No Matter How Loud I Shout (44 page)

“Didn't you know,” he asks, “that if Ronald robbed them, the store owners could identify him?”

“Yes,” Jason answers.

“But that didn't give you cause for concern?”

“For my well-being?” Jason responds. “No.”

Cooper arches his eyebrows and stares at Judge Scarlett, looking for a reaction to this implausibility. He gets none, but Cooper knows he has made clear the problem with Jason's story: How could he have hoped to get away with such a robbery unless the witnesses were eliminated? If Ronald robbed his bosses, they would call the police immediately, and Ronald would be arrested the minute he walked in the door. Had Jason really been willing to stake his freedom on the silence of a flaky fifteen-year-old tagger?

Unfortunately for Cooper, even if Judge Scarlett accepts this insinuation and concludes Jason must have known in advance that Ronald was going to commit murder, it doesn't do much for Ronald's case. Either way, Ronald Duncan is still a stone-cold killer. Indeed, if they agreed on murder in advance, it is worse for Ronald—it means there is no way Cooper can argue that the killing was an impulsive, panicked ad lib to what was supposed to be a bloodless robbery.

So Cooper tries to overcome this problem by next suggesting through his questions that it was Jason, not Ronald, who did the killing. But Jason is six feet eight inches tall, a full foot taller than the person seen running from Chuck and Ada's car on the night of the murders. It was Ronald with
the bloody backpack and the money and the bragging the next day, not Jason. When Peggy's turn to question him comes again, she emphasizes these points, making it as clear as she can that there is no way Jason could have been the person running from the car that night.

Jason's testimony wraps up a few minutes later, but not without a nasty postscript. When Peggy asks why Jason wasn't honest from the beginning, he says, “I kept silent on my involvement . . . to cover myself.”

“And now you have no reason to lie, do you, because you have immunity?” Peggy asks. “No matter what you say here, nothing can happen to you, isn't that true?”

It is a set piece, something prosecutors always ask of their immunized witnesses. But before Jason can answer yes, Cooper laughs, a short bark that sounds shockingly loud in the otherwise quiet courtroom. Peggy springs to her feet.

“I object to counsel's demeanor,” she blurts, red spots flaring on her cheeks. She is in a foul mood now, and can't let it go, as she normally might have. “It's an attempt to intimidate the witness.”

“I'm not trying to intimidate him,” Cooper responds, chuckling again, just to tweak his opponent. They both know he can and will argue just as easily that Jason would say or do anything to stay out of the gas chamber, that the only reason he gets his immunity is because his story helps the prosecution. “It's not intimidation. I'm just laughing at the game.”

Scarlett looks pained, but says nothing.

“It's not a game,” Peggy says. “It's very serious and I object to his demeanor. I believe it's inappropriate.”

Scarlett clears his throat and waves one hand vaguely at the space between the two lawyers. He looks intensely uncomfortable at the unpleasantness, and he seems vaguely surprised that a seasoned prosecutor like Peggy would become so emotional about a case. Scarlett, for one, has seen too many young killers to let one more bother him. “All right,” he finally says. “Let's be serious.”

A short time later, Jason hesitantly walks from the courtroom, his testimony over. He is not sure where to go next. Peggy follows him out and tells him to go to her office and wait there. She doesn't want to risk him getting into any confrontations with Ronald's relatives.

After Jason, there isn't much left for Peggy to present. Phai Wan Konsuer, the victims' nephew and a dayworker at the ice-cream shop, testifies briefly about his friendship with Ronald, how Ronald was chronically late to work, and how Ronald was the only one working with Chuck and Ada
on the night of the murders. Phai recalls that when he left the store a few hours before closing, Ronald was wearing a Baskin Robbins shirt identical to the blood-soaked one found lying by the curb a mile or so from the murder scene. His testimony takes less than ten minutes, the only time any member of the victims' family will be heard in this case. Unlike adult court, where juries are given detailed portraits of the lives of the victims of crime, Juvenile Court does not acknowledge the existence of victims or their survivors. Input from crime victims is considered irrelevant here, a waste of the court's precious time and a violation of confidentiality rules. Minor offenders and accused killers alike are spared having to face the human consequences of their crimes.

When Phai leaves, Scarlett breaks for lunch. The courtroom had emptied out after Jason finished, and Peggy walks over to her office with the sheriff's investigator in charge of the case, Robert Carr. She is nervous and motor-mouthing, speculating about how Jason's testimony went over with the judge, still shaken by the judge's decision to kick out Ronald's confession to police. “I just don't know what Scarlett will do,” she says. “I can't see how he could rule against us, but I just don't know about him.”

Part of what bothers her is a conversation she had with the newspaper reporter who is writing a story about Jason's immunity deal. “I just hope Scarlett doesn't view the case like that reporter does,” she says. “He kept saying, ‘Wouldn't it be better to put one guy in prison for life rather than another in CYA for nine years?' And I said no, it's who did what. It's who is most responsible. You just don't sit down and weigh time, to see who can get the longest sentence. You look at who did what. But he didn't seem convinced. Is that how the public thinks, I wonder? You just weigh time?” Carr just shrugs.

Across the street, she and Carr sit down with Jason for a last conversation. The young Air Force cadet, a plane ticket back to his military base in his pants pocket courtesy of the District Attorney's Office, pulls up a chair at the conference table and asks, “What now?”

Peggy sighs and explains to her witness how Ronald, even if convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, has to be released by age twenty-five under California law—and that, in other states, he would be released even sooner, at age twenty-one, eighteen in some places. They will try to rehabilitate him, she says, for what it's worth, but even if he remains unrepentant, the calendar will set him free. Jason shakes his head in astonishment—an odd gesture, Peggy decides, for an admitted accomplice who won't do a day of time.

“But you were in a completely different position, Jason,” she says, trying to sound good-natured, but not quite pulling it off. “You could be spending the rest of your life in prison for what you did. You were just over eighteen when this happened. They could have asked for the death penalty. All for three hundred dollars.”

Jason shakes his head again. He looks rueful. “Not even that.”

Peggy looks at him, searching his face for sorrow, for an apology, for something that looks like regret. She's not sure what she sees, and tries to drive home the point again. “Do you understand, if it had been Ronald testifying against you, you could have faced a death sentence, Jason?”

He nods. “That's what I figured.”

Peggy is silent a moment. But she realizes there is no point in dragging this moment out. It's done. She made her decision. All she can do is cling to the belief that Jason has been truthful about the core of his story—that he didn't know Ronald was going to kill anyone that night. That's the only thing that makes the immunity arrangement palatable. Even so, she has done what prosecutors do every day: She has cut a deal with the devil in order to get someone she considers even worse off the streets. If you can't live with that, she tells herself, then you might as well get out of the business. Because sooner or later—and probably sooner—she will have to do it again. It is one of the consequences few could foresee thirty years ago, when all the rights and procedures of adult criminal court were superimposed on the Juvenile Court. No one back then ever thought much about brutal double killings by fifteen-year-olds, about confessions thrown out of court and accomplices offered immunity for murder. Now it's just another day in Juvenile Court.

“Okay, why don't you get out of here, Jason?” Peggy says abruptly, then softens it by adding, “Get on with your life. Stay out of trouble.”

Jason turns toward Detective Carr, a questioning expression on his face.

The detective smiles. “That's right, it's a done deal. You're through here.”

After the man given immunity for murder works out the door, en route to a career in the Air Force, Peggy can't help but say, “I wish I could say I was through here, too.”

She retreats to her tiny office to pick at a take-out lunch while hunching over files, a solitude quickly interrupted by the office filing deputy, Sandra Flannery, who is in charge of drawing up new cases for prosecution. Flannery is puzzled by the facts of a case, and asks Peggy for advice.

“This girl shoots at her nemesis with a BB gun,” Flannery says, waving a police report at Peggy, “but just hits her car.”

The absurdity of dealing with such a case in the same place and in the same fashion, with all the same rules as the Ronald Duncan murder case, almost makes Peggy laugh out loud. She thinks of what her own nemesis in court said a few minutes earlier:
I'm just laughing at the game,
and she regrets making such a big stink about it. He was more right than she cares to admit.

“How about a 245 with a deadly weapon,” she answers. California Penal Code Section 245—assault.

“Well, it's not really a dangerous weapon. And it only hit the rear of the car. It didn't do any real damage.”

Peggy shrugs. They discuss a statute that outlaws throwing objects at moving vehicles, but because there was never any danger of causing a crash, that doesn't seem to fit, either. In the end, no charges are filed at all, the simplest solution in Juvenile Court, and the most common one: Let the kid go, and hope for the best. Hope she doesn't do it again. Hope she doesn't use a real gun next time. The filing deputy returns to her desk, and Peggy marches back to her trial.

·  ·  ·

Back at the courthouse, with time to spare before the trial resumes, Peggy runs into Sharon Stegall again. The probation officer wants to tell her about her Triple Seven against Jesus, the kid turned in by his father for having a Baggie of crack in his room. It should have been a slam dunk, Sharon says, but the DA assigned to Judge Dorn's court did not contact the police lab in advance of the trial to get test results, which meant they could not prove that the substance in the Baggie was an illegal drug. Everyone knew it was coke, but Jesus's defense lawyer would insist that proof be offered. Maybe it was sugar or salt or laundry detergent, the lawyer would say, and Dorn would have to dismiss.

“And if that's not bad enough, he hasn't even called the schools for a report. We know the kid hasn't been in school for a month, but we can't prove that, either. Now he has me calling all over, trying to assemble
his
case for him.”

Peggy shakes her head. She has known for some time that she needed a new body in Dorn's courtroom. She just hasn't had any to spare.

“Kids are walking out the door who need to be here,” Sharon says. “Dorn's eating that guy alive.”

Peggy promises to do something as soon as she can, and she asks Sharon to try, in the meantime, to do what
she
can to bolster Jesus's probation revocation. In the end, Sharon gives up the impossible task of trying to
get witnesses to rush to court at the last moment (just finding someone at LAPD's laboratory willing to locate Jesus's Baggie of crack could easily take all day). Instead, she starts talking up the case to the newly appointed lawyer, who is harried, running late, and less than familiar with the facts of Jesus's Triple Seven. One of the savvy public defenders might have walked the kid out on yet another dismissal—the deputy DA would likely have folded as soon as the defense insisted on a trial, and Dorn would have had yet another dismissal to rave about. Instead, Sharon tells the appointed private lawyer what a foul mood Dorn is in, and how he has been hammering drug cases all week. Having the father come in and testify against his own son will tear the family up needlessly, Sharon adds. Wouldn't it be better for this kid to stay on good terms with his dad, and get some drug treatment and structure in his life? The lawyer nods, spends about five minutes looking at the file, makes no inquiry about whether the necessary witnesses are present, then pleads a pliant Jesus guilty to four separate violations. The defense even agrees with Sharon's recommendation that Jesus go to camp for at least six months. Judge Dorn narrows his eyes a bit at the sudden absence of adversarial posturing, then sees it is in the best interest of the boy and accepts the plea without comment. Then he imposes the recommended sentence, adding his own provisions for drug counseling and special education classes during and after camp. In minutes, the case has gone from near dismissal to a full admission, thanks to Sharon's bluster.

“My wife and I are happy. We know he needs to be detained,” Jesus's father says later, chatting in the hallway with Sharon. “At least now, he has to go to school. He needs this.”

Sharon is less than pleased, however. “It's just the system at work, or not at work. What's the point in having probation if we're going to blow cases all the time? That boy could just as easily have walked out today. Going by the evidence, or the lack of it, he should have. The system just screwed up in reverse today. Neither side did its job, and the right thing happened. Sometimes I think that's the only time the right thing happens. Now go figure that out.”

·  ·  ·