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                                                                                LAW, Page 48

Corridors Of Agony


A rare look inside a juvenile court reveals a system waging a
thankless struggle to save society's lost children

By MICHAEL RILEY/BALTIMORE -- With reporting by Melissa Ludtke
and James Willwerth/Baltimore


    This is the story of a courthouse, a group of kids who
passed through it one week and the people whose task it is to
rescue them.

    Clarence Mitchell Courthouse, a brooding Beaux Arts
monolith in the heart of Baltimore, contains the Baltimore City
Juvenile Court. Like the 2,500 similar juvenile courts across
the nation, this is where the battles are being fought against
some of America's toughest problems: drugs, disintegrating
families, household violence. As these problems have grown worse
over the past two decades, the judicial system designed to deal
with them has crumbled. These courts are an indicator of the
country's compassion for families and its commitment to justice,
but increasingly they have neither the money nor the personnel
to save most of the desperate young souls who pass through their
doors. Almost no one seems to care.

    To protect the children from the stigma of being branded
as criminals, the proceedings of juvenile courts are hidden
behind a veil of confidentiality. In an effort to show the
strains on the system, a group of TIME correspondents was given
unprecedented access to the Baltimore court. The identities of
the children and their parents have been changed, but the
stories are true, and they are typical.

    Antwan

    Ringed by Baltimore narcotics cops and sniffling into a
tissue, Antwan Davey looks like a kid caught in a bureaucratic
land of giants. Just three hours earlier, the cops nailed the
skinny 10-year-old boy in a playground drug bust. Now, in a
cinder-block squad room in east Baltimore, he slouches in a
green office chair, unlaced Etonic tennis shoes just touching
the floor.

    Two teenage drug dealers, sullen and silent, sit nearby.
Moments before their arrest, they had forced Antwan to hide
their wares in his socks. "That's usually what they do now --
give the stuff to a little kid," says arresting officer Ed
Bochniak, who watched the deal go down. "We were lucky to see
it."

    Crime and drugs are everywhere in America's inner cities.
For Antwan, they were only a few yards away as the youngster
floated high above his steamy ghetto playground on a
turquoise-and-orange swing set. At the playground's edge two
teenagers were selling vials of cocaine from a curbside stash.
One dealer cut a score with a passing woman; looking over at
Antwan, his partner spotted an opportunity.

    Sauntering up to the youngster, the pusher demanded that
Antwan serve as a hiding place for the stash or else face a
beating. At first the child refused, then gave in. Business
continued -- until the "Zone Rangers," an undercover Baltimore
vice-and-narcotics squad that had the dealers under
surveillance, suddenly sprinted into action. One team of Rangers
nabbed the dealers; another pulled Antwan off the swing and
confiscated the vials. By the time they reached the station
house, the little boy had dissolved in tears.

    Then Antwan got his first break. A juvenile-services
worker sat down beside him. "Are you sorry for what you've done
this evening?" he asked the boy. "Yes," mumbled Antwan. "Have
you learned a lesson?" he asked. Another soft yes. Alongside
the boy stood his mother Syrita, 30, an attractive woman whose
soft face belies the rugged ghetto life she has led. The worker
decided to let Antwan go home -- he had no prior arrests -- so
long as she brought him to court the next day.

    Syrita had tried repeatedly to warn Antwan of illicit
goings-on at the playground. But such warnings carry little
weight for a kid growing up on society's margin. Antwan lives
in a storefront apartment just blocks from the drug-saturated
play ground. His mother and grandmother survive on public
assistance, and his mother is battling depression with
medication and counseling. His father is long gone.

    The next day Antwan and his mom show up at juvenile court,
which is crammed into the basement of Clarence Mitchell. The
building's massive columns, vaulted ceilings and dimly lighted
corridors conjure fleeting images of a dungeon. Children wander
the hallways, a few in tears. The water fountains are too high
for most to reach. Lawyers, their arms spilling over with
folders, bustle about. Sheriff's deputies cast jaundiced eyes
on it all.

    Syrita Davey, dressed in a white blouse, purple skirt,
hoop earrings, sits with her son in a noisy, claustrophobic
interview room. Law student Harry Kassap, a volunteer in the
public defender's office, listens to the boy's story. The
defender's office, which represents indigent youthful offenders,
usually has only a few minutes to learn about a case before the
accused must appear before a master in chancery, one of the
quasi-judicial hearing officers who presides in juvenile court.
It does not take long for Kassap to become outraged. "The kid
was a complete victim," he later observes, "yet the system
treats him as an absolute criminal."

    Antwan gets his second break. The defender's office
assigns his file to chief public defender David Fishkin, a
gentle giant who looks like a bearded Ichabod Crane. More than
anything else, Fishkin decides, efforts must be made to keep
Antwan "out of the system" by placing him in a "diversion"
program, which offers counseling and individual attention rather
than harsh penalties like incarceration. Like everyone else in
the courthouse, Fishkin knows that once a kid falls deeper into
the justice system, he may never get out. But the lawyer is
worried that the prosecutor on the case may have something
different in mind. He makes a call and discovers, to his dismay,
that assistant state's attorney Mary McNamara, 29, a well-known
hard-liner on drug issues, will oppose him.

    "Oh," says a slightly flustered Fishkin.

    "You sound disappointed," replies McNamara.

    "Well, you know, I'd like to keep this case out of the
system."

    "Dave, you know my policy on drug dealing," McNamara
answers, then pauses. "But I'll read the report and keep an open
mind."

    A third break for Antwan: McNamara, who worked as a night
bailiff to get through law school, is actually on Fishkin's side
this time. She was born and raised in New Jersey in a
blue-collar family; her hard-nosed reputation is a reflection
of a strong sense of outrage at the inner-city disaster.
"Sometimes," she says, "I get home at night and I think my name
is `Bitch.' They stop being kids to you after a while. Some of
them are vicious and nasty. They'd shoot you in a heartbeat."

    For Antwan, however, her anger momentarily softens. After
making some phone calls, McNamara finds a spot for the youngster
in Choice, an acclaimed program that enlists college graduates
to keep track of wayward kids and ensure that help is available
to them. Sometimes volunteers visit offenders a dozen times a
day to keep them on the straight and narrow. McNamara passes the
news on to Fishkin.

    Antwan finds out his fate later that day. "You don't want
to be arrested again, do you?" state's attorney McNamara asks
the youngster at his court appearance. He shakes his head no.
She tells him that a Choice worker will be his big brother.
"What's your job going to be?" she inquires. Replies Antwan:
"Obey my mom or my Choice worker."

    By this time, everyone in the courtroom realizes that this
may be the most elusive quarry, a kid who can be saved. The
tone in the courtroom changes. Master Bradley Bailey, presiding
over the case, asks Antwan if he likes to read. The boy says
yes. So Bailey writes something on a slip of paper and hands it
to him. "Can you read that?"

    "D . . . aaa . . . vid Fish . . . kin," Antwan responds.
Directs Bailey: "You concentrate on doing that -- reading -- and
leave all the other stuff out on the street." He remands Antwan
to his mother's custody. In 60 days he must return to court to
demonstrate how he's doing.

    The outlook for the two teenage drug dealers who were
arrested with Antwan -- Daryl Williams and Donnell Curtis -- is
not as hopeful. Locked up overnight, they also appear in court
before Master Bailey. Daryl's aunt sits in the courtroom, her
eyes surrounded by dark circles and her face a tight
constriction of lines. A drug addict on the nod, she slumps
drowsily against the bench, a handkerchief over her mouth and
nose. Donnell's mother sits alert and angry in the back row.
Both youngsters wear a hard, empty-eyed look of fury.

    McNamara argues for locking the boys up until their
full-dress court hearing in thirty days. Assistant public
defender Robin Ullman requests community detention, which would
allow the accused to stay at home until then. Bailey decides to
lock them up. "What's that mean?" asks Williams, a tall,
powerfully built kid. "It means you stay in Charles Hickey
School until the trial," says Bailey.

    "What?" shoots back Williams. "I didn't have nothin' to do
with that little boy." Ullman, prim and bespectacled, jumps up
and orders her client to be quiet. But he won't shut up. "Fed
up, man," he curses as a courthouse jailer leads him back
toward a holding cell. His loud protests echo down the hall.

    Williams has good reason to fear Hickey School, a grim
correctional facility. The accused dealer told the arresting
cops he was only 15, but at Hickey a counselor recognizes him
as someone else entirely. "Tyrone, are you back? I thought you
were too old for us now." Daryl is really Tyrone Roberts, age
19. He's headed for adult court.

    Roberts too was once a lost youngster. He fell into the
court system 11 years ago, accused of malicious destruction. He
was already a neglected and abused child, a runaway and a
truant. His mother wanted to kick him out of her home when he
was 10 years old. At 15 he fractured a kid's skull with a brick
for teasing him and was later arrested for arson. Psychologists
claimed he suffered from neurological dysfunction,
attention-deficit disorder and poor impulse control. For a time,
Ritalin, an antihyperactivity drug, helped. But two years ago,
he was arrested for assault, and in 1991 he was busted for
possession of cocaine and joyriding.

    As Donnell is handcuffed and led out the courtroom door,
his mother is asked if she would like to talk to him. "I ain't
got nothin' much to say," she mutters, turning away. Her son
does not look at her as he walks out.

    Antwan's case is one of 1,070 hearings that moved through
the court in this single week. Last year juvenile court
accounted for 61% of all Eighth Circuit Court hearings. Moving
cases through the gridlocked court is often more important than
dispensing justice. In 1991 about 14,000 new cases were filed,
or 20% more than five years ago. Delinquency cases jumped 15%,
while abuse and neglect cases soared 40%.

    Emily

    Nearly 80% of juvenile-court work involves youthful
offenders like Antwan. The rest focuses on abused and neglected
children. Perhaps the most tragic case to pass through
Baltimore's juvenile court this week involved Emily Travis, 6.
Several months earlier, Emily had told two
department-of-social-services workers that her father sexually
abused both her and her sister Tracy, 10, in the bedroom while
their mother cooked dinner. Since then, Emily has been in a
foster home. The court hopes to find a permanent place for her.

    Clinging to a doll that plays It's a Small World, Emily
walks into the court's waiting room, a windowless place, where
children play with a well-worn set of plastic blocks. This is
not her first visit. Three years ago, high levels of lead were
found in Emily's blood; her parents resisted health-department
efforts to rid their home of the toxic metal. Court papers
described the home as filthy, unsanitary and insect infested.

    Apparently little has changed since then. Lawyers in
Master Bright Walker's courtroom pass around recent photographs
of the same house. The photos display insects crawling in a
bowl of soup; trash containers overflowing; food spoiling on a
table; bare, broken mattresses; pornographic pictures strewn on
the floor.

    The Travis family could be torn straight from the pages of
a William Faulkner novel: a clan to rival the Snopeses in its
deviance. Emily's older brother maims rats in an alley for
recreation. Her younger brother's medical reports indicate he
may have suffered anal penetration. Emily claims her father has
touched her breasts and genitalia.

    To sort out the family's history of incestuous
relationships, lawyers devise a complicated family tree. The man
accused of molesting Emily is not only her father but also her
step-grandfather. Emily and her three siblings are the result
of an incestuous relationship their mother had with her
stepfather. And Emily had been sleeping in a bed with her mother
and her father.

    Child-welfare worker Viola Mason, who removed Emily from
her parents' house, is concerned that the family may again slip
out of the control of social-service authorities. The
department wants the court to place Emily in a foster home.

    This court, as parens patriae (literally father of the
country), spends a lot of time trying to salvage children's
lives and build new homes for them. But a climate of increased
litigiousness and confrontation, along with a lack of money, has
made the task tougher. In addition, the overburdened Baltimore
city social-services department has pathetically inadequate
means to care for the children after they are removed from their
homes, a situation that undermines the department's mission from
the start.

    Before Emily's hearing begins, her Legal Aid Bureau
lawyer, Joan Sullivan, takes her by the hand and walks her
upstairs to a quiet corner. She asks Emily how she feels in her
foster home. "I'm still scared," says Emily. "At night I see
shadows on the wall. Monsters." The social-services department
wants to place Emily with a cousin, but the young girl wants to
live with her grandmother. No matter how Sullivan feels about
the matter, she is obligated to express to the court whatever
Emily, her client, wants. And that may not always appear to be
the best solution.

    Sullivan asks if Emily knows why she had to leave home.
Emily says she does not, and then she spontaneously recants her
claims of abuse. "That wasn't for real," she says. "I lied." But
her denial rings hollow.

    "Do you like your dad?" Sullivan continues. Yes, says
Emily. "He gives me money." She adds that her father promised
to give her gifts and a party when she comes home.

    As often happens in these circumstances, the lawyers
cannot agree on a solution for Emily. Since the girl has
recanted and no physical evidence of abuse exists, it appears
she may go home with her parents. "It's an injustice," observes
child-abuse expert Betsy Offerman, who has followed Emily's
case. "It seems that no matter what we know, there is always a
loophole that means the child will go back into the situation,
and the cycle continues." Offerman explains that there is a
tremendous incentive for children to deny sexual abuse. "The
message kids get is, `If I say something, I will go to court and
get taken away from my family,' " Offerman says. "They start to
think it is better for them if they keep their mouths shut."
Offerman used to be a therapist in the social-service
department's sexual-abuse-treatment unit, which was closed in
1990 because of budget constraints.

    As the lawyers continue to argue in a corridor, Emily
falls asleep on her cousin's shoulder in the courtroom. Then
Master Walker arrives. At first things go badly for the
social-services department. Emily's lawyer prompts a
social-services worker to concede that the allegedly filthy
house had been cleaned in time for a later scheduled visit. The
attorney for the child's mother then gets the worker to admit
that Emily's older sister Tracy has denied all charges of sexual
abuse. Under questioning from the father's lawyer, the worker
acknowledges that there is no physical evidence of sexual abuse.

    Then Offerman testifies. Emily, she says, described her
father's fondling as a game. "She talked about it as if she were
going to a birthday party," says Offerman. "She had no sense of
taboo around this." Offerman relates that when the father was
told Emily was being removed from his home, he retorted, "You
ask Tracy. She'll say nothing happened."

    Finally Emily herself sits down on a wooden chair pulled
up at the end of a long table to the side of the master's
raised desk. "Do you remember talking to Miss Betsy?" asks
Emily's lawyer, pointing to Offerman. The distraught child says
nothing but fingers a piece of chalk she has carried from an
interview room. "Was what you told her the truth?" the lawyer
asks. Emily shakes her head no, then buries it in her elbow.

    A few minutes later, social-services lawyer Donna Purnell
tries to cut past Emily's reluctance to admit what she believes
happened. "Are you scared that if you tell, you won't go home?"
she asks? Emily nods yes. "If you said something to Betsy, would
you be scared to say it now?" Emily nods her head yes again.
"Does Daddy ever tickle you?" "On my feet. On my leg." Just 15
ft. away, her father leans forward, rests his elbows on the
bench in front of him and stares right at Emily.

    The final witness is Tracy, a chubby girl who smacks on
chewing gum until Master Walker makes her remove it. In short
order, the girl denies her father ever touched Emily and says
Emily never told her of any abuse. She also claims she is not
afraid of her father.

    "Is there a reason why you wouldn't tell the truth if your
father did touch you?" asks Purnell, trying to unmask the
apparent cover-up. Tracy says no. Suddenly, Master Walker's loud
voice booms across the courtroom. "She's giving more signals
than a third-base coach for the Boston Red Sox," Walker says,
gesturing toward the girl's mother. He has been watching her
coach Tracy from the bench nearby.

    Afternoon has slipped into evening. Emily's mother yawns.
When closing arguments end, Walker, a kindly 20-year veteran of
the bench who writes haiku and dabbles in abstract painting,
rules that sexual abuse did, in fact, occur. After listening to
two hours of testimony, Walker is convinced that Emily has been
sexually abused by her father and wants to protect her from
having it happen again. He orders Emily to remain in foster care
and asks social services to evaluate the suitability of placing
her in a relative's home.

    Doll in hand, Emily leaves the courtroom. In the empty
corridor, her siblings hug her and say goodbye. A few minutes
later, Emily walks with her caseworker out of the building and
back to her foster home, perhaps separated from her parents
forever. The court has done what it can.

    Timothy and Tommy

    Julie Sweeney often wonders if her two cute grandsons
traded one horrible situation for another when they were
uprooted from their mother's home and placed in foster care.
Today she has brought Timothy, 11, and Tommy, 9, to court to
review their foster-care status. Their mother, Cassandra,
Sweeney's 31-year-old daughter, is homeless; she chose cocaine
over her two sons. There's a warrant out for her arrest on
charges of prostitution, so she won't appear in court today.
"Cocaine became her lover," Sweeney explains. "She told me the
high was so good that she wanted it, even if it meant losing
everything she had. She does love her children, but she loves
Mr. C. more."

    Sweeney, in her early 60s, is not well enough to take care
of her grandsons. She waited for more than two years for the
social-services department to rescue them from their mother's
destructive grasp. "I was sending food to them by taxi at their
mother's house," she tells Legal Aid Bureau lawyer Lisa Watts
as they sit in the stuffy waiting room. "They were abused and
hungry. They turned into children of the streets." Despite the
grandmother's frequent requests, the children were not removed
from the home. "[My daughter] was selling furniture out of the
house and threatened to kill the younger boy. I called
protective services again. They went in and said the house
looked O.K. It's the laxest organization I've ever seen."

    Finally Sweeney decided to become the children's forceful
advocate. "Push, push, push," she says. "Nothing ever works
according to the system. Someone in the family has to do it."
Two years ago, when Cassandra's drug habit became
uncontrollable, Sweeney says the social services informed her
it had no home available in which to place her grandchildren.
So the next day Sweeney went to collect the boys. Her daughter,
high on drugs, slumped on the couch, while men walked in to buy
drugs from someone upstairs. Cassandra was using cocaine, PCP
and Ritalin. A social-services caseworker told Sweeney she could
not take her grandchildren, but she did anyway. After she got
them home, they all broke into tears.

    Then Sweeney called the social-services department and
explained that she was not well enough to care for her grandsons
herself, but she wanted the brothers kept together. Instead the
boys were placed in separate foster homes. Tommy, the younger,
slept on a urine-stained mattress without a sheet. "He cried
pitifully," Sweeney recalls. "He wouldn't eat or play. He sat
with a shopping bag under his arm." The youngster was returned
to his grandmother's house, but soon his mother, who temporarily
cleaned herself up with the help of a detox program, regained
custody of the boys.

    Things only got worse. One night Timothy walked downstairs
to find his mother injecting drugs into her arm. Within months,
the children were back with social services.

    This time, after reviewing the case, lawyer Watts has
designed an agreement that allows the boys to remain under
official jurisdiction and continue a program of therapy. Sweeney
will retain visitation rights. The boys want to live with their
aunt; the department will try to help the woman afford better
housing so that she can take them in. Finally Tommy will be
assigned a Court-Appointed Special Advocate volunteer, who will
look out for his best interests.

    Almost every child at Clarence Mitchell could use an
advocate, but there aren't enough to go around. "It's
overwhelming, and nobody really has the time to prepare them for
what's happening," says Diane Baum, who heads Baltimore's more
than 160 volunteer advocates. What is needed, says
juvenile-court administrative Judge David Mitchell, is "a
fundamental change in the way society views the family and
children." Nothing less than that will make the system work.

    Antwan's Hope

    Sometimes, though, against all odds, it does work. Days
after Antwan Davey left court with his mother, Choice counselor
Bob Cherry, a graduate from the tough streets of Boston's
Southie district, paid his second visit. Like a shy colt, Antwan
leaned close to Cherry as the young man drove the boy around
town in his white Chevy Monte Carlo, its throaty exhaust pipes
growling.

    Everyday Cherry and members of his Choice team keep tabs
on Antwan; so far, the boy's mother has only good things to say
about the program. "They say he's got to call everyday," she
says. "He has to come home at certain times and not hang out in
the wrong places. I don't let him hang out at the playground
anymore." Even Antwan is impressed with Cherry. "He seems like I
can trust him."

    After the car ride, Antwan steps back inside his apartment
to do his homework. His mother unscrews the light bulb from the
kitchen socket and screws it into the living-room ceiling. Its
harsh glow illuminates a poster on a far wall of a black boy
crying. "He will wipe away all tears from their eyes," the
poster reads, "and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor
crying, nor pain. All of that has gone forever. -- Revelation
21:4"