No Matter How Loud I Shout (24 page)

But just when Peggy felt she had gained some momentum, the chaos so common in Juvenile Court asserts itself. Midway through the deputy's testimony, just as he is uttering the words “severe head trauma,” the lights in the room, and throughout the courthouse, black out—an aftereffect of damage from a devastating earthquake that hit the Los Angeles area a month earlier. Even the red emergency exit lights wink out, leaving the room in total darkness, generating bewildered exclamations from the audience, a giggle from Duncan. The bailiff rises to guard the minor, but it is the deputy on the witness stand who lights up the courtroom, pulling a large flashlight from his belt and shining it around from the stand, focusing on the boy in the orange jumpsuit.

Eight minutes later, the power flutters back on. But it takes another half hour for the crowd, the witnesses, the lawyers, Duncan, and, finally, the judge to settle back in the courtroom. Several attorneys use the lull to rush to the front of the courtroom to ask Scarlett to conduct a few brief hearings for other kids, which he does. Peggy finishes with the deputy, but her momentum is lost, the pasteboard and photos pushed aside. Scarlett becomes so distracted after the blackout that he forgets who Duncan is and mistakes him for another kid accused of petty theft.

Peggy moves on quickly through a series of witnesses who talk of blood—blood found on Ronald's book bag, on a pair of Ronald's pants crumpled up on the floor of the getaway van, inside the getaway van, and on a Baskin Robbins shirt streaked with blood, found by a jogger on a street between Ronald's home and the murder scene. No sophisticated DNA tests were performed on this critical blood evidence, as is routinely done in adult murder cases. But the far less discriminating blood-type tests showed the stains could have been from Chuck and Ada. Peggy hopes it will be enough.

With those preliminaries out of the way, Peggy goes to the heart of her case: Ronald's friend Marvin, who had just been found by her office investigator after months missing in action.

Peggy had always liked Marvin. He was her hero, a reminder that not all children in her world were monsters. Marvin had done the right thing when it would have been far easier to just go along, to protect his friend, to remain silent and accept the forty bucks Ronald had offered him from the roll of cash he started flashing at school on the day after his bosses were killed. She didn't know what made Marvin different from Ronald, only that he was—and that as long as there were Marvins in the world, she had hope. Hope died easily when you prosecuted twenty-nine hundred juvenile delinquents a year.

But she had not seen him for nearly a year. Now her star witness saunters into court with a new swagger, mirrored by his disheveled father, who sits down in the back of the courtroom, a dusty baseball cap pulled low over his eyes—until the bailiff tells him to take it off. Father and son sport matching gold earrings in their left ears. The investigator had been right about Marvin's appearance. Peggy frowns at the boy's outfit—jeans and an oversized black T-shirt with a cartoon drawing of a man in a top hat holding a large mallet behind his back, as if waiting to brain some unsuspecting victim. She had asked that he wear his Sunday best. She hopes for his sake this isn't it.

But despite his less than ideal appearance, Marvin remains just as soft-spoken and convincing a witness as when she first interviewed him so long ago. He calmly recounts seeing Ronald with a wad of cash on him in school on the day after the murders, bragging about what he had done.

“He said, ‘I killed Chuck. Chuck and his girlfriend.' And I was saying, Yeah, right. I didn't believe him. I started laughing and stuff. He said he hid in the backseat of the car, and he shot Chuck first, then his girlfriend started screaming, and he shot her. And he ran to a van, a waiting van. He
said he was covered with blood and had to take off his clothes and run into his house in his boxers.”

Marvin's testimony amounted to devastating evidence of guilt. His account—which he had told in similar detail the first time police questioned him nine days after the murders (on Ronald's sixteenth birthday, to be exact)—matched the physical evidence in the case perfectly. The blood in the van, the bloody shirt, Ronald's bloody clothes—all squared with what Marvin swears Ronald told him. Most important, Marvin's testimony mirrors Ronald's own confession to the police—right down to the detail about Ada screaming after the first shot, until Ronald silenced her by reloading and firing again. Peggy remembers again, with a chill, Ronald's comment to the police.
No, I didn't hate them. I really loved them.

There was no way Marvin could have made up such an accurate story, Peggy planned to argue. Ronald had to have told him the details. She felt confident Marvin would withstand the expected assault on his credibility by the defense. The only thing that bothered her was the look of disinterest on the sixty-nine-year-old Scarlett's face. He looked bored and distracted throughout most of Marvin's testimony. At one point, the judge slumped so far down in his chair he was barely visible behind the bench, with just the top of his bald head sticking up so that everyone knew he was still there.

Still, sensing the solidity of Marvin's testimony, Ronald's lawyer surprised Peggy. Cooper didn't try to call Marvin a liar. Rather, he tried to show
Ronald
was the liar, shrewdly focusing on something Marvin had told the police early on—how he initially thought his friend Ronald had been telling tall tales. Under cross-examination, Marvin readily agrees that he had at first discounted what Ronald told him, writing off his story of murder as mere bragging about nonexistent exploits. It was only that night, when word of the murders appeared on the news, that he began to believe Ronald, telling his mother, then police, what he knew. Cooper suggests Marvin was right the first time—maybe Ronald really was just bragging. That was the real reason Marvin's account and Ronald's confession matched: not because Ronald told the truth, but because he told the same lie to both Marvin
and
the cops, Cooper plans to argue. And to tie this all together, the lawyer even offers a ready explanation for why Ronald would tell such a grotesque false story to his friend in the first place.

“You both belong to the same set, the same tagging crew, right?” Cooper asks.

Marvin nods.

“And sometimes you brag to one another, don't you?”

“Yeah, we're both in BSA—Beyond Street Artists,” Marvin says. “You brag, you exaggerate to get respect.”

“And if someone kills someone, or commits a drive-by, that gets more respect, right?” Cooper asks.

Marvin doesn't even have to think about it. He answers, “Yes.”

Peggy winces. Not so much at what this testimony does to her case, but at what it says about Marvin. Here is a kid at a crossroads. A year ago, he had told his mother and the cops about the killings, because that was the right thing to do. But now here he is talking about equating murder with respect. He has a father who complained bitterly about him appearing in court, who called his own boy a snitch and derided him for failing to keep his mouth shut. Now that father has custody of him. Would Marvin be sitting at the defense table himself sometime soon, Peggy wonders, as Cooper presses on with his questioning, laboring to show Ronald was just a lying braggart, not a killer.

“And so Ronald is more respected now in your set?” Cooper asks. “Now that he has been charged in this case?”

“Yes.”

Judge Scarlett, who has never lost his look of disinterest throughout Marvin's testimony, suddenly sits up and glances over at the witness. “You said you're in a tagging crew. Taggers don't do violence, do they?”

Marvin smiles, then proudly corrects the judge and the lawyer. “We're not just taggers anymore. We're tag-bangers. We have members of the set involved in shootings.”

“So you're not just a vandalism crew?” Cooper asks.

Marvin is bursting with pride. He and Ronald exchange smiles. “Not anymore.”

·  ·  ·

The first day of trial is drawing to a close, but not before settling the matter of Ronald's confession. When Peggy tries to peel back the next layer of her evidentiary onion—by introducing the boy's taped statement to the police—the defense, as expected, objects. Cooper jumps up and says the confession was coerced with threats that Ronald would receive the death penalty unless he cooperated. Having explained why Ronald would have lied to Marvin about the murders—to gain respect—Cooper now wants to show why he would tell the same lie to the police: self-preservation.

“Ronald denied guilt. Then the tape was stopped. When it came back on he confesses.” Cooper arches his eyebrows and shrugs, as if to say,
We
all know what goes on in interrogation rooms when the cops switch off the recorder—nothing good. Nothing legal.

“That didn't happen,” Peggy says, bristling.

“The proof is on the tape, Your Honor,” Cooper retorts. “Just listen to it.”

“If he was promised no death penalty, that's coerced. That's true,” Scarlett exclaims excitedly, siding with Cooper, sitting up straight and tall now in his chair. He has not yet heard the tape of the confession or heard any testimony, but he has already staked out a position, a slight grin on his face. “He can't get the death penalty anyway. He's a juvenile.”

“Well, listen to the tape, Your Honor,” Peggy says, exasperation creeping into her voice. The judge waves his hand, a gesture for the attorneys to proceed.

When the tape is played, it reveals there is indeed a gap of five minutes that occurs just over midway through the two hours and twenty minutes of Ronald's taped statement. For the first half of the recording, Ronald denied being involved in the murders, instead telling a story—full of holes and easily disprovable—about being robbed and stabbed while walking a circuitous route home. This was his attempt to explain the blood on his things. When he refused to budge from that story, the detectives ended the interview and shut off the tape.

What happened next depends on who's telling the story. The two sheriff's investigators say they simply told Ronald he was under arrest and would have to go to Juvenile Hall. It was then, the investigators say, that Ronald volunteered to revise his statement. So the tape went back on. That, one of the two investigators swears on Scarlett's witness stand, is the only reason there is a gap on the tape.

Ronald has another story.

He walks up to the witness stand and takes the oath with a smile. The boy props his chin up on one hand and assumes a look of extreme concentration as he repeats his lawyer's argument and declares his confession to murder was a lie that the police forced him to tell.

“They cut off the tape and said, It's a double murder—I can get the death penalty for it,” Duncan swears. “And if I confess, they won't push for the death penalty. Then they turned the tape back on.”

When Ronald finishes his explanation, Cooper plays the very end of the taped confession, the very last exchange between the interrogators and their quarry.

“You haven't been threatened or promised anything?” Sheriff's Detective Robert Carr asked Ronald after he finished confessing to the killings.
It was the sort of routine query made at the end of almost every police interrogation.

“No,” Ronald said on the tape. “Promise I wouldn't die, that's about it.”

There it was. An inexplicable statement by Ronald, foolishly unheeded and unacknowledged by the interrogators sitting across from Ronald at the time. Neither Carr nor his partner responded to it. All they did was go on to recite the time and the date and to shut off the machine, this time for good. As soon as Peggy had seen it on the transcript months before, she knew it would be trouble; she knew exactly what was going to happen in court. Those seven words seemed to suggest that Ronald really had been promised something, or at least thought he had been.

“They said I wouldn't get the death penalty if I confessed to it. So I confessed to it,” Ronald tells Judge Scarlett nearly a year after the tape was made. His expression and inflection are slightly sarcastic, as if he were explaining the facts of life to another kid his age, someone who should have already known the score. “Anything's better than dyin'.”

When it is Peggy's turn to cross-examine Ronald, she goes to great lengths to point out every lie he uttered on the first half of the tape, hoping to erode his credibility. He lied about being robbed, he lied to Marvin, he lied about the facts of the murder. Ronald turns sullen and silent under her insistent questioning, forced to say, Yes, I lied, over and over, but I'm telling the truth now. “Anything's better than dyin',” he keeps repeating. After ten minutes of this, with Ronald exasperated and making faces, jutting his lower lip defiantly with each question, Peggy suddenly shifts gears with a mild query. “How many times,” she wants to know, “was the death penalty mentioned in that interrogation room?”

“Once,” Ronald answers, without hesitation. Once was enough.

It is the reply Peggy had hoped for. She then plays a section of the tape where the death penalty
is
mentioned, but in a more innocuous way than Ronald recalled—and long before the gap in the recording where Ronald claimed to have been threatened. On the tape, the detective simply stated that murder can carry a death sentence.
For me?
Ronald then asked, and the detective answered,
For whoever did it.
If the death penalty was only mentioned once during the interview, that was it—captured on tape, not whispered during a five-minute gap. What was on tape was no threat, at least not as Ronald had described it. And, in any case, after that mention of capital punishment, Ronald continued to deny doing anything wrong for another twenty minutes of taped interview. If his latest testimony is true—that the death penalty only came up once during the interrogation—then
it could not have been mentioned again in a more threatening way during the gap in the tape. Peggy had caught Ronald in another lie.