, Violanda, was unfit, and attempted to reunite the family—despite a social worker's report that found Mrs. Trevino led “a life filled with violence.” Still, Violanda had surrendered herself to police, then struck a deal for probation, making her at least theoretically eligible as a parent. But on the eve of a sixty-day trial at living together, George's mother was again arrested and imprisoned, this time for fatally shooting someone outside a liquor store.

George's mother stayed in prison until he reached his teens and was released after finishing her manslaughter term, only to be incarcerated again for forgery and parole violations. She never regained custody of him, and was mostly barred from visiting her son, though when she was out of prison, she sometimes sneaked in to see him at school or in his placement by using a false identity. She eventually died in the penitentiary. He had no memory of a father. He died of a drug overdose before George turned two.

George's little sister fared better. Because she was a cute and precocious toddler when she entered the system, she was easier to place and was almost immediately adopted. George never saw her after that night when they were all pulled from that stinking van with its moldering blankets and wadded fast-food wrappers. Her new name and address were kept confidential, even from her own brother.