No Matter How Loud I Shout (42 page)

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To Judge Dorn, of course, there is nothing unusual or inconsistent in his handling of the Christopher Jones case. Set aside the lousy performance of the Probation Department (it turns out they knew for months before his arrest how to find Chris at his aunt's home, yet never did anything) and all that is left in Dorn's view is a kid who ran away and who now wants to beat the system. “That is something this judge will never allow,” Dorn says. If the court does not enforce its orders—in this case, an order requiring Chris to stay in a group home—then the judge's authority and power is destroyed, along with the ability of the Juvenile Court to heal children's lives. To Dorn, it's that simple.

But this case, along with Rolando's and Keesha's and others, fuels a perception in the courthouse, already nascent because of Dorn's past controversies and his heavy-handed treatment of lawyers who try to paper him, that he is a wild card, capricious and unpredictable. Right or wrong, prosecutors and defense lawyers in the courthouse begin to divide themselves into two camps: those who consider Dorn a savior, and the apparent majority, who see him as willing to bend or break the law when it suits him, yet just as likely to be harshly inflexible with some other kid, whether it seems warranted or not.

The private attorneys by and large remain neutral, because of a perception that to cross Dorn is to risk a cutoff of their livelihoods. Dorn controls which attorneys are eligible for court appointments and, these lawyers say, it is a time-honored tradition among judges to punish lawyers who paper them or appeal them too often by crossing their names off the appointment list.

“I have an obligation to my clients, when I believe they will not be best served by appearing before Judge Dorn, to do something about it,” one lawyer whispers outside the courtroom after a terse and angry hearing with Dorn. “But I also have an obligation to my family to bring home a paycheck. I've been told not to paper Judge Dorn, that I'll be punished if I do. Then I'm no good to anyone here. So what am I supposed to do?”

In the end, this lawyer decides she will serve no one's interests by getting booted from the courthouse, so she settles on a covert strategy to elude Dorn instead. In each case she wants removed from Dorn's courtroom, she requests special hearings to determine if probable cause exists for the charges against her clients. Every juvenile has a right to these hearings, but they are not automatic, and few private lawyers request them because of the extra work they entail. Their advantage, however, lies in the legal requirement that someone other than the trial judge must conduct the probable cause hearing, to avoid tainting the trial later on. It is the equivalent of holding a hearing outside a jury's presence in adult court. Dorn has to send these kids next door or downstairs for these probable cause hearings, after which the cases are supposed to return to Dorn for trial. But once this lawyer has one of her kids before another judge, she quickly cancels her request for the special hearing and negotiates a plea bargain and sentence then and there, avoiding ever having to return to Judge Dorn, where sentences and conditions of probation are often far more rigorous. Peggy Beckstrand catches on to this trick fairly quickly, but does nothing to intervene—she has no desire to keep cases in front of Dorn, either.

The same defense lawyer also quietly begins feeding information about Dorn's behavior to the more job-secure, civil-servant public defenders, particularly an incident in which Judge Dorn locked up a petty thief in Juvenile Hall on questionable legal authority.
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Other lawyers follow suit. It is around this time that both the Public Defender's office and the District Attorney's Office begin amassing long lists of anecdotal evidence against Dorn, at the instructions of their superiors downtown, in hopes of finding sufficient material for a formal complaint of misconduct—just as had been done five years earlier during Dorn's first tour of duty in Juvenile
Court. DAs assigned to his courtroom must return to their office and write a report every day critiquing Dorn's rulings and demeanor, then hand it in to Peggy Beckstrand; the public defenders must do the same for their boss. It becomes a race, then, to see which office moves first in publicly opposing Judge Dorn, an open secret in the halls of Thurgood Marshall Branch. If Dorn is aware of this—and he probably is—he gives no hint of it, nor does he give any ground.

The battle almost comes to a head after Judge Dorn flies into a rage when a new prosecutor on Peggy's staff resolves a scheduling conflict by asking a colleague to finish a trial for her. All that remained to be done was to call a final witness, then rest the case. But when Dorn convenes the trial and sees a different DA in his courtroom, he begins screaming about shoddy, unprofessional prosecutors, and threatens to have the absent deputy DA arrested for contempt. Then he dismisses the case, a strong-arm robbery in which the victim had been threatened with death if he testified (but where the evidence ended up falling short due to witness problems that had nothing to do with which DA happened to be in court that day). Finally, at Dorn's insistence, Peggy has to trudge over to the courtroom, where Dorn first gives her a silent treatment, then screams at her in open court and on the record, telling her she runs an unprofessional shop, and lecturing her like a probationer. No prosecutors will be excused unless they are in the hospital or carrying a note from their doctors, he declares. Peggy has to jam her hands in her pockets to keep her own temper in check. Dorn will not let her speak. Her place is to listen to him, he says.

Back at the office, her gut reaction is to go to war over this encounter, but upon reflection, she decides being humiliated publicly by a Dorn tirade, however unpleasant, is not sufficient cause. Instead, she sends a memo downtown, and her immediate boss in the DA's Office, Tom Higgins, ends up coming to Dorn for a quiet meeting in chambers. In the process, this senior prosecutor observes a young girl sitting in the courtroom in handcuffs, accompanied by a policeman. She is a runaway being brought to Dorn as a status offender in need of one of his in-chambers lectures. This, Higgins concludes, is blatantly illegal—status offenders may not be handcuffed, since they have committed no crimes—and if a sufficient stink was raised, it could doom Dorn's most beloved project, his effort to bring status offenses back into the Juvenile Court mainstream. The potential legal liability to the county is also enormous—if a child in illegal custody was to be injured, the lawsuits would fly. Peggy's boss now has some damaging ammunition to bring into chambers with him, and
he feels sufficiently comfortable, once he has the judge on the defensive and sputtering about misunderstandings by the police, to tell Dorn that his outburst at Peggy was both childish and unprofessional. Dorn admits no wrongdoing, but assures Higgins that measures will be taken to prevent any more improper handling of status offenders, and the meeting closes on a conciliatory note. Dorn wants to work
with
, not against, the District Attorney to make the system work better, he promises.
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Afterward, relations between Peggy's staff and the supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall take a notably cordial, even jovial turn, and most of the courthouse regulars begin to speculate that it will take some hotly contested fitness case, probably a murder or other violent crime, to provide the impetus to push either the DA or the Public Defender over the edge into a direct conflict with Dorn. Something where the stakes are truly high.

In the end, though, the fuse is lit by nothing more than a fifteen-year-old wristwatch thief, and a simple question over visits. Judge Dorn had ordered a juvenile facility to bar the public defender's in-house social worker from visiting the young man. Such visits are normally a routine process no other judge had ever tried to impede, but Dorn does not see it that way. Attorneys from the Public Defender's Office point out that Dorn is interfering with their representation of a client and, by extension, violating the kid's rights. But Dorn will not relent. He says in open court, “No. You cannot take anyone to see the minor. Not without an order from the court.”

It is a line in the sand. The Public Defender's Office could say Fine, may we please have your permission to talk to our own client? Or they could fight.

The head of the public defender's juvenile section downtown sees this as the opportunity he has been waiting for. He has long regretted his office's agreement not to pursue a formal complaint against Dorn five years earlier once it was made clear Dorn would depart Juvenile Court. He has watched with increasing distaste Dorn's harsh sentences and attempts to reform the system through reviving the status offense, and he thinks Dorn is neither representative of judges in the system, nor a model who should be emulated. Now he gives a two-word command to his lawyers in Inglewood: “Paper him.”

That's all it takes to declare war on Judge Dorn and, in the process, cripple the entire Los Angeles Juvenile Court.

In the last 70 years many dedicated men and women have devoted their professional lives to the enlightened task of bringing us out of the dark world of Charles Dickens in meeting our responsibilities to the child in our society. . . . The court now . . . invites a long step backwards into the Nineteenth Century. In that era there were no juvenile proceedings, and a child was tried in a conventional criminal court with all the restrictions of a conventional criminal trial. So it was that a 12-year-old boy named James Guild was tried in New Jersey for killing Catherine Beakes. A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was executed. It was all very constitutional.

JUSTICE POTTER STEWART,
in a lone dissent denouncing the Supreme Court's 1967 Gault ruling requiring Juvenile Courts to grant children the same rights as adults

It is, to begin with, absurd to think that one must be mature enough to drive carefully, to drink responsibly or to vote intelligently, in order to be mature enough to understand that murdering another human being is profoundly wrong. . . . We discern neither a historical nor a modern societal consensus forbidding [it].

THE SUPREME COURT,
1989, sanctioning the death penalty for some juveniles

Like many cities in Southern California, Inglewood seems more municipal fiction than actual place, a roughly rectangular set of boundaries visible only on maps, surrounded on all sides by the tar and concrete fist of LA. Technically, it is a city unto itself, but to the casual observer passing down Hawthorne Boulevard or Manchester Avenue or Seventy-eighth Street, this home to the Fabulous Forum where the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Kings play is indistinguishable from the rest of the continuous urban sprawl. There is no buffer or break or green space dividing it from the rest of the world, no clearly defined border, no separate identity beyond the City Hall letterhead and the slightly different shade of blue the police officers wear. And, certainly, its boundaries offer no relief from the big-city crime statistics that plague the Los Angeles Basin like a fever chart and which, more and more, are the work of small hands. The events of January 26 show that as clearly as blood pooled on a hot sidewalk.

It is just after 7:00
P.M.
, a balmy night, LA in winter, a waning moon peering through the day's rising smog. Four teenagers in a gray Oldsmobile Cutlass cruise down West Seventy-eighth Street, passing rows of two- and three-bedroom bungalows with drought-choked lawns and ground-floor windows caged by bands of black wrought iron. The Cutlass glides to a halt next to a man who is standing on the sidewalk talking to his twenty-three-year-old
girlfriend. They are outside her house, holding hands, her daughter playing at their side. Their smiles fade as they turn toward the stopped car just in time to see the tinted windows on the driver's side, front and rear, lower in tandem. From inside, they hear a coldly indifferent voice, still creaking with adolescence: “What's up, cuz?”

The man on the sidewalk has the survival instincts of a lifelong gang member. He begins to scramble for cover even before the muzzles of two semiautomatic weapons materialize from the car's gloomy interior and jut out the windows, gleaming blue-black in the frosty streetlight glare. When those muzzles start to jerk and flash, spewing a dozen bullets in the space of a handful of seconds, the man eludes injury. His girlfriend, though, has not been honed by a life on the streets. She takes a bullet in the leg and falls to one knee. At the same moment, her two-year-old daughter, Kyiara Nicole, yelps and emits an odd, wet-sounding cough. Her tiny chest has been pierced by a single bullet. Mother scrambles to her feet, scoops up baby, and runs bleeding into the house, screaming for help, dimly aware that the crashing of gunshots has stopped, replaced by the retreating sound of a car engine racing. Kyiara's grandfather comes running through the house and into the living room, but it is too late. The toddler who loves puzzles and kittens and the Zoe character on Sesame Street and her granddad's whiskery face doesn't cry, doesn't speak. She just looks up at him for an aching moment, eyes wide, bewildered, a plume of red blossoming across the front of her shirt like those time-lapse photos of flowers blooming. Then, as he and her mother both reach out to her, Kyiara Nicole crumples and dies on her own living room floor.

A half hour passes. The ambulances and squad cars have arrived, the insect buzz of their radios filling the night air, neighbors gathered outside like a Greek chorus, kids straining to see inside the house, restrained by festoons of yellow tape. Less than a mile away, the same gray Oldsmobile reappears, this time pulling up to a crowd of ten schoolkids hanging on a corner. As far as anyone can tell, the schoolkids are not gangsters or hard-core criminals, just young people passing time, idle and harmless. The same two windows snick down with an electric hum. The same two muzzles rise and spit more bullets, and a boy and girl go down, wounded in the legs and back, while the other kids duck and scatter. The fusillade stops, and someone emerges from the car, a pale teenager with wild hair, who appears to the kids on the corner to be somewhere between fifteen and seventeen years old. He leaves the door to his car open; rap music with the bass turned way up thumps incoherently from inside the car. Wild Hair strides purposefully toward one particular girl, Tila French, a fourteen-year-old junior high school student
who has fallen to the ground, a pile of books cascading from her backpack. Tila sees Wild Hair coming, the big gun carried loosely at his side, and she tries frantically to escape by crawling under a parked van. She is halfway underneath—that's how the police will find her body, wedged at the curb amid the oil stains and flattened cigarette butts and her own blood—when the kid with the gun stops, standing directly over her. With his feet planted, arms extended straight out in front of him, the gun in both hands, just like on the TV cop shows, Wild Hair yells, “You're not goin' anywhere, bitch.” Then he calmly pumps three bullets into Tila's body. The last is an execution-style coup de grâce to the head, delivered as the other children, Tila's friends and schoolmates, watch and scream and wonder if they are to be next. But Wild Hair just jogs back to the car, which vanishes around a corner, its billowing exhaust fumes mixing with the stink of gunpowder, blood, and fear.