Fighting Chance(8)

5

When Russ Donahue first agreed to take a case in juvenile court, he had been more than half convinced that he would fail at it. Lose your temper, lose the argument, his father had always said. The very idea of a “juvenile justice” system made Russ lose his temper. Surely there was something wrong with a country that could think of nothing else to do with its troubled children but lock them up and parade them around in leg irons anytime they went outside.

Russ had seen the leg irons once when he was late for a court session and went around the back way as a shortcut. The kids brought in from juvie had had a delay of their own, or the door they were supposed to use had had something wrong with it, or something. Russ didn’t really know. Still, there they were, lined up along one wall, their hands in cuffs behind their backs, their ankles in irons—as if every one of them were a precocious Jeffrey Dahmer, ready to commit murder and mayhem if given half the opportunity.

That night he’d gone home to Donna and Tommy and the baby and stared at them all through dinner, as if the fact of them could make sense of the fact of what he had seen at court. Tommy was close to the age of many of the kids he had seen. Russ tried and tried to think of something Tommy could do that would make leg irons a necessity. He even tried to think of something Tommy could want to do. He’d come up blank. Eight-year-olds didn’t rob banks and gun down all the tellers. They didn’t carjack little old ladies in grocery store parking lots and shoot them in the woods to get their wallets full of one-dollar bills.

Some of the kids against the wall had been older, teenagers at least. That had made a little more sense. Teenagers were at least capable of doing real harm. A seventeen-year-old was more or less an adult—in size and strength, if not in maturity.

Then he found out that there were almost no seventeen-year-olds in that line against the wall, or sixteen-year-olds either. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who had done truly bad things were almost always charged as adults.

“That’s why you should do it,” Donna had told him when he was thinking about accepting that first case. “There aren’t enough people to take these cases, and not enough of them don’t think we should be putting children in jail.”

“Wouldn’t there be less of the kind of thing you were talking about if lawyers who didn’t like it got involved with it?” Bennis Hannaford asked him.

Russ was helpless enough when Donna went after him on her own. When Bennis joined the party, he had no idea how to get himself out of the mess he’d gotten himself into.

That first case had been one of Father Tibor’s, a case like the one he was working on now—a kid newly in from Armenia, not a case of criminality as much as of culture shock.

Well, there was more criminality in the case today but it was still something small. If Russ had left well enough alone after that first time, all the juvenile cases he handled would have been small, and he wouldn’t have ended up where he was now.

Instead, he’d let the word get out that he was willing to take juvenile cases, and the excrement had hit the fan.

The second case he’d taken involved a twelve-year-old boy who had first raped and then murdered a three-year-old in his neighborhood. The case was sensational, an international news circus of truly epic proportions. There were still Web sites devoted to vilifying the kid, three years after he’d been sent away. Hell, there were still Web sites devoted to vilifying Russ himself.

The kid, of course, had been tried as an adult—sort of. He’d been tried in an adult court, but there was no possibility that someone that young could actually be incarcerated in an adult jail. The other inmates would eat him alive.

The compromise had been to remand him to the juvenile justice system until he was eighteen, then to transfer him to an adult prison for the rest of his natural life. Russ had rehearsed all the arguments he had ever made against locking up juveniles forever: Their brains weren’t fully formed. They didn’t have the impulse control. They would mature out of violence if only you treated them right.

The arguments all came to a crashing halt against the reality of John-Ray Croydon.

The first time Russ met with him, the kid had sat tilted back in his hard wooden chair and said, “They told me in there you couldn’t tell anybody anything I said to you. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Russ had said.

Even in those few seconds, Russ was able to feel something going wrong in the room. John-Ray’s eyes were hard little pits, all the more disconcerting because they were such a clear, bright blue. The kid looked like he’d been called up out of central casting to play the Carefree Barefoot Boy in some retro version of The Waltons.