“She’s not back yet,” the voice on the other end said. “When did she get out of court?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not sure. I didn’t see her leave. I was tied up there all day. She should be back shortly.”
“She said this morning if things didn’t work out so she saw any prospect of getting free, she wasn’t coming back,” the voice said.
That evening Cheryl’s mother called me up, crying. She’d received an anonymous call threatening Cheryl’s life. Cheryl was not at her grandmother’s, or at the shelter house, or at her girlfriend’s. She must be up in the robbers’ neighborhood, her mother said.
I said that I was sure that the threat was just talk, an attempt to intimidate Cheryl. The robbers knew that if anyone touched her, they’d be in big trouble.
“I’ve known them to do it. They’ll do it,” she said.
What was I going to say—“No, you’re wrong. I know more about your world than you do”?
I suggested she call the robbery squad. They’d know whom to keep an eye on, and they could try to find Cheryl and pick her up.
“Those prosecutors. They get her to cooperate by promising to let her go. Then she gets it in her head she’s getting out,” Mrs. Harris said through tears. “Then they go back on their word. They say they won’t do anything for her, so she runs away, and now she’s going to get killed for cooperating.”
Over the next several days I was engaged in the unusual enterprise of pestering the police and FBI to find and arrest my client. This was probably unethical, since the last indication from my client was that she did not want to be found, much less arrested, so I was acting as her adversary instead of her advocate. But, seeing as how she was a juvenile, and people apparently were out to kill her, I followed my own judgment. One tends to.
Cheryl showed up at my office a week later. Wherever she’d been, and whatever she’d been doing, something had led to her to decide she’d rather risk being locked up.
After signing a detailed “Memorandum of Agreement,” specifying that she would testify truthfully “at the current trial and any ensuing trial(s) concerning the said robbery activities” of Harry Smith, Cheryl pled guilty to the lesser included offense of bank larceny in my case, and her second bank robbery case was dismissed. The corp. counsel, who had agreed to support Cheryl’s release in the community pending sentence, and then to support a sentence of probation, interpreted “support” to mean “not oppose” and said nothing when the judge said he guessed he better lock Cheryl up for the six weeks until her sentencing.
One of those occasionally manifest imperatives of justice—an Appeal to God, Don’t Tread on Me!—suffused the courtroom and lifted me to my feet. I implored the judge to give heed to any remaining shred of decency in this vale of tears, and at least respect the right of Cheryl’s innocent, unoffending infant to have her mother at home. Cheryl herself broke down into shuddering sobs as I invoked mercy for her baby. The judge saw it my way.
Across the street at Jaybird’s restaurant afterward, Cheryl sat beside me at the bar, demurely sipping a lemonade as I celebrated her freedom with a beer. I asked her what her plans were, now that her bank-robbing days were through.
“I’m going to be an aerial physicist,” she said.
Cheryl testified again at Harry Smith’s second trial, at the conclusion of which he and two of his cohorts were sentenced to extensive periods in prison. Cheryl was put on probation, but within four months she was back in custody, charged with two more bank robberies. She was convicted of those and committed to the Children’s Center, whence she escaped. She was a fugitive, wanted for yet another two bank robberies, last I heard.
I had been disappointed by Cheryl, and somewhat annoyed—all that work, and I might as well have stayed in bed. But mostly I was saddened. That girl had so much going for her.
§3-09
Most of my juvenile clients pled guilty to something. There was very little reason not to. If you went to trial, you were almost sure to lose, anyway. Unlike juries, which are unpredictable, a judge is going to convict if the evidence permits, and maybe even if it doesn’t.
It really didn’t make much difference what a juvenile pled to. Minor charges subjected him to precisely the same sentence as more serious charges—an indeterminate period of incarceration not to extend beyond his twenty-first birthday—and charges that were dismissed were still carried in his file and seen by the sentencing judge, who would often explicitly refer to them as the equivalent of convictions. But dismissal of charges at least kept the kid’s record of official convictions shorter than your arm. And as part of the deal, the prosecutor usually agreed not to argue for incarceration (which, incidentally, meant that he didn’t have to show up at the sentencing). That took a little pressure off the judge.
Pleading also suggested to the judge that the kid acknowledged his guilt, and it saved the hassle of a trial—a favor that the judge might take into account when deciding whether to lock him up. There wasn’t room to lock up everybody, and the idea was to give the judge a means of sorting through the candidates that would be favorable to your client: “He pled, Your Honor.” If pleading even marginally improved the client’s chances of avoiding commitment to the Children’s Center, I figured it was worth it.
Avoiding the Children’s Center made sense. Little else did, in juvenile court. It was a self-contained, self-referential system, like a court held below deck in a rudderless ship—everything seemed orderly and purposeful until you stepped outside.
If I got a kid off, that victory was usually no triumph at all. I had simply ensured that there would be no intervention in his life, and he would go back to the same troubled family, in the same overcrowded house, and skip the same crummy school with the same delinquent peer group, until he got in trouble again, the only difference now being that he thought he could beat the system. The kid lost, and the community lost.
If I didn’t get the kid off, the Juvenile Branch of the Division of Social Services of the Superior Court would prepare a pre-sentence report for the judge. The report, sometimes prepared with the help of specialists in medicine, psychology, and education, would detail the respondent’s personal history from day one (“mother reports he was carried to term and developed normally”); describe his situation at home (“resides with his mother and four siblings in a three-bedroom subsidized National Capital Housing apartment, which appeared neat and adequately furnished”) and at school (“reads at the fourth-grade level; was absent thirty-nine days last school year”); and recommend that the respondent be placed in “a structured, homelike setting with positive male role models, where he could benefit from psychological counseling, tutoring, and job training.” No such facilities existed.
The judge could then put him on probation or commit him. If he was put on probation, he would be one of thirty to forty cases handled by his caseworker, who would be able to offer only minimal supervision.
If he was committed, unless he was one of the handful placed in a group home or a residential facility for the mentally handicapped or disturbed, he would go twenty-five miles up the road to Laurel, Maryland, to the Children’s Center, an isolated collection of drab brick barracks operated by the Institutional Care Services Division of the Bureau of Youth Services of the Commission on Social Services (formerly the Social Rehabilitation Administration) of the Department of Human Services (formerly the Department of Human Resources) of the District of Columbia government.
Unless the committed child was among the 150 incarcerated in the Children’s Center’s maximum-security facility, Oak Hill, where he would have his own locked room, he would join the 280 or so juveniles at Cedar Knoll, where, except in one maximum-security cottage, the inmates slept in large dormitory rooms holding fifteen to twenty-five beds. No counselor stayed in the dormitories at night. The doors to the dormitories were locked. He would face beatings and sexual abuse from the other juveniles, and could expect no protection from the staff. Indeed, according to a city council ta
sk force report, “The counselors … themselves pose a threat to the health and well-being of youths at Cedar Knoll and Oak Hill.”1 Sexual abuses of juveniles by staff have been documented,2 and beatings of the inmates by the staff were commonplace.3 The “institutional counselors” who provided most of the care and supervision of the inmates were not required to have a high school diploma or any experience working with children. Cedar Knoll employed individuals who had themselves been inmates of the institution as little as three months before their hiring. After four days of training, they were put in charge of the kids. This was what the taxpayers got for $20,000 per incarcerated kid per year.
An inmate could readily obtain drugs from staff members, but he could not get adequate health care, counseling, education, or job training. At Oak Hill there were four “training programs”: culinary (working in the kitchen); laundry (working in the laundry); maintenance (working on the grounds); and barbering.
He would, however, during the course of his indeterminate sentence, learn to think of himself as a criminal, and refine his criminal skills, and become adjusted to institutional life and, thus, maladjusted to life in the community. Finally, based on “no formally established or generally used or written criteria for the release of juveniles,” after a period of time “based on neither rhyme nor reason,”4 the inmate, now in all likelihood more dangerous than when he went in, would be unleashed on the community. The kid lost. The community lost.
I have never heard anyone, including the people who run it, claim that the Children’s Center has a salutary effect on the children who pass through it. At best they are simply warehoused, and that not very well—escapes are common.
An average of 340 kids per year are committed to the care of the Commission on Social Services.5 Over 1,200 are detained—locked up while awaiting trial or “disposition” (sentence).6 Not surprisingly, no data are kept on the number of Children’s Center graduates who go on to be convicted of crimes as adults—the figures would only make the taxpayers angry.
The stated goal of the juvenile court system is “care,” not punishment. The law requires that “when a child is removed from his home the [court] will secure for him custody, care, and discipline as nearly as possible equivalent to that which should have been provided for him by his parents …”7
Giving young people “care” has tacitly been abandoned as the rationale for sending them up the road, replaced by the goal of getting them off the streets, on the assumption that the safety of the community will thus be enhanced, at least until their return.
Even that assumption is shaky. Before a new youth services commissioner, Jerome Miller, closed down the state’s large “industrial schools” for delinquents in 1972, Massachusetts had a daily population of up to 2,000 incarcerated juveniles. There was no dramatic increase in juvenile violence when all but 100 were released or placed in small unlocked facilities8—this in a state with eight times the population of the District of Columbia.
Since my client’s involvement with the system was a no-win situation for everyone, I viewed my representation of him as an end in itself. He would have a relationship with an adult who was honest with him, and with whom he could be honest. I figured that experience had some intrinsic value.
§3-10
Judge Whitter, one of several retired judges who heard cases to relieve the burden on the full-time judges, had no idea what was going on in his courtroom, and neither did anybody else. Dealing with him required a certain flexibility, but it also created opportunities—he was manipulable.
I appeared before him with Reginald Chatsworth Dickinson, who, slow to realize that burglary was not his calling, had been arrested again in another Georgetown house. (An alarm went off, but he thought it was next door.) He had pled guilty to one burglary in exchange for the dismissal of the other—“one-for-one,” a standard deal—and was to be sentenced.
Judge Whitter sat on the bench like a toad on a log. He appeared to have no neck, his head, the size and shape of an antique football, resting directly atop his round body. His lips were the same parchment color as his skin, leaving his face almost featureless except for the black frames of his gogglelike eyeglasses, which were half an inch lower on one side than the other, like a permanently tilted scale of justice. He was reading, obviously for the first time, a motion that had just been argued to him for half an hour. The white paper was reflected in his glasses, rendering them the color of fishbellies. He had two silver-white disks of dead fishbelly where his eyes should have been.
The judge took off his glasses and held them up toward the ceiling at arm’s length, focusing a yellow spot of light on his cheek. He beckoned with a pudgy finger to the young woman bailiff and handed the glasses to her. “Clean them,” he said.
For Reginald’s sentencing I’d decided to try the “Tan His Hide” speech, which I’d heard about over a beer at Jaybird’s. It was supposed to be very effective with Judge Whitter. I ran through the scenario with Reginald in the lockup behind the courtroom first, then came out and went over it with his bleary-eyed mother, who was never far from tears over Reginald, for whose troubles she felt responsible. It must have been confusing for her to hear her son’s attorney say, “As I’ve explained to Reginald, I’m going to say some things that sound as though I’m against him, but that’s only because that’s what the judge wants to hear. Pay no attention.” I would have had to be extraordinarily persuasive to get a mother to believe what I said to her and disregard what I said to the judge, a person so well situated that he literally sat several feet above everyone else’s head. But no matter. She had no choice. Anyway, her alcoholism had left her unable to understand much of anything, hard as she tried.
“Your Honor, Reginald Dickinson is one of the sorriest characters I’ve ever represented,” I began, casting a withering glance at Reginald, who looked properly abashed. “He doesn’t deserve another chance. He doesn’t deserve anything. And I know his folks feel the same way about him, Your Honor.” I had the judge’s attention now. “In fact, if for any reason you do let him go home today, they’re going to TAN HIS HIDE! Which is exactly what he needs.”
Judge Whitter, unable to resist the prospect of some old-fashioned discipline, put Reginald on probation. No Children’s Center for Mr. Dickinson this time.
I made it back to my office in time for a client conference with Ricky Melville and his stepfather. Ricky, a lean, pretty fourteen-year-old, was charged with simple assault, based on a complaint arising out of a fight in school.
“School fight” was one of my favorite buzz-phrases, conjuring up, as it did, a Norman Rockwell image of rasslin’ in the schoolyard—“boys will be boys”—rather than the reign of terror prevailing in the corridors and stairwells of some of our urban public schools. But in this instance, my investigation showed it was a fair description of what had happened. Ricky had never been in trouble before, and had been at most a peripheral participant in this particular melee, which involved a dozen boys on both sides, triggered by someone’s insulting someone else’s jacket.
From the lawyer’s point of view, such minor, first offender cases fall into the category of nifnaf shit, busywork lacking the drama of “heavy” charges. But it could be argued that they are the most important cases, because they determine whether a kid is drawn into the system and swept up in its inexorable tide. As I explained to Ricky, “This may seem like a silly charge, but it’s no joke. If you bring your witnesses down, the government will probably drop the charge, and everything will be fine. If you don’t, you’ll be found guilty, you’ll be put on probation, you’ll spit on the sidewalk sometime and you’ll be revoked, you’ll be sent to the Children’s Center, and your whole life will go down the tubes. It’s that simple.”
§3-11
Eric Webster, four-foot-eight, seventy pounds, twelve years old, was a crook. He thought what was bad about wrongdoing was that you got in trouble for it, sometimes, if you got caught.
He did get caught, acting as the lookout for some o
lder boys who snatched a purse. (He said he was “just playing.”) And, after I got him released to await trial, he was caught again, this time helping some older kids pull a daylight burglary. The burglary was successful. The big kids were successful. But a neighbor had recognized Eric.
A Detective Salt had dropped by Eric’s house shortly after the burglary. Eric’s aunt had tried to stop him from questioning Eric. She said he would not talk without a lawyer. But when she left the room to call me, Eric’s grandmother encouraged him to make a clean breast of it. (“Eric’s grandmother gets nervous around police,” his aunt explained.)
Eric had given Detective Salt the nicknames of a half dozen accomplices, and the streets they lived on. As is common in his society, even among close friends, he didn’t know their last names. Last names weren’t used, perhaps as a hedge against inquiries by the authorities, perhaps for other reasons. Now the detective wanted Eric to come down to the station and ride around with him, pointing out their houses.
Eric’s aunt brought him to my office. I asked her to wait outside. Eric sat down opposite me, his sneakered feet swinging back and forth above the floor. (His sneakers were immaculately white, as though fresh from the box. In fact they were several months old, but Eric cleaned them every night with a bar of soap and a toothbrush.)
“You remember how everything you tell me is a secret?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we don’t have to go all over that again. So, did you do this burglary?”
Eric took a deep breath and told me that he had stuck his arm through the mail slot in the door of the house and opened the door, and he and six other kids went in. He said he did not want to snitch on the others. He was afraid of what they would do to him.
How Can You Defend Those People? : The Making of a Criminal Lawyer Page 10
