Full Court Press

It is noon in Inglewood. The county’s most controversial Juvenile Court jurist has already dealt with an astoundingly young and sullen array of carjackers, thieves, murderers, addicts, gangbangers, youth-camp escapees, sword-brandishers, gun-toters, wielders of fists, knives and assorted exotic weapons the very existence of which are unknown to most law-abiding souls.

Judge Roosevelt Dorn has scolded, questioned, cajoled and preached--his majestic orator’s voice rising and falling, at times so musical and compelling that even the overworked courtroom staff stops shuffling papers, looks up, and listens as raptly as if in church.

Delivered from his high-backed chair in the windowless beige courtroom, Dorn’s sometimes withering comments are oddly laced with gentleness, and then shot like darts at the juvenile felons and their ineffective parents, at the fumbling neophyte lawyers and at the L.A. County probation officers who have inadvertently filed reports containing false information.

One report praises a minor for doing “excellent work” in school; under Dorn’s questioning, it turns out the child has not attended school in five months.

A baby-faced car thief, new to Dorn’s court but with a long rap sheet, sits with his public defender. After speed-reading the boy’s file, Dorn lambastes his colleagues on the bench who “repeatedly send these young lawbreakers home with a slap on the wrist” until they finally commit horrendous crimes because no one has put the brakes on them. “We program these children for failure,” Dorn booms to no one in particular.

Both prosecution and defense roll their eyes at the judge’s oft-repeated sermon.

The district attorney’s office has requested that this minor be sent to the California Youth Authority--a state-run facility with a tough reputation.

“I am not sending this 13-year-old to the CYA,” he tells the miffed prosecutor, who replies, “But Judge, this minor has committed six felonies in three years. He has already been to boot camp once.”

“He is going to camp again,” retorts Dorn. Turning to the boy: “You have led a charmed life until now; that is at an end.” Dorn elaborates a list of rules with which the youth must comply while he is in camp and sets a date three months away when the youth must report back to court to make sure he is obeying the judge’s orders.

“You will bring me no grade lower than a C. You will attend every class every day. You will not associate with gangs. . . . You will become a leader at the camp. . . . You break my rules and mess up, and you will go to CYA, which is prison. You are getting this one last chance from Judge Dorn, son. Don’t let me down. And good luck.”

The cases roll on.

Numerous parents are quizzed: “Mother, how is this young man doing?” Dorn asks a frazzled woman. “Terrible, your honor. He’s disrespectful, he’s violent, he’s not in school, he’s been away from home for a month.”

“Do you want him out of your home?”

“Yes I do. I can’t control him. He doesn’t listen.” Dorn complies.

Numerous manners are taught: “Young lady, don’t come to my court dressed in that fashion again,” he tells females whose clothes show too much skin.

“Are you chewing gum? Don’t you ever do that in my court again.”

“Why were you so late? You don’t know? I’m going to detain you so next time you’ll know.”

And then there are the magic moments--when, looking at his next file, he realizes that he has done it again. Saved another life. A child he has monitored through probation, with repeated court visits, has finally made it through.

“Dennis, I see you brought me a diploma today,” he says, beaming down at a scrubbed youth. “This young man has graduated high school--put that in the minute order,” Dorn orders the clerk. She, and everyone else in Dorn’s courtroom crew, is smiling now at one of the recurring triumphs they say make their jobs so worthwhile.

On learning that this youngster hopes to work his way through college, the judge seems to literally inflate with joy. He asks an expressionless woman in the third row, “Mother, are you going to help this young man get the education he wants?”

The woman shrugs, as if the idea had not occurred to her.

“He needs that help, Mother. You ought to try. Make some sacrifices if you must.”

Despite all his fancy elocution, Dorn has worked so fast to dispatch so many cases this morning that two bailiffs have been needed to control the court’s traffic flow instead of the usual one.

Numerous youths have been removed from the custody of their parents to become wards of the court and serve what has come to be known unofficially as “Judge Dorn’s probation program,” which means they will be expected to observe rules dictated by Dorn, to return to his courtroom every three months (the judge sets the date then and there) with official school records documenting perfect attendance and decent grades.

According to those who know Dorn’s work, an unusually high number of youngsters he handles eventually appear before him triumphant, having done what neither they nor their parents ever expected them to do: graduate from high school and make plans for college or a vocation.

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What could be wrong with this picture?

Nothing, say Dorn’s numerous admirers, including prosecution and defense lawyers, probation officers and others who regularly work in his court. They say Dorn is unusual among judges because he works so hard, cares so much and achieves such fantastic results.

Of the 27 bench officers in the nine districts of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, he alone runs an “open courtroom,” inviting parents with wayward children into his chambers for counseling.

He is one of few to insist on such rigorous monitoring and among the most reluctant to send children to the CYA, preferring county-run boot camps where he believes they will get a better chance at rehabilitation and where they can remain under his wing.

But this is an era when new laws give Juvenile Court judges less and less discretion in meting out penalties; when the public wants more young offenders to be treated like adults, with punishment that emphasizes the protection of society rather than the rehabilitation of the minor.

Dorn stubbornly remains as concerned for the children who are going astray as for the people whose lives they impact. At 60, after a lifetime of community activism and interest in the problems of children, Dorn says many kids with the worst behavior are potentially America’s greatest assets.

“If we don’t harness their immense talents and energies,” he says, “our penitentiaries will overflow, our greatest resource will be wasted, and we will be overrun with crime.”

Dorn believes in catching these youngsters in the court’s net as soon as they take their first missteps, and monitoring them until they realize that an education and a productive life is more rewarding than death by gangbanging.

“You want to get rid of gangs in Los Angeles?” he asks. “Just give me 100,000 part-time jobs with salaries of $8 an hour and up, available only to kids who go to school. I guarantee I will virtually eliminate the gangs. Those kids who are looking over their shoulders, tryin’ to sell a little rock cocaine, wondering if today’s the day they’ll be killed. You think they would do that if they could earn money some other way?”

But Dorn’s detractors, some of whom hold high positions in the juvenile justice system, decry his methods and take steps to prevent cases from being heard in his courtroom. Dorn is a judge under siege. And he knows it.

The L.A. County district attorney’s office prevents him from hearing most “fitness” cases to determine whether juvenile offenders should be tried as adults. Explains Tom Higgins, head of the district attorney’s juvenile division, “In our opinion, Judge Dorn does not follow the law in this area.”

Translated, that means Dorn interprets the law to send fewer juveniles to be tried in adult court than most other judges. Some in Higgins’ department agree with Dorn. They say the district attorney’s office tends to seek adult trials in almost every case where a juvenile might qualify, regardless of the mitigating circumstances. One prosecutor says Dorn will not allow children to be tried as adults when by law they should not be, but neither does he let hardened criminals off the hook.

The public defender’s office also has problems with Dorn. The office files affidavits to prevent Dorn from hearing almost all cases in which their clients are involved.

“There are only three ways a juvenile can get off probation” in Dorn’s court, an old joke goes: “The teenager can graduate from high school, go to prison or die.”

Mark Lessem, head deputy of juvenile services for the L.A. County public defender’s office, says: “Dorn is harsher on sentencing and if kids don’t obey him, he has them arrested.” He also says Dorn tries to wear too many hats. “If you’re a judge, you should be a judge. If you want to be a social worker, do that--but then you have to give up being a judge.”

But a source close to that office, who does not want his name used, says the public defenders often steer cases away from judges who they think may find a client guilty. “Dorn looks at the whole picture of the minor’s life, school, family. He decides what’s best for that minor. He gets affidavited all the time. It’s kind of a horrible situation.”

The probation department doesn’t love Dorn either. “We’re carrying caseloads in excess of 250 minors, where we used to have only 75,” says one probation department member, who does not want to be named. “We have to see each kid once a month, check their progress, verify with schools, etc. It’s impossible. Then you add a guy like Dorn, who brings kids back to court all the time for progress reports, which creates a lot more work for us. Many in the probation department resent him for that. And they’re afraid of being called on the carpet by him.”

Still, “In my opinion, he’s the best judge in the whole system, and I’ve been in every court. He’s the fairest, toughest, most consistent. He makes a positive difference in kids’ lives and, bottom line, that’s what it’s all about.”

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Another bottom line, say insiders, is that Dorn just causes too much work for everyone. By putting even minor offenders into the system, by calling them back to court so frequently, by preferring the camps to state facilities, he adds an enormous burden.

Dorn agrees that may be true. “But that’s the only way I’ll know they’re complying with my conditions of probation.” Many other judges and commissioners “simply put a youth on probation and continue the matter for a year, with no further appearance necessary, even at the end. The minor walks through the experience, knows that as long as he doesn’t get caught during that year, he can go on doing what he wants, committing crimes, skipping school. The probation department is too overworked to keep track of him. He does not have to live up to the conditions of probation. He becomes programmed for failure.”

For an overloaded, underfunded system, Dorn is an irritant to say the least. In 1989, he was reassigned to adult court.

Explains Judge Paul Boland, who was a presiding judge then and is now president of the California Judges Assn., “Dorn was clearly controversial and already a legend in the community in 1989. At that time, both the public defender’s office and the D.A.’s office did not want him to hear their cases and disqualified him on a regular basis. It was apparent he would not be able to function at peak capacity.”

But after four years and a change of presiding judges, Dorn was back with the kids.

An observer close to the situation sums up: “Every parent knows there are times in dealing with kids that you have to do things differently than you would with adults. Some of the conditions Dorn imposed, which parents understood and applauded, were perceived as conditions with which the U.S. Supreme Court might not agree.”

Boland likens Dorn to the judge in the recent book and movie “The Client,” who “did what was right, whether or not it was legal.”

*

Hogwash, says Dorn, to most of the above. He was transferred, in his opinion, for no legitimate reason. Juvenile court is his love, the court in which he has always wanted to work. It took him a long enough time to get there.

Dorn was born in 1935, the youngest of nine children, son of a barber and a nurse in Checotah, Okla. “Both my parents stressed education as the only way to make something of yourself,” he says.

After graduating from high school in 1954, he spent 3 1/2 years in the Air Force, trying to figure out what to do in life. He went to college in Kansas. After his mother died, he moved to Los Angeles to be near some of his sisters and brothers.

“It was a big city where I could get a decent job and go to school at the same time.” He worked as a court bailiff while attending Cal State Los Angeles. It was during his eight years as a bailiff, in the court of Superior Court Judge Ralph Nutter, that he developed a love for the law. Nutter became his mentor and urged him to attend law school. Dorn graduated from Whittier College of Law in 1969 and joined the city attorney’s office as a prosecutor. In 1979, he was appointed a municipal court judge by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. A year later, he was elevated to the Los Angeles Superior Court.

“All the time I worked in adult criminal courts, I saw a very clear pattern. It became obvious to me that these committers of the most heinous crimes had started at very, very early ages. They were counseled and released, counseled and released. If I were going to try to make a difference, it was obvious it would have to be in juvenile court.”

In July 1982, he got his wish.

“I was thrilled. To me juvenile is the big time. Others may think of it as a dumping ground, because there aren’t the high-priced lawyers and the high-profile cases. But it is the only place you can have an effect on the course of people’s lives. Juvenile court is a place full of hope.”

He and his wife of 31 years, Joyce, have two daughters. Rochelle, 24, has a law degree from Tulane and is working on an MBA at Purdue. Renee, 26, has an MBA and is in law school at Texas Southern University. Son Bryan, 35, from a previous marriage, works in medicine.

*

Meanwhile, back in court, he has been judging nonstop, since 8:30 a.m. He has spent the 15-minute morning break in his chambers, counseling a tense-looking mother and her rebellious 14-year-old. The mother has come to Dorn in hopes that he will scare her little girl straight.

At lunch break, Dorn retreats to chambers to meet with civic leaders. He does not take time to eat before he takes the bench again.

But now the courtroom aura has changed.

No more heavily lip-sticked teenage girls dandling their babies, waiting to see their boyfriends arraigned. No more haggard mothers and grandmothers, sitting alone, twisting wads of tear-drenched tissues as their handcuffed children are brought in from detention, sentenced to camp by Dorn, and shuffled out again.

The room is hushed, empty except for two groups of “guests,” arranged like a surreal wedding party on opposite sides of the courtroom aisle.

On the left, the large family of a murdered 13-year-old, all wearing snowy new T-shirts with a photo of the dead boy’s radiant, choirboy face centered on their chests.

The shirts were purchased for this hearing, they say, in hopes the judge would notice the sweet innocence of the boy they lost and perhaps be persuaded that his 14-year-old killers be tried as adults. This would mean that they could be sentenced to life in prison.

On the right, family members of the two accused murderers--one boy who handed the gun to the shooter; the other who used it to end a life. They too are hoping for grace from Dorn. That he will look at the naive youngsters who found a gun on the railroad tracks near the projects where they live, and who shot it on a sunny afternoon in the park when they felt threatened by an approaching gang.

These people want their boys to be tried in juvenile court, where penalties are less severe and rehabilitation more possible.

Dorn decides that the boys do not fit the criteria necessary for trial as adults. They will remain in jurisdiction of juvenile court.

And the cases roll on.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Judge Roosevelt Dorn

Home: Inglewood.

Family: Married 31 years to Joyce, a retired nurse. Father of two daughters, one son from a previous marriage.

Hobbies: Traveling with his wife; watching old black-and-white films starring Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. And any film with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. “They all had perfect endings. Everyone lived happily ever after.”

Philosophy: “I don’t believe in giving up. I’ve had minors go to [boot] camp as many as three times before I was able to get them through high school, have them graduate and feel good about themselves.”

Success Rate: “I believe 90% of youngsters that come under my jurisdiction, that I have an opportunity to work with, will go straight.”