No Matter How Loud I Shout (53 page)

Eventually, some deputies arrive to escort him from the lower levels of the courthouse to a large courtroom upstairs, where he sits in his orange HRO jumpsuit, not sure what is about to happen, sweaty and chilled in the air-conditioned room, scared to death. He knows his case is set for sentencing, but that's been true for the last several hearings, and it's always been delayed for one reason or another, a maddening source of both relief and anxiety. When he is told that his attorney from the Public Defender's Office, Al Johnson, is on vacation and won't be there today, he figures another continuance is in the offing, and that combination of disappointment and relief sweeps over him again.

But, instead, a colleague of Johnson's who knows very little about Geri's case—and knows Geri not at all—says everything's set, he'll sit in, we'll wind it all up today.

Geri later recalls not being sure what was going on, but he nods, okay, let's do it. After more than a year in Juvenile Hall, the notion of getting his life moving again—and avoiding another bout of fear in the holding tank—is a powerful one, and he shoves aside his unease at the unfamiliar person representing him in court. He barely knew Johnson's name, anyway, he tells himself—it wasn't like they had any deep relationship.

But whatever he expected to happen at the sentencing is not what he gets. There is no discussion of his performance in Juvenile Hall, the earning of his high school diploma, his work in theater and music, the fact that a lineup of counselors and staff members and volunteers would happily testify on his behalf. There is no submission of his poems or stories or plays. The favorable report he received from his three-month CYA evaluation is barely mentioned; Johnson later admits he never even took it out of the envelope.

Instead, there is just a cut-and-dried discussion between prosecutor, judge, and defense lawyer about his plea bargain reached months earlier. The murder charge was dropped, the lawyers remind the judge, replaced by a single count of attempted murder and a negotiated mid-range sentence of twelve years and four months. Judge Robert Gustaveson closes the deal, sets the sentence, and orders Geri housed at CYA, like other state prison inmates his age who are well behaved.

Don't worry about it, the substitute lawyer says, with time off for good behavior, and if you keep out of trouble, you'll serve your whole sentence in CYA—out in seven years, maybe less.

The hearing is over and Geri is back in the holding tank in the space of five minutes. “I didn't even have time to get my seat warm,” he says later, back at the hall.

Once he has time to think about what happened in court, Geri becomes deeply disappointed about the hearing and his sentence. Several counselors at the hall had told him he had a good shot at getting the coveted YA number, rather than the state prison M number he ended up with. One could have meant freedom in four years or so; now he'll be lucky to get out in seven years. And, all that time, he will have to worry that one misstep, one fight, one detention officer who takes a dislike to him, could spell his transfer to state prison. You don't have to start trouble to get nailed, Geri knows. Sometimes just being there is enough. It's like basketball, where the ref misses the first foul, then spots the retaliation; the person defending himself in a prison fight just as often looks like the aggressor. And even if he keeps his nose clean, there have also been rumors that budget cuts could end up eliminating some spots at CYA for kids with M numbers—it is so much cheaper to put them in state prison at twenty thousand dollars a year per inmate versus thirty-two thousand a year at overcrowded CYA.

When Geri tells everyone in the class about his experience in court, I promise to find out why he was treated in such a peremptory way. And it turns out the reason Geri did not get his YA number is because no one ever asked for it. Geri's lawyer did not request Judge Gustaveson to consider returning Geri to the juvenile system and committing him to CYA, rather than prison—even though Geri appears to be as ideal a candidate for such a sentence as there is.

“We didn't ask because you can't do that,” Deputy Public Defender Al Johnson tells me after returning from vacation, his desk piled high with cases, his time occupied largely by California's new Three Strikes and You're
Out adult sentencing law. “Once you're in the adult system, that's where you stay. He can only be
housed
at CYA.”

The lawyer is aghast when shown Section 1731.5 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code, which says a judge
can
commit to CYA anyone under the age of twenty-one who has not been convicted of first-degree murder, and who has gotten a favorable three-month evaluation. Such a commitment essentially undoes a kid's transfer to adult court.

“I didn't know that law existed,” the lawyer says, flustered. “What can I say? It was incompetent of me not to ask for that.”

But after a few moments, Johnson thinks it over and assumes a different posture, defending his work on behalf of Geri and taking the position that it really doesn't matter in the final analysis. “No judge out here would do that anyway, even if I had put on a full-court press to get it. Pomona is too conservative.”

Johnson says that the important thing was negotiating a plea bargain for Geri that eliminated the potential life sentence he had over his head. Going to trial could well have cost Geri his entire future.

“I was looking at a young man who I liked and who was talented, and I think we got a very good result. It's the best we could have hoped for. . . . Sure, I agree that there's better ways we could spend our money. In seven years, it's going to cost us $210,000 to keep him there. I think we could get more bang for the buck sending him off to college, or if we had invested in improving his life nine years ago. But we have to deal with reality. This is the best possible outcome for him.”

Still, even if Johnson's assessment is correct, the public defender's failure to at least ask for commitment to CYA, along with his failure to present witnesses and evidence of Geri's good works and behavior, provides firm grounds for appeal and a new sentencing hearing. Other kids with far more serious charges have been committed to CYA from adult court, even in conservative branches of LA adult court—one tagger in the writing class, convicted at trial of a cold-blooded execution murder far more serious than Geri's crime, won such a commitment a month earlier. And he got it from a branch of the Los Angeles Superior Court in the city of Norwalk—a courthouse so conservative and generally harsh in sentencing that the kids in the hall call it “No-Walk.”

When I explain all this to an attorney in the public defender's appeals section, she promises to investigate Geri's case and Johnson's handling of it, sounding confident in her ability to help Geri. Johnson, however, is outraged by this interference, and refuses to talk about the case further. Then
the appeals lawyer calls back and says no appeal will be filed in Geri's case—not because it would lose, but because it probably would succeed, thereby so irritating the judge on the case that he might retaliate by giving Geri an even harsher sentence.

“I can definitely see a judge saying, Screw this kid,” the appeals attorney says. “This kid ought to get down and kiss Al Johnson's toes for getting him this deal. He was looking at serious time. He ought to be happy with what he's got.”

Geri shrugs this off, a sad smile on his face, though he admits to being amazed that some lawyer who doesn't know him thinks he should be happy about a twelve-year prison sentence. “Easy for her to sit in an office and say that,” he says. “She gets to go home every day.”

Sister Janet asks Geri if he would like her to try to find him a new lawyer to check out his case, but, after thinking about it a few days, he says thank you, but no, he's afraid that the appeals lawyer could be right, that it might just make things worse for him. The climate of public opinion is so angry and fearful now, he has been told, that it's not worth the risk. Adult court judges have been denounced and targeted for recall for committing kids to CYA, making such sentences even less likely than before. “I'll just do my time,” Geri says. “And I'll do my best.”

·  ·  ·

Every year in the United States, about 2.3 million kids under eighteen are arrested, shoplifters to murderers. This is a frighteningly large number—and one that, given a recent baby boomlet that is swelling the ranks of teenagers, is destined to grow.
¹
But it is also a deceptive number, for once these boys and girls are in custody, they enter something the juvenile justice experts call “The Funnel.”

At the mouth of The Funnel, big and fat, are those 2.3 million kids. But about a third never go beyond arrest—their cases are dropped, never forwarded to court, the kids “counseled and released.” That leaves 1.5 million kids.

Each of them goes on to meet the Intake Officer, and the Funnel contracts further. Half of the 1.5 million kids referred by police for further action get dropped at the next stop—no Juvenile Court, no prosecution, their cases either dismissed outright or dispensed with through unsupervised probation, followed by dismissal. Seven hundred and fifty thousand arrested kids—whom the police wanted to prosecute—told to go home as if nothing happened. The Funnel is too small to accommodate them. They spill over and are lost.

That leaves the remaining three-quarters of a million kids to be formally charged in Juvenile Court. But the passage narrows even further here, and of those that are left, a tiny fraction (one in a hundred) go to adult court, and another four out of ten are dismissed or placed on informal probation by the court itself, with little or no supervision. A few of these kids are like Hugh, innocents falsely charged, but the vast majority are dropped simply because their offenses are deemed too minor or their cases too difficult to try, patients passed over as if this were triage in an emergency room: attend to the bleeders first, and let the rest sit and wait.

The Funnel continues to shrink for the remainder who go on to trial or plea bargains in Juvenile Court, with more dismissals and releases winnowing their numbers—the car thieves and graffiti vandals whose witnesses don't show, the molesters who walk because the victim is too disabled to testify.

At the very end of The Funnel, 330,000 kids out of the 2.3 million arrested are left to have their cases disposed of through probation, foster homes, or detention of some kind. Of the kids who enter The Funnel in handcuffs and are referred by police for prosecution, only 22 percent actually end up facing a meaningful consequence at the end (and that's assuming formal probation constitutes a “meaningful consequence”—a debatable assumption at best).

Strip away all the rhetoric about tough new laws and longer sentences and police crackdowns, and this is the bottom line on juvenile crime: When a kid is arrested, he or she can be assured that there is less than a one in four chance something is going to happen to them. Three out of four times, they will walk away. They'll stay on The Outs.
²

Simple priorities are at work here. There are not enough courtrooms, detention facilities, or probation officers to adequately handle that one out of four cases, much less the three out of four it ought to be for the system to really have an effect. This is why, in Los Angeles, the 16 percent of kids who account for the majority of juvenile crimes can be arrested four or five times before any firm measures are taken. It is a futile set of priorities decried by everyone from the novice attorneys trying their cases here to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who speaks passionately about society's refusal to put its children first and to build and pay for a system that works. And yet it is a set of priorities that has so far proven intractable and inescapable, and it is bringing the system down.

Even with The Funnel firmly in place, winnowing the cases down to a fraction, there are still too many delinquents flooding the dockets in most
cities. In Los Angeles, the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys can't remember individual kids anymore, or faces or histories. They look at you as if you're insane if you name a juvenile and ask what happened with his or her case. “I can't keep their names straight for one day, much less kids from last month or last year,” Peggy Beckstrand candidly admits. “They all run together.” It is a comment that might not cause a second thought in adult court, but somehow it doesn't seem right in Juvenile; even Peggy admits that. “It's not supposed to be that way, but it is,” she says.

Some of the more unusual and momentous cases might stand out, of course, but even then, only because the judge or the lawyers remember the facts of the crime, not the identity or character of the kid in question. A lawyer will sit down in the back of the courtroom and ask someone sitting in the next seat, “Is that the kid who killed his mother and left her face down on a heating grate for two days?” Or “There goes the kid who broke into thirty-two cars parked at the airport in a single day.” Or “That's the girl who stuck her newborn baby in a suitcase and threw it in a Dumpster, but someone found the baby before it died. And, now, can you believe it, she wants custody?”

You can hear the lurid details of dozens of such cases in the back of every courtroom at Thurgood Marshall or in the hallways of Los Padrinos, discussed in hushed whispers by bored lawyers and cops and probation officers hoping to pass the time, trying to see if their companions retain any ability to be shocked, like medical students playing with cadavers. It is part of an attitude that increasingly permeates this place, the tendency to deal with the crime, not the kid. Do you really want to lock up petty thieves? the defense attorney asks. Aren't there better ways to spend the court's meager resources? Do you really want to let armed robbers free on probation? the prosecutor asks, just as sincerely. Isn't it better to lock them away to ensure public safety? The kids have been reduced to categories.