No Matter How Loud I Shout (5 page)

It is a fear seemingly grounded in fact, as juvenile crime, particularly violent crimes by kids, had ripped through the cities and suburbs of America like a new and deadly strain of virus for which no one possesses immunity. The figures were staggering: a 175 percent increase in juvenile murder rates since the 1970s, with similar boosts in juvenile crime of all kinds. Just in the last five years, violent offenses by children—murder, rape, assault, robbery—had risen 68 percent.
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Los Angeles, with an estimated street gang force of 200,000, a majority of them under eighteen, has been especially hard hit by this epidemic. Given such figures—and the expert (and very mistaken) predictions that juvenile crime would continue to escalate for a decade or more—it should surprise no one that the Juvenile Court each year focuses less on children in danger, and more on dangerous children, locking more away, sending more to be tried as adults, imposing stiffer sentences. And still, the fear grows. You can see it in the courthouse hallway, in the furtive glances exchanged in the never-ending line at the two dented and sticky courthouse pay phones, in the way people rush through the gauntlet of silent, staring youth who sit on the steps and railings at the courthouse entry each day. One glimpse says it all: This is not a place to come for healing. It is a place to flee, as fast as you can.

Confusion is the other principal state of mind here—and in the nine other juvenile courthouses serving Los Angeles County, with their forty-nine courtrooms and eighty thousand active cases,
⁴
a system that dwarfs adult courts in most jurisdictions, the largest juvenile justice system in the world. Sweaty hands wave crumpled subpoenas and court orders like pennants, dangled anxiously in front of anyone who remotely appears to be in authority, followed by this question: Where do I go? Because most of the people asked this question are not actually in authority, but merely happen to be walking the hallway in a business suit or policeman's uniform, the most common reply is a shrug, and so dozens of people roam about aimlessly, unsure where to go.

This is what they find as they wander the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, Thurgood Marshall Branch: a waiting room, a clerk's office, and one courtroom downstairs, with one wide stairway leading to the second floor, scarred by graffiti, as are the other gray walls of this place. There is an arthritic elevator at the other end of the building, but it stinks of old urine and seems to take several minutes to pass between the two floors of this disheveled courthouse. The bathrooms are graffiti museums, the mirrors so thoroughly etched with gang insignias that the lawyers brave enough to enter cannot see enough of their own reflections to straighten their ties.
The layout of the place mystifies all but the initiates: Superior Court Department 241 is on the first floor, and Departments 240 and 242 are on the second floor. There is no logic to this numbering scheme (other than judicial jockeying for the least shabby quarters), and there are no other room numbers for the courts—you have to figure out their locations on your own. There is no information counter, no posted court calendar, no map of the building, no guidance of any kind. Cryptic, hand-lettered signs, faded and yellowed with age, hang haphazardly from the walls, suspended by ancient, brittle pieces of Scotch tape, defaced by vandals and communicating nothing relevant to the day's proceedings.

The aged building, once a small municipal courthouse for adult offenders, outgrown, disused, and, finally, thrown like a gnawed bone to the space-hungry Juvenile Court, is brimming with children and their families today, their combined voices a riotous roar. The modest, casual clothes worn by most of the parents, and the bagged-out, gangster-chic clothes worn by many of the kids, make it easy to spot the lawyers in their suits and power ties, clustered together, cutting deals or interviewing witnesses three minutes before trial. These hurried mutterings in the hallway are what passes for trial preparation in this haphazard court of law, except for a rare few high-profile cases, “specials” in DA jargon. Snatches of conversations become intelligible as you push through the first-floor hallway, packed tight as a rush hour subway car, hot and claustrophobic: A father says,
You listen to the judge, boy,
followed by a shrill,
Fuck the judge
. . . . A woman's voice pleads,
Can my daughter come home today?
while someone's brother complains,
Why are they charging him with murder? He was just drivin' the car.
Next to him, a public defender wheedles with a DA, a salesman at the bazaar, pressing to close the deal:
Come on, you don't need a felony on this one, we'll cop to the misdemeanor, save some court time
. . . . The DA has her eyes closed, files tucked under each arm, trying to remember the facts of the case they're talking about, one of forty-seven she is supposed to handle that morning.

As each of the three courtrooms begins its morning calendar call, the blur of intertwining hallway conversations fades as lawyers and litigants hustle into court. There are enough stragglers, witnesses, and families waiting for their children's cases to be called to keep the hallways crowded and loud, and any respite in the noise quickly evaporates as the public address system kicks into gear. Throughout the rest of the day, conversations will be drowned out by an intermittent electronic bong, followed by the voice of one of the court bailiffs speaking over the PA summoning some
child or his family or a witness or an attorney to court. During morning calendar call, the busiest time in the courthouse, the harsh screech of the loudspeakers reverberates constantly, so loud that not even the thick, heavily worn double wooden doors barring entry to each courtroom can stop the sound. These announcements frequently drown out the words of judges and lawyers in the midst of hearings, destroying any semblance of courtroom decorum, and proceedings constantly are delayed as attorneys leap up to telephone some other courtroom competing for their services via loudspeaker. The crush of cases is so great, and the public defender and the district attorney here are so understaffed, that it is not uncommon for them to have two, three, sometimes five or more cases scheduled simultaneously in different courtrooms, causing impatient judges to electronically bellow for them to come on down every few minutes.

Peggy Beckstrand strides through the chaos, up the stairs, and makes her way into the courtroom of Judge Roosevelt Dorn, the newly arrived supervising judge at Thurgood Marshall. Ostensibly, she is there to pay a courtesy call on the new judge, but her real purpose is to assess what she will be dealing with in the coming year. She sits down inconspicuously in the back of the courtroom, surveying the scene like a baseball coach scouting the competition, jotting down the occasional note but mostly just watching, taking it all in. On the bench, she sees a fifty-seven-year-old man, short and a bit stocky, with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to his head, unfashionably long sideburns, a scrubby, well-clipped mustache, and large gold rings on each of his thick, blunt pinkies. Aside from his booming voice, his most daunting characteristic is a pair of pouchlike cheeks that seem to puff up when he is incensed, a warning sign as unmistakable as the maraca chatter of a rattlesnake. Lawyers have pushed through the double doors to his courtroom, spotted those inflated cheeks and slitted eyes peering over his reading glasses, and they have spun around and left, preferring to wait until later to ask him to call their cases. Peggy has seen that look during past encounters with this judge, when they both worked in adult court. “With Dorn,” she has already warned her staff, “it's not a question of
if
things will come to a head. It's a question of when.”

·  ·  ·

“You may have been on probation before, young man,” the judge says, his trademark baritone booming, a radio announcer's voice emanating from the little man peering over the tops of gold-rimmed reading glasses. “But you have never been on probation in
Judge Dorn's
court.”

You can almost hear the royal italics in the way he pronounces his name
and title, more preacher in the pulpit than judge on the bench, leaning forward, gripping a court file in his hand as if it were scripture. Department 240 is full this morning, its torn and lumpy rows of ancient auditorium chairs crammed with parents, lawyers, witnesses, cops, and kids accused of crimes. Judge Roosevelt Dorn—who wears the minister's hat on Sundays—is preaching as much to this audience as to the fourteen-year-old boy whose case is momentarily before him. Part of Dorn's strategy is to run an open court in the normally closed and confidential arena of juvenile justice. The kids waiting for their cases to be called must listen to Dorn lecture or lock up one defendant after another—the judge figures the message will sink in for at least some of them, much the way Madison Avenue figures repeating the same jingles will sell laundry detergent. It is not precisely legal, but any reasonable way he can frighten, cajole, or persuade these kids into abandoning criminal lives is fine with Judge Dorn, whether the law specifically allows it or not. The defense lawyers despise this practice as a means of intimidating their young clients—which, strictly speaking, it is—but though they have a legal right to request an empty courtroom, few of the lawyers have the grit to ask. Dorn has an odd way of getting his way—and of dealing with those who would impede his agenda.

The boy before him now is named Robert, a young car thief and robber on his way to worse crimes. He has violated his probation by cutting school to hang out with his street gang, one of the more common entries on the LA juvenile docket. The boy's frustrated probation officer knows just how to push Dorn's buttons.

“This is the second time I've had him in here for missing school, Your Honor,” the PO says, glancing at the skinny kid sitting in his oversized, untucked Raiders T-shirt, stereo headphones reluctantly removed from his ears and hanging insolently around his neck. “He's been missing classes for weeks—starting with the day after he last appeared before you.”

Dorn's eyes turn to slits at this, a hooded, reptilian stare he has honed with much practice. Several lawyers in the courtroom shake their heads, knowing what is coming, for this judge is particularly infamous for two things: He insists the juveniles under his control maintain stellar school attendance, and he cannot bear to have his orders ignored. “You cut school
after
you came before Judge Dorn?” he thunders. It is a personal affront—the kid has already lost. Sure enough, the judge waves Robert's lawyer and his litany of excuses into silence and says, “This minor has no intention of complying with the court's orders. Therefore, I have no choice but to remove him from the home and send him to camp.”

The bailiff immediately rises to stand behind Robert, his days in the street abruptly ended, a stay of up to a year in a county-run boot camp ahead, because he had the misfortune of getting Roosevelt Dorn for a judge instead of almost any other. And Dorn is not through.

“You've seen those homeless people down on Fifth Street, haven't you? That's where you're headed, son, if you don't get an education. Don't you understand that if you don't get an education, if you don't go to college or learn you a good trade, all you can expect in this world is a lifetime of degradation and poverty?”

The kid is silent, sullen, staring at his hands as Dorn lectures. The judge doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are darting around the courtroom now, where several mothers and fathers are nodding and whispering to their children to listen to the man. One father whispers, “That's a good judge. That's what that boy needs.” Someone else calls out, “Amen,” as if she were in church, and a slight smile plays across Dorn's lips at this. His voice grows even louder and deeper.

“You're stealing from yourself, no one else,” he tells Robert. “You're stealing your own future. If you keep on the way you're headed, you can only end up in one of two places: the cemetery, or the penitentiary.”

He pauses then, lowering his voice, taking off his glasses. “I can send you to a place where you have to go to school every day, but I can't make you learn, son. You have to want to learn. I think the world of you, son. I love you. I'm sending you to camp to give you a chance to decide to help yourself. Because I love you.”

This is vintage Dorn. The parents in the audience—Robert's mother among them—appear awed. They have never heard anything like this newly arrived judge before. None of his brethren crack down on truancy this way. The same woman who said Amen before says it again. But most of the kids in the courtroom look bored with all this talk of learning and the future. Some of them have heard the cemetery or penitentiary threat five or six times already, and their eyes are wandering. One girl yawns, then grins at a sharply dressed young man with a gold earring and a long rap sheet who has blown her a kiss from across the aisle. As for Robert, as tough a nut for his age as any kid who comes before the court, he seems unmoved, not quite concealing a smirk as he is ushered through the door to the holding tank. “It's not like they can take anything from me,” he says later, back with his homeboys at Juvenile Hall. “Ain't got nothin' to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.”

Still, whether or not it had any real impact on Robert, this heartfelt lecture of Dorn's was a bravura performance. Certainly, the parents were impressed, maybe a few of the kids, even the often-jaded prosecutor Peggy Beckstrand. But the scene is marred in the end by one slight jolt of mundane reality, a little thing, really, that nevertheless seems emblematic of the despair and futility that inhabits this courthouse so much more often than hope, a stark reminder that the crush of juvenile crime can reduce this system to an anonymous assembly line. After the sentence has been pronounced, the clerk grabs Robert's file—one of sixty cases the judge will hear this day—but Dorn suddenly realizes he forgot some minor point, and he asks for it back. He stutters oddly as he does this, and it takes a second for those present to understand why. Then it becomes clear: though he may indeed love Robert, Judge Dorn does not know his name.