No Matter How Loud I Shout (56 page)

Maybe, he later tells me, this is payback for all the bad things I've done before without getting caught. Haltingly, he describes how, years ago, he once watched a fellow gang member leave a party, drunk and furious, swearing he was going to go outside and kill a girl who had pissed him off. Scrappy did nothing to stop it, though he could have intervened with a word. The next day, the girl was found beaten to death on the sidewalk. Fourteen years old, killed for nothing. Scrappy sits hunched over at the hall, remembering, saying the guilt over this has eaten at him for years (though it never would occur to him to turn his friend in to the police—in Scrappy's universe, that would be dishonorable).

“Maybe God is punishing me for not doing nothing, you know?” he murmurs. “Maybe I'm paying for that by being here now for something I didn't do. I figure whatever happens now, maybe I'll deserve it, you know?”

Sitting in the hall's Special Handling Unit, the last stop for kids sentenced to adult time, he is smiling and calm and surprisingly at ease, given the long incarceration stretching out before him like an empty highway through the desert. He says he will try to use every program and service he can squeeze out of the system—particularly during the first leg of his sentence, which will be at CYA—to try and better himself, and to earn the earliest release possible. “If I give up on myself, I might as well just be dead,” he says. “I don't want to be dead.”

Then he gives me a copy of an essay he just wrote, one that tries to explain how he feels about how he came to be where he is. It is entitled “Regret.”

I stand looking out the window at the walls that separate me from the world. I see an old homeless man shuffling across the bridge. He walks with his head down as if he was going through some type of pain. A pain that won't let go. Much the same as the pain that clings onto a mother when she's not able to face she has lost a child.

The night merely lets me see that his hands are in his pockets. I wonder what he could be thinking. The word “regret” comes to mind. Is he now paying for a wrongdoing in his life? Does he regret? Or does the pain cause him to regret? Is he tired of experiencing the problems and the pain it causes? Does he hope to drift away—away to a place that would leave him
at peace? I sense in him the loneliness I feel, even though he finds himself in the world that has its freedom.

As I see the old man walk away, I stand there trying to hold the tears that water my eyes. But the feeling is so strong teardrops come gushing down, like a father trying to fight the tears at his son's funeral, but he eagers to weep.

I close my eyes, only to see a flashback of the time that caused me to go through this unwanted pain. I fall into a dream that burns my heart so slowly, as someone being tortured by a memory and aching at the visual memory of wrongdoing. I see the young man that departed from his mother and the wonderful dreams he wished to reach. The hopes and dreams the mother had for her child would never be reached. A mother never wishing to go through the pain of losing a child. The pain the mother goes through flashes off my body, like a light being turned on and off.

Experiencing the mother going through the awful pain causes me to force the words, “I regret” out. But is it easy just to say the words “I regret” and not feel any kind of physical, emotional, or mental pain? Has a person really regretted after saying the words? Do the words touch the deepest of a person's heart to really mean them? Or has the person only said the words because the pain doesn't seem to have an end to it? Does it only take one person to hurt another for the pain and loneliness to keep going in circles? Could the mother and lonely old man have done something in life to deserve to feel the pain and loneliness they feel?

As I open my eyes I sense life has its own way of teaching each person. If life is a learning experience, why lose a child, your freedom, and why feel hopeless to learn? Now I wonder: If people didn't feel pain after a wrongdoing, would they regret?

I
N
Inglewood, another normal day is unfolding at the Thurgood Marshall Branch of Los Angeles Juvenile Court. Peggy Beckstrand is filing five weapons charges against five kids, all of whom were caught carrying pistols onto the campus of the same junior high school during the same week.

She also finds herself helpless against a kid known on the street as “Sniper,” a member of an extremely violent street gang called Asian Mob Assassins. Though he is suspected of running stolen automatic weapons and of committing at least one murder and one attempted murder, Peggy can't prove anything but his illegal possession of two concealed semiautomatic pistols. In California, that remains a misdemeanor, even for juveniles, and the best she can do with Sniper is send him to camp for six months, assuming she can even convict him on the minor charge. Sniper thinks this is quite hilarious. “Why are they even bothering with this small-time crap?” he demands to know after his arraignment, casting an amused glance around the tired trappings of Thurgood Marshall. “Like I really care what goes on here.”

The public defenders, meanwhile, are up in arms again at Judge Dorn, this time for his practice of imposing one-day sentences to Juvenile Hall for every school day a probationer misses. For some insistently truant kids, this can add up to a month or more of detention by the time they are hauled into court—even though the public defenders believe the law limits such stretches of detention to a five-day maximum. They have begun papering Dorn again, but only on a very selective basis—minor cases where informal probation would be the sentence in most other courts, and Dorn's beloved status offender cases, a tactic that genuinely grates on him.

At the same time, next door, Commissioner Polinsky has been asked to put a scare into a fifteen-year-old boy whose once high grades and active participation in varsity sports have dropped precipitously, replaced by cut classes and long hours spent in front of the television. He is a handsome, curly-haired kid in baggy chinos and big black Nikes, his expression bored as Polinsky forces him to watch a morning of court action. Just before lunch, the commissioner orders the boy into chambers for a dressing-down. Next stop, Polinsky warns, could be Judge Dorn's status offender program if you don't wise up. Then we'll see how bored you look.

As the boy disappears into chambers, his father sits in the audience looking miserable, hoping this show of force (essentially toothless at this point) will help. “He tells me he knows the system can't do anything to him for cutting school,” the father says. “I only hope this convinces him otherwise.” An hour later, he leaves with his son, who looks less than impressed. But Dad is due back at work—as a judge in another branch of the Juvenile Court.

Meanwhile, downstairs in Judge Scarlett's courtroom, it is time for the final chapter in the Thirty-one Flavors murder case. Ronald Duncan is
due in for his disposition, a hearing that should be as cut and dried as George Trevino's—in its own way. But where the system was programmed to hammer George for a burglary no matter how deserving of leniency he might be, the system is just as arbitrarily programmed to be relatively lenient with Ronald Duncan for fatally shotgunning his two ice-cream store employers.

Scarlett looks blank when Duncan's name is called by his clerk. Too much time and too many other cases have passed his bench in the three months since Ronald's trial, and he doesn't remember the case or the boy. He looks at Deputy DA Hyman Sisman, transferred to this more sedate courtroom from Dorn's domain, and asks what the sentencing range is in the case. Peggy Beckstrand, sitting nearby, answers instead. “Twenty-five years to life times two, plus ten years for personal use of a firearm.”

Scarlett is startled for a moment, not expecting to hear from the deputy in charge, then says, “Oh, that's right, you tried this case.” He clears his throat and says, “The court will call the Ronald Duncan matter.”

In the gallery, Ronald's mother whispers, “Jesus,” and shuts her eyes. The bailiff brings out Ronald in his orange jumpsuit, grinning as always, waving to his relatives, who still cling stubbornly to their belief in the boy's innocence—or at least something close to innocence.

In preparation for this hearing, Ronald talked to a probation officer about the offense and his background, there being no remaining legal reason to assert his right to remain silent. At his lawyer's insistence, he also spoke to a court-appointed psychiatrist. Both PO and analyst generated similar, grimly negative reports about Ronald.

In both interviews, Ronald admitted that he lied in his court testimony, as well as in all his previous statements about the murders. He still insisted that he did not pull the trigger on the shotgun that obliterated the heads of Chuck and Adelina Rusitanonta, but now he has finally conceded that he was part of a plan to rob them at gunpoint. In his latest story, Ronald claims he and Jason Gueringer—the policeman's godson who received immunity and became Peggy's star witness—planned to stage the robbery at the ice-cream store. But Jason showed up late, Ronald told his interviewers. Frustrated, he and Jason followed the store owners' car, then tried to rob them when the car halted at a stop sign. When they resisted, Jason shot them, according to Ronald's new story. He said he and Jason were supposed to split the money later, but everything fell apart when the police were tipped off about Jason and his bloody van.

In telling this story, Ronald not only admitted being a perjurer—since
he had denied planning the robbery during his trial testimony—but he also was admitting to murder, whether he knew it or not. Even disregarding all the evidence that puts the gun in Ronald's hands and taking his newest story as literal truth, he is still guilty of murder for taking part in an armed robbery that resulted in two deaths. The felony murder rule makes him just as guilty; who pulled the trigger is irrelevant.

Ronald made no mention of being bullied, threatened, or coerced by the police into confessing. It was as if that had never happened.

When the probation officer asked Ronald if he thought there was anything wrong with planning an armed robbery against two people who had given him a job and had treated him with love and kindness, he said, “No. They were in business and they could always make more money.”

The probation officer reported that, even now, Ronald does not think he did anything wrong, and that he doesn't feel he deserves to be locked up at CYA, or anywhere else, for that matter.

The interview with the psychiatrist yielded similar results. The doctor described a home life torn by divorce, where Ronald lived with his father most of the time, and desperately missed his mother. He said he wet his bed until age twelve or thirteen, and he recalled getting in trouble for setting a fire—two indicators of a potentially disturbed and violent adolescent. He talked of receiving daily beatings for messing up in school, and recalled being kicked out of one junior high school for possessing crack cocaine, though the incident was never reported to the police. One of the baffling aspects of Ronald's case—his lack of any criminal record before he committed murder, a pattern seldom seen—was thereby explained. It wasn't that he had never done anything wrong before. He just never got caught.

More recently, while living in Juvenile Hall, Ronald's small-time membership in a tagging crew turned into full street gang membership in a Bloods gang, he proudly claimed during his psychiatric interview. He said he participated in at least one race riot in the hall.
¹

The psychiatrist urged the court to recommend an intensive therapy program for Ronald at CYA, so that he could be shown the need to take responsibility for his crimes. The probation officer—one of the top juvenile investigators at the department, known for taking on high-profile cases and researching them thoroughly—was far harsher.

“The minor cannot be trusted and is a habitual liar,” she told the court. “The minor has changed his story on numerous occasions and continues to do so even after being found guilty. The minor has even manipulated
his parents into thinking that he can do no wrong. . . . The minor needs to be punished to the full extent of the law . . . in a secure and structured environment, supervised twenty-four hours a day.”

There isn't really any question that this is exactly what will happen to Ronald. Because he was nine days short of his sixteenth birthday when he shot Chuck and Adelina, the law doesn't allow him to go to adult court. As a murderer, he has to be sentenced to life in prison, since the juvenile code mirrors the state's penal code. But as a juvenile, he has to be released at age twenty-five, at which age he walks out the door, free and clear, life sentence notwithstanding. No parole, no probation, no record. There is no room for any other sentence.

Still, Peggy Beckstrand and James Cooper get into a heated argument over whether Ronald should be sentenced concurrently to a total of twenty-five years to life for both murders, or whether the terms should be consecutive—“stacked,” to use courtroom slang—so the sentence becomes fifty years to life.