Opposite Lives Grow From South-Central Roots

U.S. District Court Judge David W. Williams, 79, grew up poor on 109th Street in South-Central Los Angeles, raised in an era when it was still not allowed for blacks to buy homes west of Western Avenue.

Richard Winrow, 22, until Wednesday lived on 118th Street in South-Central, a little more than a mile away from where the judge was raised. An A student before dropping out of high school from “sheer boredom,” Winrow was the youngest in a poor family of nine children. He was born in an era when blacks could move anywhere they liked, but few, including Winrow, could escape the poverty that surrounded them.

On Wednesday, the two men, separated by two generations but sharing similar roots, were brought together in Department 23 of U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles. In his courtroom, Williams--bound by a federal multiple-offense law that forced his hand--dispatched Winrow to prison for the rest of his life, without possibility of parole.

While of judicial interest as the first use of the mandatory sentence law in California, the courtroom paradox also raised fundamental and troubling questions about who fails in society, who succeeds, and why.

Named a student of the year in 8th grade at Ralph Bunche Junior High, Winrow was known as “the smartest kid in the neighborhood”--a child who it seems could easily have attended college and followed a career.

Winrow’s family, which emotionally insisted upon his innocence Wednesday, said he had a chance to make it in life, but circumstances were always running against him. Relatives, reacting to the harshness of the sentence, found it hard to believe the judge was a product of South-Central himself.

“If that judge had ever been on this street, then he’d know what it was like,” said Vincent Scott, one of Richard’s six brothers. “(Williams) didn’t grow up here. If he grew up in this neighborhood, how could he judge my brother?”

Today, East 118th Street and 109th Street mirror one another; both are lined with trees and modest homes. And children in both neighborhoods today have a high school dropout rate of nearly 50%. Gang graffiti mars industrial buildings that stand where grassy fields once were.

Williams, long a resident of Bel-Air, is intimately familiar with South-Central’s troubles, having presided over 4,000 criminal cases arising from the Watts riots of 1965, and watching jobs move out and crime go up in the area in more recent times. But he remembers a more nostalgic time, when he practiced law on Central Avenue “and people could stroll down the street without any premonition of danger.”

As Williams remembers, “the whole society was different” in South-Central in the 1920s and ‘30s. Social pressure was so great that if a boy got in trouble with the law, his family would pack up and move away.

“The neighborhoods were good, and if a kid was arrested the shame of it would drive a family out,” he said in an interview. “Now the question (in the South-Central area) is which families have not had a son arrested.”

No matter how bad the environment, Williams said, it does not provide an excuse for criminal behavior.

“I blame the young people of my own race for not getting an education and for taking the easy way and for trafficking in drugs and joining gangs,” Williams said. “But there is blame to share, because our young people were not denied a chance for a job like they are today.”

At Winrow’s house on Wednesday, such sociological musings seemed off the mark. A member of the family had been sent off to prison for a long, long time, and those left behind did not seem to understand why.

The family, so emotionally distraught over the sentence handed down by Williams, did not clearly understand that their brightest star would spend the rest of his life in prison. His mother, Lavern, believed the sentence would last only 20 years.

“I think it’s too stiff a penalty for a young man,” she said, speaking softly and holding back tears. If Winrow was guilty, then he should get “time to think about it, yes. But not 20 years.”

Though a reporter attempted to explain that it was a life sentence, the family was unshaken in its belief that Winrow would be free in 20 years.

Shaking her head sadly, her voice fading, the mother said, “I don’t feel he deserved 20 years.”

Winrow had three prior convictions on narcotics violations when he was arrested last December in a raid at his East 118th Street home and charged with possessing 5.5 ounces of cocaine. Prosecutors identified him as a member of the Mona Park Crips.

But family and neighbors all claimed he did not sell drugs and never joined a gang.

“Richard was not a dangerous person,” said Renee Scott, 28, his sister. “He was not a bad boy. These (gang members) around here, true, he knows them, but he was never a gangbanger.”

In fact, his mother said, the family used a relative’s home address so that Richard could qualify to attend Locke High School and avoid the gang pressure at a closer school. But he dropped out after junior year because of “sheer boredom,” according to one brother.

“They’re trying to use him as an example for all these other guys around here,” Renee said angrily. “They didn’t do him right.”

But Williams said that Winrow’s gang and drug activities had been clearly proven. He also noted that Winrow’s attorneys--two from Las Vegas and one from Los Angeles--are “high-priced lawyers . . . who handle large drug cases. No little kid from Watts is going to come up here with that kind of high-priced representation without a lot of financing behind him.”

The sentence he handed down Wednesday nevertheless troubled Williams, who said he hopes the case will prompt a review by Congress of mandatory sentencing laws that preempt a judge’s ability to decide.

“Some of us judges feel we are made to be like robots who cannot decide for themselves, but this is the law, and it’s my job and it’s up to Congress to do something about it. . . ,” Williams said. “Let’s put it this way: Today was the first time in 35 years as a judge that I have had to give anyone a life sentence.”

Winrow’s grieving family and friends couldn’t fathom that he will not be coming home again.

“Life without parole?” said Betty Williams, 23, a family friend and former neighbor. “That’s his whole life wasted.”