No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes Read Free Book Online Page A

needs.” Someone else calls out, “Amen,” as if she were in church, and a slight smile plays across Dorn’s lips at this. His voice grows even louder and deeper.
    â€œYou’re stealing from yourself, no one else,” he tells Robert. “You’re stealing your own future. If you keep on the way you’re headed, you can only end up in one of two places: the cemetery, or the penitentiary.”
    He pauses then, lowering his voice, taking off his glasses. “I can send you to a place where you have to go to school every day, but I can’t make you learn, son. You have to want to learn. I think the world of you, son. I love you. I’m sending you to camp to give you a chance to decide to help yourself. Because I love you.”
    This is vintage Dorn. The parents in the audience—Robert’s mother among them—appear awed. They have never heard anything like this newly arrived judge before. None of his brethren crack down on truancy this way. The same woman who said Amen before says it again. But most of the kids in the courtroom look bored with all this talk of learning and the future. Some of them have heard the cemetery or penitentiary threat five or six times already, and their eyes are wandering. One girl yawns, then grins at a sharply dressed young man with a gold earring and a long rap sheet who has blown her a kiss from across the aisle. As for Robert, as tough a nut for his age as any kid who comes before the court, he seems unmoved, not quite concealing a smirk as he is ushered through the door to the holding tank. “It’s not like they can take anything from me,” he says later, back with his homeboys at Juvenile Hall. “Ain’t got nothin’ to give. Nothin’ but time, that is. And I been doin’ time my whole life, one way or the other.”
    Still, whether or not it had any real impact on Robert, this heartfelt lecture of Dorn’s was a bravura performance. Certainly, the parents were impressed, maybe a few of the kids, even the often-jaded prosecutor Peggy Beckstrand. But the scene is marred in the end by one slight jolt of mundane reality, a little thing, really, that nevertheless seems emblematic of the despair and futility that inhabits this courthouse so much more often than hope, a stark reminder that the crush of juvenile crime can reduce this system to an anonymous assembly line. After the sentence has been pronounced, the clerk grabs Robert’s file—one of sixty cases the judge will hear this day—but Dorn suddenly realizes he forgot some minor point, and he asks for it back. He stutters oddly as he does this, and it takes a second for those present to understand why. Then it becomes clear: though he may indeed love Robert, Judge Dorn does not know his name.
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    During the pause between cases, Peggy Beckstrand approaches a public defender manning the defense table. They need to confer on a murder case they are trying together—the People v. Ronald Duncan. The trial of the kid accused of murdering the owners of a nearby Baskin Robbins store has become the most infamous—and certainly the most brutal—case currently on display in the Inglewood courthouse. Although her duties as deputy in charge are primarily administrative, Peggy is handling the case personally, unwilling to entrust it to one of the young DAs barely out of law school assigned to her office. Something about the way that short, squat kid with the scraggly goatee walks grinning and waving into court for each hearing—as if he was in on a curfew violation, not a double homicide—just infuriates Peggy. She is determined to win his conviction, despite the absolute certainty that, no matter how great her labors, she will not find the outcome either satisfying or just.
    â€œWe’re supposed to set a trial date today,” Peggy reminds the PD, knowing the lawyer will complain about needing more time,