No Matter How Loud I Shout (25 page)

But Scarlett is not so easily convinced. The death penalty should never have been mentioned at all, he says. It was wrong to bring it up with a juvenile. It doesn't matter that Ronald's confession is too detailed to be anything but the truth, the judge decides. Ronald could have been coerced by what he perceived to be a threat, Scarlett says.

Peggy tries to argue the point further, but the judge rapidly seems to lose interest, interrupting her repeatedly to take care of other court business. Trials in Juvenile Court, even murder trials, are not like the solemn events seen in adult court, where interruptions, even stray sounds, can send judges flying into rages. In adult court, interrupting testimony and argument to handle other matters while a trial is in progress would be unthinkable. There is a simple reason for this, beyond courtroom decorum. When life and liberty and public safety are at stake, causes in which both the individual on trial and society as a whole have profound interest, it is only right that the court give its undivided attention to the case at hand.

Juvenile Court enjoys no such luxury and maintains no such illusions. The courtrooms never stop bustling, with lawyers standing off to the side whispering into phones or huddled in conversations, and with judges juggling many cases simultaneously, even though their task is much more complex than an adult court judge's. Juvenile court judges must act as both judge and jury, deciding both legal and factual questions in a case. Yet their distractions are constant.

While Peggy tries to argue that Ronald was lying about receiving threats in the police interrogation room, Scarlett stops her no less than five times to hear other cases. He gives probation to a thirteen-year-old boy charged with graffiti vandalism. He congratulates a graduate from a county detention camp who has just been accepted to a community college. He placates an angry father who has waited a day and a half in court for his son's case to be heard, only to be told to wait some more. Then comes Max, a tiny kid, no more than ten, with a refugee's arms and hollow eyes, here to be arraigned for assaulting his mother. He has been in Juvenile Hall for several days, and his public defender wants him sent home. “But I like the hall,” the boy whispers. The way he says it, so plaintive and stark, everyone in the courtroom stops for a second to look at him, the kid who wants to be in the lockup. The public defender shrugs and says fine. Max can continue living at the detention hall, the happiest home he has known in years.

“Okay, continue,” Scarlett finally tells Peggy as Max leaves the room. She takes one look at the sour expression on the judge's face, and quickly wraps up her futile argument. The judge listens to Ronald's lawyer for a few minutes, nodding and agreeing the entire time, even repeating Cooper at times.

“There is no reason for bringing up the death penalty,” Cooper says. “Why would he even mention it?”

“Why would you even mention it?” Scarlett echoes, staring at Peggy.

Scarlett is an affable, compassionate man, slow to anger and easy to get along with. But along with a perception that he is lenient in sentencing kids, he is known for holding police investigators to a very high standard—unfairly high, some prosecutors say, though defense attorneys disagree—and he unflinchingly punishes them whenever he judges the police guilty of misconduct. He rules that threats and coercion led to the Duncan confession. Despite Ronald's recollection that the death penalty only came up once, Scarlett concludes that a threat was made during the gap in the tape, and that the police are lying about it. Using the rules of evidence imported from adult court by the Gault case so many years earlier, Scarlett makes his ruling.

“There's only one way to interpret what he says at the end of the tape. I believe the minor. . . . Something was promised. Threats were made. The statement is excluded.”

A short time later, the trial recesses for the weekend. The public defenders who had gathered in back of the courtroom walk out into the hall with Cooper, congratulating their old boss on his victory, notwithstanding the fact that the ruling could mean freedom for a killer. Peggy also congratulates her opponent. Then, as Ronald's parents gaze at her with undisguised hatred, his mother actually moaning aloud, Peggy announces that she would now have to give the getaway driver Jason legal immunity. He would be her next witness.

“You've got to be kidding,” Cooper says. “He's the one you should be prosecuting. You're going to give immunity to someone who would be eligible for the death penalty if convicted, so you can get a kid who will be out in eight years? Come on, Peggy. That doesn't make any sense.”

“You haven't given me any choice,” she tells Cooper quietly. She glances at the Duncan family, and hears Ronald's mother saying something about cops taking care of cops, a reference to Jason and the fact that he is the godson of a police sergeant. “I want Ronald. He's the one who blew the heads off of two human beings, not Jason. It's not about who can do the most time. It's about who is most culpable.”

Cooper nods at the Duncans. “They don't understand that. They don't think Jason should get a walk.”

“Well,” Peggy says, “tell them it's your fault. Tell them you're too good a lawyer.”

She walks off then, an angry buzz in her wake, a long weekend of work ahead.

·  ·  ·

Now Jason Gueringer is the key to Peggy's case. Investigators first found him a day after the murders, when an Inglewood police sergeant named Harold Moret came forward with a bizarre story. Moret told investigators that his son, Peter, had once worked at the ice cream shop owned by the victims. A few weeks earlier, a neighborhood boy who had taken his place, Ronald Duncan, had told Peter he was angry at the shop owners for docking his pay for being late. He told Peter he planned to kill them. Moret said Ronald even asked about borrowing a van to use as a getaway vehicle. Sergeant Moret had seen the wanted posters put up in the wake of the murders. The van police were seeking in the case sounded just like one that belonged to a friend of his son's—a young man named Jason Gueringer, who happened to be Moret's godson. Ronald, Moret told the investigators, often tried to tag along with the older Peter and Jason.

The investigators then left Moret and drove down the block to Jason's house, where they were stunned to find the eighteen-year-old Air Force cadet in the act of busily scrubbing down the interior of his van. He looked up and appeared stricken by the sight of the two detectives walking toward him. Then they saw the sponge and bucket of murky water he was using were tinged pink with blood.

Faced with imminent arrest, Jason admitted he was engaged in a cover-up, but he swore he had nothing to do with the murders. He had been driving home from his girlfriend's house that night when Ronald ran out into the street and flagged him down. When he pulled over, Jason said, Ronald climbed into the van. Covered with blood and carrying a shotgun, Ronald had exclaimed, “Go, go, go. Take me home! Man, I just shot somebody.” As a panicked Jason drove, Ronald peeled off his blood-soaked shirt and threw it out the window.

Jason said he had kept silent afterward, fearful—and correctly so—that he would appear more like an accomplice than an unwitting bystander. He had stuck to his story for the past year, but he would tell it again on the witness stand only if he received legal immunity, since the conduct he would be admitting to was a crime. By saying he knowingly drove a
murderer home, then covered up the bloody evidence, he was admitting to being an accomplice after the fact. And there it had rested for the past year, with Jason graduating high school and joining the Air Force.

That he was never charged for this was, to the Duncan family, more signs of favoritism. The sheriff's investigators, however, said they always held off on the relatively minor accomplice charges because they suspected Jason of being far more involved. For one thing, the witness in the neighborhood, as well as Marvin, both said the van had been waiting for Ronald. And Jason's girlfriend said she never saw him that night. Early on, the sheriff's investigators made it clear that they would cut Ronald a deal if he rolled over on Jason, suggesting lack of evidence, not favoritism, was behind the failure to nail a cop's godson. Ronald, however, refused to give up his adult friend. Detectives never could find any hard evidence against Jason, and he was never charged with the murder. But neither was he cleared.

Now Peggy felt she needed him, and she was willing to take the chance that he had been telling the truth, despite some problems with his story. She had to go over her immediate supervisor's head to get an okay to offer Jason immunity, then get him on an airplane to Los Angeles from his new Air Force post in Colorado. Peggy went to the airport and picked up the lanky teenager herself, went over his statement with him and Investigator Carr, then dropped him off, satisfied that he had remained consistent in his story. “Just tell me the truth,” she cautioned him as they finished for the evening, “and you'll be okay. The only thing that will get you in trouble now is if you lie.”

Jason hadn't said anything to that. He just nodded.

At midnight on Sunday, just after Peggy took four aspirins and climbed into bed, dreading her next day in court, Jason calls. Peggy gives all her key witnesses her home phone number.

“Is my immunity agreement going to be in writing?” he asks, strain, perhaps even panic, constricting his voice like a sneaker tied too tight.

Peggy feels a knot settle in her stomach. “We'll make a record in open court. We're not going to screw you, Jason. The only thing it won't protect you from is lying.”

Jason remains silent a long time. Peggy holds the phone and waits. Finally, Jason says, “We've got to talk.”

“Can't it wait until morning?”

“No, I want to do it now.”

“I can't,” Peggy says. “I can't talk to you without the investigator present. Be in my office at seven-thirty.”

Jason reluctantly agrees to wait. Peggy knows she won't sleep that night.

The first thing she asks Jason the next morning is “You didn't shoot them, did you?”

“No.”

“You didn't know Ronald was going to shoot them, did you?”

“No.”

“What, then?” Peggy asks, not allowing herself to feel relief at these two answers to questions that had tortured her through the night.

“I knew he was going to rob them. I was in on it. I was waiting for him. I was the getaway driver.”

Peggy blanches. Jason has just admitted to being part of an armed robbery that ended in murder. Jason, an adult, who could face the death penalty in a capital case, has, in effect, admitted to murder.

And in her zeal to get Ronald Duncan, she knows she still is going to have to give this killer his freedom. Because as bad as he is, Ronald is worse.

She stalks from her office, then the building, to pace outside in the cool morning air, hating her job more than ever, the rational part of her insisting that she has no choice, but still feeling as if nothing in this juvenile system works, feeling as if she were drowning.

I was born on my favorite spot.

It's comfortable or mean, dark or bright, happy or sad.

I can go there when I want, how I want, and who I want.

This place scars my heart with good and bad.

This place is my mind.

ELIAS ELIZONDO,
Central Juvenile Hall

Bellflower, California

Pace School for the Disabled

Spring 1994

There she is. Andre can see her through the bus window, Walkman hanging from her neck by a cord, music blasting through the headphones at brain-jellying volume, body juking and jiving in the wheelchair. He watches as her eyes focus on his yellow bus, the vacant expression vanishing from her round face, replaced by an enormous smile. He sees her struggle to keep her head from lolling, to keep her hands from flapping uselessly at her sides, and she succeeds, after a fashion, Andre is happy to see. Then he watches her lips form the word “Andre,” knowing she is calling to him, her tiny voice lost in the sound of diesel engine and spitting air brakes as the bus grinds to a stop.

He feels himself smile in a way that once would have been impossible for him, tickled by the idea that she is so eagerly awaiting him. Waiting for him to kiss her cheek in greeting. Waiting so she could shout, “Rock and roll!” over and over as he pushes her chair, knowing he would smile and clap at her mastery of this one sentence. Waiting for him to wheel her to class, to feed her lunch, to wipe her chin, to arrange her chair in just the right spot—“Our special spot,” Andre whispers each day—so the sun warms her face. The pleasures are few in Miriam's small, limited world. What few there are, Andre helps provide.

The bus door creaks open. As Andre rises from his seat and jostles with the
other delinquent boys headed for the door, he is gripped by a familiar sensation, a feeling that this bus is his conduit between two warring worlds. The wheezing sound of the bus shutting down reminds him of a movie he once saw, about an outpost deep undersea where the inhabitants spent hours adjusting to the crushing pressure by sitting inside a claustrophobic yellow tank not quite big enough for the six people inside it. Images of valves turning, air hissing from metal pipes: the bus, Andre imagines, is his decompression chamber. He walks onto it a member of Varrio Norwalk, master of the One-ways, the cramped, one-way streets that form the heart of his barrio and the turf of his gang, where a vato strong of heart and fast with his hands commands respect. Andre knows how to break into a car and start it without a key in forty-six seconds—he had timed it once when he was thirteen. He knows how to drive those cars down the One-ways so no cop could catch him, except for the last couple times, when the strange thoughts and distractions he had begun to feel with alarming regularity made him careless. And he knows how to drive slowly, with purpose, his homeboys peering out through tinted windows, looking for enemies from the rival gangs, so that they might shoot first.