No Matter How Loud I Shout (51 page)

The twelfth murder in the Venice gang war happened on a Sunday night, vicious and random like all the rest, a retaliation against the Shoreline Crips for the murder of a Venice 13 member a few weeks before. A stolen Jeep Cherokee with three Venice 13 gangsters inside drove slowly by someone they believed was a Shoreline Crip, a teenager standing on the sidewalk arguing with his girlfriend and the girlfriend's sister. The car turned around, came back, and stopped. Without uttering a word, the driver produced an assault rifle and pulled the trigger. Eleven shots later, the Crip was dead, the girlfriend was shot in the stomach and buttocks (she recovered), and the sister was weeping, screaming, and flagging down a patrol car.

A few minutes later, a woman who had seen the shooting and who had followed the Jeep in her own car, told another police patrol what she had seen. A short time after that, the police spotted the Jeep, now with only two people inside. After a high-speed chase, the car stopped. Shy Boy got out and was arrested, but the other person in the Jeep managed to get the car moving and escaped. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, the original driver of the car, an adult gang member who had tried to escape on foot earlier, was found and arrested. The sister of the wounded woman identified that man as the shooter with the assault rifle. She could not identify the others in the car, nor could the wounded woman.

Nevertheless, when it came time to file the case, police reports prepared by the LAPD detective leading the case identified Shy Boy as a shooter,
claiming he had been in the car at the time of the murder, and that he had confessed on tape to murder. Based on these assertions, Peggy Beckstrand's office charged him in Juvenile Court with first-degree murder and multiple counts of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and discharging a firearm at a person from a moving vehicle—charges that would put him in CYA until age twenty-five.

The evidence seemed so convincing that Sherry Gold seriously considered taking an early manslaughter plea in exchange for his testimony against the other suspects in the shooting. But Shy Boy told her no, he would not rat on his homeboys, that he would stand up for them and take the blame for the killing. Sherry tried to explain to him that older gang members exploit young kids all the time, hoping they'll take the heat in Juvenile Court so the older criminals can avoid adult trials and possible life or death sentences. But neither she nor Shy Boy's mother could get through to him.

“You think that'll prove what a man you are?” Sherry said. “It proves how stupid you are. They're using you.” But Shy Boy just turned away. He finally told her that even if he wanted to talk, he wouldn't. “They'd kill me,” he whispered.

So, back against the wall, Sherry launched her own investigation and found, once again, that the evidence was not what it initially appeared to be in a juvenile murder case. Contrary to the police reports, there was nothing to show Shy Boy had been in the car at the time of the murder. He could have gotten in the car when the driver—the man with the assault rifle—got out after speeding away from the murder scene. Shy Boy was, in fact, behind the wheel when the police stopped the Jeep, but he definitely had not been driving when the murder occurred. And none of the witnesses to the murder recognized him as being in the car.

As for his supposedly taped confession, when Sherry got it transcribed—something neither the police nor the DA on the case had done—she found Shy Boy had not admitted to killing anyone after all, but merely said he had fired a pistol from inside the car. And there were no pistols used in the murder—just the adult gang member's assault rifle. However, Sherry found out that police dispatch records for that night showed someone else had reported being shot at with a pistol in a separate incident close by the murder scene. Perhaps that was the shooting Shy Boy had been referring to. This didn't exactly make him out to be a model citizen, Sherry Gold decided, but neither did it make him a murderer.

Had there been hard evidence that Shy Boy was in the car at the time
of the fatal shooting, Peggy Beckstrand probably would have insisted he be tried for murder. Being in the car, armed with a pistol, with a fellow gang member firing fatal shots from an assault rifle, was more than enough to sustain a conviction against Shy Boy as an “aider and abettor”—a fully culpable accomplice. There were plenty of juveniles in CYA and state prison right now for doing little more than riding in a car with a killer—Scrappy, for instance, and Elias Elizondo.

But prosecutors can't put Shy Boy in the car at the right moment, and that saves him from eleven years in CYA. Given Shy Boy's youth and otherwise clean record, Peggy agrees with Sherry Gold that the evidence isn't there. Once again, she drops a murder charge. Shy Boy agrees to plead guilty to a single count of firing a gun from a car at another person, and Judge Dorn sentences him to camp for at least a year.

Instead of going to CYA or—had new laws lowering the fitness age been in place—to state prison, Shy Boy enters a camp with intensive school and counseling programs designed to lure kids away from street gangs. Whether this program will work for Shy Boy, no one can say. But afterward, when the court session ends, Shy Boy's parents cry and embrace in the hallway and promise Sherry they will hold their son's feet to the fire and keep him away from the gangsters. Then Sherry walks down to the lockup to say good-bye to her young client—he had made her promise to come down after the sentencing.

“I just wanted to thank you,” he tells her. “You never gave up on me.”

The lawyer tells him that the best thanks would be never to make work for her again. He smiles and nods and seems to agree. At least, that's what Sherry tells herself.

“It looked so bleak there for a while, but it's a classic example of the prosecution not being able to prove its case,” Sherry Gold says later, parked in her usual seat at the luncheonette across the street, already at work on still another murder. “Yet justice was done in this case. If they had been able to prove their case, justice would not have been done. He would have spent eleven years in CYA, which is just prison by another name, and he would be gone, destroyed.”

When Sherry Gold finishes her cup of brackish diner coffee and crosses back to court, she meets her latest client, one of two juveniles accused of the cold-blooded murder of an elderly woman who had been sitting at a bus stop after doing volunteer work at an institute for the blind. The killing has aroused considerable outrage in the community. Around the courthouse, they're already calling it “The Angel of Mercy Murder.” At
first blush, Sherry almost wishes she could prosecute this kid instead of defend him, but then she reminds herself how wrong first impressions can be in Juvenile Court.

“My name is Sherry Gold. I've been appointed to represent you,” she whispers to the fifteen-year-old, as he stands handcuffed next to his crime partner, waiting for his arraignment before Commissioner Polinsky.

The kid turns to Sherry, sneering with contempt, unaware that he has been blessed through sheer luck of the draw with one of the best court-appointed attorneys working at Thurgood Marshall. “I wanna real lawyer,” he hisses. “You work for the state. My mother's gonna hire a
real
lawyer.”

Sherry Gold tries very hard not to say “Good.”

·  ·  ·

Three weeks, three murder cases, all filed against innocent kids, all dropped by prosecutors when the errors were pointed out by defense lawyers. In a place where presumption of innocence often seems turned on its head, these cases are extraordinary. And yet there is no uproar, no demands for reform—as the inability to try fourteen-year-olds as adults has sparked—no rethinking of the slow dismantling of the juvenile justice system now under way here and nationwide. The public remains ignorant of these confidential proceedings, and within the system, no one seems to blink at these developments.

Yet, as everyone involved in these three cases agrees, any one of these kids could have gone to prison unjustly had they not received exceptional lawyers to represent them—representation that was never available in the original, informal Juvenile Court, and which still remains tough to come by in the current second-class system. Even allowing such kids to be transferred to adult court—something many lawyers barely try to fight because it is a battle so rarely won—could have been disastrous for these kids. Theoretically, they would have had just as much chance of disproving the charges in adult court as in Juvenile, but the stakes are so much higher there, the climate so much harsher, the pressure to plead guilty to some lesser charge to avoid a life in prison so great, that the outcomes could have been very different. Prosecutors and defense lawyers know that, unlike the judges hearing cases in Juvenile Court, the juries who decide adult cases rarely have any sympathy for defendants accused of being gun-wielding gang members, no matter how shaky the prosecution case may be. Prosecutors depend on this factor; defense attorneys fear it. As Geri Vance's lawyer told him:
Black kid with gun? You're their worst nightmare, pal. I know you say you're innocent, but take my advice: Take the deal.

At the same time the three erroneous murder cases are coming apart at Thurgood Marshall Branch, another case raises even more questions about the wisdom of pushing more and more kids into adult court, though for very different reasons. This time, there are no problems with the attempted murder case against Mark Lancaster—this seventeen-year-old is clearly guilty, the evidence overwhelming. And yet his case is no less troubling than the other three, providing yet another unheeded lesson about the juvenile justice system.

A few days before Leon and Hugh were arrested in their murder cases, Mark Lancaster spent all day drinking beer with friends and smoking
primo
—marijuana joints laced with cocaine. A chronic truant, he was failing all his classes and had been abusing alcohol and drugs, even sniffing glue, for years. His parents, now in their fifties, with two older daughters with college degrees and solid, independent lives, weren't sure what to make of Mark, who once had been such a good student, and who even now had them convinced he was a health nut far more interested in vitamins and exercise than drugs. With his odd, choppy haircut, ratty ponytail, and scruffy brown mustache perched unappealingly above pale lips, Mark had been drifting toward nowhere for years, though he had never been in trouble with the law.

But that day of drinking and
primo
was different. He left his friends and went for a walk, finding himself standing in front of a gas station. He approached an attendant and asked for change. Then, when the man's back was turned, he abruptly plunged a sharpened screwdriver into the attendant's back. Mark always kept this little homemade weapon in his pocket, though he never told anyone why.

The blade hit bone and bounced off, clattering to the ground and causing little more than a slight cut and bruise, though a difference of a few inches could have been fatal. Mark tried to run, but another attendant and a customer at the gas station caught him, then turned him over to police. Mark told detectives he had wanted to kill the attendant because he recognized him as the murderer of his best friend years before. Mark told them his friend had been shot in the back while trying to steal a six-pack from a liquor store, and that the gas station attendant looked just like the man who did it.

“I wish I had killed him now,” Mark told the police. “If I had a gun, I would have killed him.”

The police quickly ascertained that the gas station attendant had never worked in a liquor store. They could find no record of a shooting such
as the one Mark described, nor had he ever mentioned it to his parents or other relatives. The police decided it was just a cover story. Mark later admitted that he had stabbed the wrong person—“Something in my head just snapped”—and that he was sorry, though he insisted that his friend really had been killed in a beer robbery. He must have still been high on the
primo
, he said, and mistook the attendant for the killer. No one believed him, though. The police said he did not seem high at all when they arrested him. Peggy Beckstrand authorized a fitness motion to ship him to adult court for attempted murder.

At the hearing, a psychiatrist testified that Mark should remain in Juvenile Court to receive treatment for his drug and alcohol problems. His crime was neither sophisticated nor particularly grave, the doctor suggested, having been rather feeble, poorly planned, and causing no serious injury. He was probably still high from drinking and doing drugs earlier in the day, the doctor suggested.

But Commissioner Gary Polinsky found the doctor's report infuriating. “You're accepting his word that he was under the influence, when there is no evidence of that,” the commissioner spat, surprising the psychiatrist, whom he normally receives warmly. “What can you see here other than that he is a conniving, cruel individual who attempted to stab somebody in the back? That's the interpretation that I see here. . . . He's done nothing but lie, and has shown no remorse.”

Mark's parents, both in their fifties, sit in the courtroom wearing red windbreakers, worry lines mapping pale faces. Mr. Lancaster, a former warehouse manager, has cancer, heart disease, and a bad back. He sits motionless, listening, and Mrs. Lancaster holds his hand and bites her lower lip. When the doctor is through, they get up and testify for their son, one by one, describing him as a good but troubled boy. It does no good. Mark avoids looking at them, stroking his mustache, biting a nail, disconnected from his surroundings, the same pose he maintains when a visibly disgusted Polinsky finds him unfit to be tried as a juvenile, and orders him shipped to adult court. “Is this not a hideously violent case?” he asks the boy's lawyer, then cuts her off, saying, “And what in the world mitigates that besides this story he concocted?”