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

standard procedure in Juvenile Court. Nothing happens when scheduled. Nothing.
    â€œI’m going to need more time,” the defense lawyer says, eyeing her opponent cautiously. Peggy and the head public defender in Inglewood have been battling recently; the PD’s office just finished an unsuccessful attempt to have one of Peggy’s young prosecutors censured for misconduct. The fallout has left the two offices quibbling over the most routine matters, further slowing down a process that only crawls on its best day. “Is that going to be a problem?”
    Peggy knows there would be no point in fighting it. Defendants in JuvenileCourt, particularly those accused of murder, are pretty much entitled to unlimited delays, unlike prosecutors, who must be ready at the appointed hour, or lose. Besides, Peggy cannot find her star witness in the case, a potential disaster on the horizon. She didn’t want to telegraph this by asking for a postponement of her own, and she conceals her glee at being taken off the hook with a chagrined expression and a tired shrug. “I guess not,” she says. “It’s not like Ronald’s going anywhere.” The hypocrisy implicit in playing such games bothers her, but they are a big part of the process here, a shabby mirror image of adult court. In both venues, winning the case is everything. Figuring out what’s best for a kid—and for the community—well, that isn’t her job. Peggy’s job is to get a conviction. Her opponent’s is to do whatever it takes to get an acquittal. Only when that contest is resolved does the Juvenile Court take up the question of what to do about a screwed-up kid. Like so many other initiates of the juvenile justice system, Peggy despises this order of priorities, while feeling powerless to change it.
    The two lawyers agree on a new trial date, knowing the judge will go along with whatever they want. “I think the family is hiring private counsel anyway,” the PD says, “so I doubt that I’ll be trying this case.”
    Peggy looks at her for a moment, then, with a bitter sincerity she didn’t mean to show, says, “Lucky you.”
    Â·Â Â Â·Â Â Â·
    With the question of the trial date for Ronald Duncan settled, Peggy lingers in Dorn’s courtroom long enough to watch him give probation to a seventeen-year-old girl convicted of driving the getaway car in a bank robbery—a shockingly lenient sentence, Peggy fumes to herself. The girl is articulate and attractive, despite her cartoonishly long, red-lacquered nails extending daggerlike from each finger. But she also has prior arrests for threatening a teacher with her fists and a fellow student with a knife, and she is believed by police to have ties to the infamous Rolling Sixties street gang as well, one of the toughest, deadliest in LA, with branch “offices” nationwide for dealing crack, and a series of bank jobs and daring Las Vegas casino robberies to its credit. Both the prosecution and the Probation Department have asked that this girl be locked up in the California Youth Authority, widely considered the biggest, toughest juvenile prison system in the country. But Dorn is impressed by the girl’s membership in a church choir and her plans to go to college, where, she says without a trace of irony, she plans to study to be a police officer or a CIA agent.
    â€œI daresay very few bench officers would send you home on probation for this,” Dorn says, and Peggy can’t help nodding, then hoping Dorn didn’t see her.“I’m giving you a rare chance. No one can love themselves robbing a bank. Sooner or later, you’ll end up in the penitentiary or the cemetery unless you change.”
    The girl leaves all smiles, her own lawyer blinking in surprise at the outcome. But moments later, this same judge lambastes the prosecutor assigned to his courtroom for being too lenient with a