No Matter How Loud I Shout (21 page)

“He's not enrolled,” Dorn parrots in disgust. “He hasn't attended for five months—since the day of his arrest in this case. And yet the probation officer reports that the minor is in school and his attendance and grades are good. In other words, the minor just lied. And the probation officer simply took his word without checking. Incredible.”

After a moment, he says the probation recommendation would be ignored. “Camp is the place for this young man,” Dorn rules. “And that is where he is going to go.”

Eric appears stunned—given the ease with which he had fooled the probation officer, he expected to get off, as always. Eric's mother begins to mutter angrily and incoherently in the back of the courtroom, but Dorn
silences her with a stony stare. “The mother obviously has no idea what is going on with this minor. No idea. She is ordered to take at least ten parenting classes.” Now it is Mom's turn to appear stunned. She whispers to no one in particular, “Can he do that?” A lawyer sitting nearby shushes her before she can make Dorn angrier.

The judge turns back to Eric. He does not look six months shy of his eighteenth birthday. He looks more bar mitzvah age than voting age, especially with the expression of disbelief now plastered on his face, in place of the studied gangbanger cool he normally tries to affect.

“Four years have gone by, and you are still on the same path, young man. But this time, you're going back to camp under Judge Dorn's supervision. There is going to be a change in your life. Crime is not the answer. Crime will only get you that quick trip to the state penitentiary or the cemetery. I don't want to see that happen to you. I love you as much as your mother. All right then, good luck, young man.” The bailiff rises and leads the boy out.

“If I had handled that minor's case four years ago, when he was thirteen, he might be applying to college now,” Dorn says later, sitting in his chambers during a break. “It is a tragedy that no one thinks it's worth the court's time to help a youngster who is assaulting other children or carrying firearms. That is a cry for help. But that boy got none, and now here we are, and here he is, almost eighteen, headed for the state prison next time if he doesn't straighten up. And it could have been prevented. It's just another example of the slipshod way some people are used to doing business around here. You see what's going on in this courtroom, what I've been handed to work with. It's shameful.”

Dorn looks up from his desk, his round, jowly face almost cherubic. “But, then, that's why I'm here. To do something about it.”

·  ·  ·

Roosevelt Dorn's message is simple: The Juvenile Court is the most important facet of the American justice system. The problem is, most people don't know it.

“But they will,” Dorn promises. “The word is going out. I shall see to that.”

Look at it this way, the judge says, leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled, delivering a lecture he has honed and practiced inside court and out. Virtually every adult with a criminal record, virtually every inmate in state prison, virtually every murderer on death row, started their criminal career in the Juvenile Court. Whatever was done with them at that time, way
back before they became serious, violent offenders—way back when they were in the Juvenile Court—obviously didn't work. Why? “Because our priorities are backwards,” he says, leaning back in his chair, warming to the subject. That is why crime is rampant, why violent juvenile offenses have climbed 50 percent between 1987 and 1991—double the increase among adults—and why the number of juveniles arrested for murder climbed 85 percent in those same years, four times the adult increase. This, Dorn believes, is directly attributable to the juvenile justice system's focus on the worst offenders, while the first-time delinquents get no attention at all.

“Instead of spending the time and the money and the manpower on the front end, when children first transgress—and when they can be helped and guided and set straight—we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.” Dorn assumes an expression of extreme disgust at this point. “And then you get the hue and cry from the politicians that we must try children as adults in order to fight crime, sixteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds, who knows where it will stop? When the fact of the matter is, the politicians have never committed the resources we need to stop crime in its tracks at the juvenile level, where it starts.”

He points to the recent study of the court by the Probation Department—the infamous “Sixteen Percent Study” that found such high failure rates and futility, and showing that the most violent and intransigent 16 percent of juvenile offenders was taking up the lion's share of the system's time and energy. That's all wrong, Dorn says. And making the system even harsher will make things worse, not better.

“Instead of spending billions of dollars on more and more prison cells for adults, which is bankrupting our nation, we could spend a fraction of that amount here, with these minors, and cut crime in half. Every dollar spent here would save ten dollars down the line in prison costs, there is no doubt about that. Yet, Juvenile Court remains the unwanted stepchild of the system. They're talking about doing away with it entirely now, which would be a travesty. A disaster. Well, I intend to educate people about what this system is really about, and what it can do. I am the squeaky wheel. I will be heard!”

Which brings Dorn to his other main theme: openness. The doors to Juvenile Court must be thrown open to the public, sweeping aside the traditional confidentiality that protects the mediocrity and failure from public view. “The public has no idea how important this court is, or the shocking, deplorable conditions that exist in these courthouses. Or, with
the right judge and the right program, how well this court can succeed. I want to educate them.”
⁴

Because he is certain that working with kids is the justice system's most crucial task, Dorn feels intense bitterness toward most of his judicial colleagues, who, as a group, consider Juvenile Court a low-prestige assignment, even a punishment. The assignments most prized by his brethren on the bench lie far away in the white-collar world of the civil courts, where the pace can be more sedate, the clients, especially the corporate ones, tend to be clean and well pressed, the fight is always about money, usually lots of it, and a judge can easily slide off the bench and into the partnership track at some major LA law firm that knows the value of having a former jurist on the payroll. That is where most of the judicial stars want to be, as far removed from the realities of Thurgood Marshall Branch as they can get. They shun Dorn's gritty domain, which is why there are only eight Superior Court judges filling Juvenile Court's twenty-eight delinquency courtrooms, with the slack taken up by appointed commissioners and referees, lawyers who assume the duties of judges to fill temporary shortages that are, in truth, permanent.

Some of the eight judges on the Juvenile Court bench are highly regarded and hardworking, but the verdict is less than flattering on a few of the others. Two have been criticized by lawyers for years for their less than energetic work habits, one of them infamous for his four-hour workdays, constant continuances of virtually every case before him, and his refusal to try more than one case a day. (By contrast, Dorn regularly holds ten or more trials in a single day, plus thirty or forty other matters—sentencings, guilty pleas, arraignments.) Because there is no effective way to discipline judges—like feudal lords, no one can tell them what to do within their own courtroom fiefdoms—such judges remained unchastised, except when lawyers refuse en masse to practice before them, the practice known as “papering the judge” because of the blanket of legal motions that must be filed to remove him or her from cases. The system is so jammed already that such a move is to the Juvenile Courts what blocking a lane on a freeway is to rush hour traffic: The effect is paralyzing. Sometimes this leads to a change in personnel, a transfer of judges from one outpost to another. Sometimes it just makes a mess.

The perception of Juvenile Court as an undesirable assignment doesn't stop at the bench. Some defense lawyers on the appointment list are little more than warm bodies occupying a chair while their clients admit to the charges. In most cases, the only written defense motions in the file are
bills to the county for legal fees. These court-appointed lawyers are paid far less than their adult court counterparts, and the level of competency and experience among many can be shockingly low. O. J. Simpson's lawyers do not walk these halls, nor do any of Los Angeles's other legal luminaries. (Such lawyers would never work for the meager fees offered by the court—forty-five dollars an hour with a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cap, even on first-degree murder cases, compared to a sixty-thousand-dollar cap on murder cases in adult court.) Instead, Dorn and the other juvenile judges and commissioners find themselves scolding attorneys in open court for their incompetence and lack of preparation—then appointing them again, for lack of any alternative.

At the same time, the DA's Office, which has a cadre of investigators, forensic experts, witness coordinators, and victim counselors assigned to adult court, provides no such help to its embattled juvenile prosecutors or the crime victims who troop in and out of court each day—another bald statement of the system's priorities. High-tech tests of hair, blood, and DNA so crucial in adult court have never been employed in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—not because they aren't needed, but because the system cannot afford to pay for them. Except for the deputies in charge of each juvenile office, the least experienced prosecutors, sometimes only one year out of law school, often end up staffing Juvenile Court, trying murder cases and making decisions about kids' futures. Many are skilled and dedicated, but it takes years of trial work in adult court before a prosecutor is allowed to handle a murder case there. Juvenile Court, however, is as much a training ground as a court of law, where errors are more easily forgiven, and problem lawyers more easily hidden from sight.

The same weaknesses hold true for the Probation Department, the police, every agency that works in the juvenile system—it is an afterthought, Dorn gripes.

“But I have the answer to these problems. I can't change the whole system—not yet, at any rate—but I can change how things work in my courtroom. Call it a pilot project, call it whatever you want. But the change starts here. And if it works, then we can expand it systemwide. But there will be change in this courthouse. Be assured of that.”

·  ·  ·

Judge Dorn's main engine of change, it soon becomes apparent, is hauling more kids into court more quickly for more minor offenses.

“We must get to these minors as early as possible,” he tells probation officers, prosecutors, parents—whoever will listen. He has his staff send
notices out to churches, counseling agencies, police departments—every agency that has contact with troubled and troubling children—telling them that Judge Dorn is back on the bench in Inglewood, and that open court is back in session. He distributes press releases, appears on radio talk shows, grants newspaper interviews, speaks to civic organizations, getting this message out: Parents who have lost control of their kids and have nowhere else to turn can come to the front of the line in Department 240, no questions asked. The status offense is back, and Judge Dorn has a new twist that puts some teeth back in the law, he promises.

The judge knows that it will take time to restore the line of parents and kids trooping to his door that made him famous during his first tour of duty in Juvenile Court in the 1980s, but he will not just sit back and wait for them to start trickling in. His next point of attack is to take on the constant problem of dismissed cases in Juvenile Court—the daily discovery that witnesses are absent and, therefore, cases cannot be proved. Many of these dismissals involve first-time, minor offenders, the very kids Dorn most wants to save, and though myriad reasons exist for this constant and shockingly immense problem, Dorn's fury falls squarely on the District Attorney's Office, which has the legal responsibility of bringing cases to trial.

Not long after the pizza-robbery dismissal, Dorn has to dismiss charges against a fifteen-year-old named Rafi who shoplifted a Levi's shirt from a department store, then, once arrested, was found to be carrying live ammunition in his backpack. The case had been pending for six months, but the DA's Office had never subpoenaed the policemen who arrested Rafi or the store security guards who saw the boy and a friend stuff the shirt into his backpack.

Deputy DA Sisman did not contact any witnesses until Rafi was sitting in the courtroom on the day of trial. The subpoenas generated by his office in this case, as in others, were never served. The prosecutor's attempt to remedy this situation consists of using a courtroom phone to call the department store security office, where no one answers. He then announces, “People are unable to proceed.” The boy grins, and Dorn has to boot the case.

“But Judge,” Rafi's mother pleads, not understanding how this could happen. “He's not going to school now. He's not doing anything but watching the cable. I feel he does need some kind of supervision. He's not doing anything, and he won't listen to me.”

Dorn gives Sisman an icy look, then says, “Mother, at this moment, I can't do anything because the district attorney has not brought its witnesses
into court. I assume they'll refile. I can't do anything until he's under the jurisdiction of this court. . . . Obviously, you need help with this young man, but I'm sorry to say I can't give it to you.”

As the boy gives his mother a hateful look, then saunters from the room, Dorn instructs his probation officer to give Rafi's mother some do-it-yourself forms for charging her own son with a status offense, part of Dorn's new program of change. For now, though, forms are all the court has to offer the mother, a legal secretary who lives alone with her son and who doesn't understand what is happening to her boy.