The 57 Bus Read online

  California’s Proposition 21 was approved by 62 percent of the voters in March 2000. Billed as a way to get tough on gang violence and drive-by shootings, the measure increased the sentences for a number of different crimes, and it gave prosecutors the power to decide on their own if they wanted to file charges in adult court against offenders as young as fourteen. Previously, prosecutors wanting to charge a juvenile as an adult had to make their case in a fitness hearing before a juvenile-court judge. Prop 21 allowed them to make the call on their own in certain cases, and made the call for them in others. Some crimes, mostly sex crimes, now had to be prosecuted in adult court.

  Nine months after the passage of Proposition 21, 30 percent of all teen offenders in California were being charged as adults. In some counties the percentage was much higher—in San Diego County, for example, three out of every four young people were charged as adults by the end of that first year.

  This wasn’t because more juveniles were committing crimes. Juvenile arrest rates began to fall in 1994, and they have continued to fall ever since. Today the FBI’s juvenile violent-crime index, which measures arrests for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, is lower than it was in 1980, and that’s true across racial lines. The violent-crime rate among black youths, in fact, has dropped by 60 percent in the past two decades, and the homicide rate has dropped by 82 percent.

  The super-predator apocalypse was a myth.

  Yet many of the laws that the scare put on the books are still used. While California voters effectively repealed Proposition 21 in 2016, many states continue to routinely treat juveniles as adults. Each year, an estimated 250,000 US juveniles are transferred into adult courts. In California, three-quarters of those juveniles are transferred by prosecutors using the discretion given to them by Proposition 21. This discretion has not been evenly applied. A 2012 analysis by California’s Department of Justice found that cases against black youths were more than twice as likely to be directly filed in adult court than cases against white youths, and cases against Latino youths were more than six times as likely. And the disparity didn’t end there. Once they landed in adult court, young black and brown offenders were also much more likely to serve time. Just one-third of white youths were sentenced to adult or juvenile state correctional facilities in 2012, while two-thirds were given probation or sentenced to serve time in county jails. For kids of color, the ratios were reversed—two-thirds served time in state facilities, while one-third received probation or jail. Nationally, 58 percent of all incarcerated African American youths are serving their time in adult prisons.

  “What he did was a terrible thing,” Jasmine said after Richard was charged. “I’m not trying to defend his actions because it was very terrible.” Even so, she said, Richard was a kid, a kid who was capable of making an exceedingly dumb mistake, but one who was also capable of learning from it.

  “Life in jail? A sixteen-year-old? It’s ridiculous,” she said. “They need to give him time to grow. Why lock him up and have him institutionalized and make him worse?”

  COURT DATE

  On November 7, the day Richard made his first court appearance, reporters packed the hallways.

  “What kind of boy is he?” one shouted as Jasmine and her sister Juliette stepped into the elevator with Richard’s grandmother.

  “He’s a good kid. A very good kid,” the grandmother, also named Juliette, said.

  “Why do you think he did this?” another reporter asked.

  “I don’t know. He was with his friends, joking around, that’s all,” she said.

  “He’s not a bad person. If you knew him you’d know he’s always joking around,” Richard’s aunt Juliette said in a separate interview. “He shouldn’t have did what he did. I feel so bad.”

  Jasmine spoke to the press too, off camera. “I am very sorry for my son’s actions,” she said. “I did not raise my son that way.”

  That’s what they said.

  But all anyone seemed to hear was this: “He was joking around.”

  “Setting someone on fire because of their clothes is not a joke or prank gone awry,” editorialized the Bay Area Reporter, a newspaper serving the LGBTQ community. “As Alameda County prosecutors correctly see it, it’s a felony, and [Richard] surely isn’t laughing at the possibility of life in prison because he apparently couldn’t handle someone dressing differently.”

  Online forums seethed with outrage.

  To the Mother of the 16 year old who set the fire. You call that just joking around? Suppose some kid set you on fire, burned say 90% of your body. Would that be joking around? Your son needs life in prison! For attempted murder! a man named Brian Weil wrote on an anti-bullying Facebook page. The comment received 160 “likes.”

  On news sites, blogs, and forums around the country, the conclusion was the same: Lock him up. Throw away the key. Lock up the mother too while you’re at it.

  Many suggested far worse.

  REELING

  Jasmine felt the world had spun off its axis.

  It was impossible, and yet it was true.

  Richard had hurt someone, really hurt them. Somebody who hadn’t done anything to anyone.

  She was mad at Richard. She was mad at Lloyd. She was mad at herself. She was mad at society. How could this have happened?

  She knew what people were saying about Richard, about her. She’d seen the online comments. Her sister Juliette advised her not to tell anyone about Richard’s arrest, but she wasn’t going to hide. “If you have anything to say, bad comments, take it to God,” she told everyone who asked about Richard. “Pray for him.”

  THE DESK

  Nancy O’Malley, the Alameda County district attorney, worked at a weighty dark-wood desk that was once used by Earl Warren, the US Supreme Court justice whose court ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 decision Brown vs. Board of Education. A round-faced blond with a brisk, no-nonsense manner, she was known as a crusader for the rights of women and children—her prosecutorial priorities included sex trafficking, domestic violence, and child abuse. She had a reputation as tough, but generally fair. Her office had one of the lowest direct-file rates in the state. But in this particular case, O’Malley had no qualms about prosecuting Richard as an adult.

  “The crime is very, very, very serious,” she explained. “But for some Good Samaritans, Sasha could very well be dead. He lit Sasha’s skirt on fire on the bus in the middle of the day and that’s very, very disturbing behavior. If the defendant doesn’t change and get rehabilitated, he’s a very serious person in our society and a real threat to anyone.”

  A threat, she argued, because hate crimes are discrimination, just as segregation was. And as the occupant of Earl Warren’s desk, she was determined to fight discrimination wherever she found it.

  “We have a history, a long history in this country, of people and cultures who have been treated badly because of their race, their gender, their religion, and all the protected classes that we’ve identified under the law,” she explained. “So if somebody commits a heinous crime against somebody because they are a member of a protected class, that is very purposeful discrimination. It’s important to show that this is the kind of behavior that will never be tolerated.”

  Until the mid-1980s, the law made no distinction between crimes motivated by bigotry and crimes motivated by money, passion, or boredom. Murder was murder; vandalism was vandalism. The term hate crime was coined in response to what was described at the time as an “epidemic” of neo-Nazi and skinhead violence, although in retrospect it’s unclear whether any such epidemic existed. Since then, the number of bias-motivated prosecutions has steadily gone down. In California, a state with close to 39 million people, hate-crime prosecutions have fallen 48 percent since 2003, with just 158 bias crimes filed for prosecution in 2012. (Since bias crimes are vastly underreported, however, the true number is undoubtedly higher than the statistics indicate.)

  But despite how infreque
ntly they’re prosecuted, high-profile hate crimes offer a powerful narrative, one that has been important in fighting prejudice. A hate crime is bias boiled down to its most vile essence. Even someone who isn’t sure what they think about hiring people who are black, gay, or transgender can feel the essential wrongness of hurting someone because they are black, gay, or transgender. By revealing the raw ugliness at the heart of prejudice, high-profile hate-crime prosecutions have helped build empathy for people on the margins. Perhaps the most high-profile hate-crime prosecutions in Alameda County history were against four men who murdered a transgender teenager named Gwen Araujo in 2002, after discovering her biological sex. In the wake of that case, California’s state legislature passed the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act, which allows juries to be instructed before they begin deliberations that they should not allow themselves to be influenced by bias against the gender identity of the victim, defendant, or witnesses.

  Yet the majority of hate-crime offenders don’t fit the stereotype of the squinting, bristle-headed loner with a swastika tattoo or a Confederate flag T-shirt. Researchers estimate that fewer than 5 percent are members of an organized hate group. Most are young males, either in their teens or early twenties, acting in a group, often immediately after school. In a study of Boston hate-crime prosecutions in the early 1990s, two-thirds of the offenders were categorized as “thrill-seeking”—that is, they were groups of young people “looking for some fun” at the expense of someone they regarded as lower status. The authors of the study found that many of these offenders weren’t even particularly biased toward their victims, but were following the lead of a more biased peer.

  Many hate crimes, according to Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, a criminal-justice professor at California State University, Stanislaus, “don’t have as much to do with the victim as they do with the offender and their own insecurity—which of course is a lot of what’s going on with adolescents in general.”

  Maybe that’s why Nancy O’Malley received a surprising letter in November 2013. The letter was from two groups that might have been expected to support O’Malley’s decision to charge Richard as an adult: the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center.

  “When juvenile impulsivity and poor judgment produce dire consequences, it does not make sense to craft a response intended for adults,” they said in a letter that was also sent on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “Rather, these are the very circumstances under which it is important to remember that children are different from adults.”

  The letter concluded: “We firmly believe that you can demonstrate your office’s commitment to protecting the victims of hate crimes without imposing adult sanctions on juvenile offenders.”

  UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ADOLESCENCE

  When people say “Children are different from adults,” what do they mean? Is a sixteen-year-old really a child? By that age, surely any rational person knows not to go around setting people’s clothing on fire. That, anyway, was the argument made by many online commenters:

  He’s 16 not 10. If he doesn’t know by now that trying to kill other people is bad, then its a bit too late for him. Some people can not be fixed, if he behave like an animal then he should be treated like one, one wrote.

  If you have to be “taught why” and you’re 16, then you’re never going to be anything but a threat or a curse to everyone around you, wrote another.

  It’s true that in terms of pure intellect, teenagers are just as smart as adults, just as able to reason, and just as knowledgeable about the consequences of risky behavior. But they are also wired differently. Many people have observed that adolescents tend to be more reckless, impulsive, and vulnerable to peer pressure than adults. It turns out that at least part of the explanation for this behavior can be found in the structure of the teenage brain.

  The limbic system is the part of the brain that detects things in the environment that we should pay attention to and sends an emotional signal about what to do in response: Avoid! Investigate! Eat! Fight! Flirt! Starting around puberty, the limbic system becomes more sensitive to stimulus, which is one reason teenagers become both more emotional and more interested in having new and intense experiences.

  Throughout adolescence, the brain is busily lining important neural pathways with a fatty sheath called myelin. Myelin is often likened to the plastic coating around electrical wires—it insulates the neural circuits, making them about a hundred times faster than unmyelinated circuits.

  The very last part of the brain to get myelinated is the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reason, planning, and deliberation. So while teenage emotions have gone into hyperdrive, reason and logic are still obeying the speed limit.

  The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex. The presence of peers is one of the things that raises the emotional stakes, making it more likely that teens will seek out risk and short-term reward without pausing to consider the consequences.

  “Even the brightest, best-meaning teenager doesn’t tend to think much beyond the moment, especially when they’re with their friends,” observes Gerstenfeld.

  As people grow up, they generally get better at making thoughtful decisions even when under pressure. Studies have found that around the world, antisocial behavior increases by a factor of ten during adolescence and then begins to taper off as people reach their early twenties (criminologists call this the age-crime curve).

  But it doesn’t always. Some people start committing crimes when they’re young and keep on committing them, progressing from burglary to robbery to murder. The problem is, there’s no way to know which kid is going to mellow with age and which one is just getting warmed up. “You cannot tell when you’re looking at a sixteen-year-old whether they are irredeemably depraved,” explains Barry Feld, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on juvenile justice.

  So how should we look at teenagers who commit bias crimes? Are they kids with deep-seated character flaws who are likely to be antisocial bigots for the rest of their lives? Or are they simply manifesting the worst aspects of adolescence—an obsession with conformity, group identity, and peer approval combined with an appetite for risk and sensation?

  Or are they at a fork in the road, a place where their future will be determined by what happens next?

  “The proponents of hate-crime laws are liberals, and yet they are the ones who are the biggest critics of mass incarceration,” observes James B. Jacobs, director of New York University’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, and an expert on hate-crime laws. “So there are ironies piled on ironies. The remedy here is imprisonment, and prisons are the ultimate incubators of antisocial attitudes.”

  LIFE AT BOTHIN

  The first surgery was soon followed by a second. Dr. Grossman needed to cut away more dead tissue—he felt that the wounds still weren’t clean enough for a skin graft. After that, things settled into a routine. By the end of the first week of Sasha’s hospitalization, Debbie and Karl had returned to work part-time, arriving at the hospital every afternoon around two p.m. and staying into the evening.

  Sasha didn’t have the concentration to read or watch movies, so they spent their time dozing, scrolling idly through Tumblr, and calculating how long it would be until they got another dose of painkillers. What makes you get out of bed in the morning? a friend asked Sasha on Tumblr as part of a list of get-to-know-you questions that got passed from person to person.

  it used to be not wanting to miss the bus and be late to school, Sasha wrote. now it’s my nurses taking me to the tub

  Being bathed in the hug
e stainless-steel tub was Sasha’s favorite part of the day. The official name for it was hydrotherapy—the purpose was to keep the wounds clean and prevent infection. All Sasha knew was that the water and towels were warm. It was pleasant, floating there, a welcome change from lying in bed waiting for the next dose of Dilaudid.

  Friends came to visit, dressed in yellow paper gowns, their hands covered by blue synthetic-rubber gloves and their faces hidden behind paper masks. Two visitors were allowed in at a time. Nemo and Michael were the first to come. Healy visited a few days later, with Teah. Sasha had asked them not to bring food because everyone had been bringing food. They brought food anyway—vegan sushi from Berkeley.

  It was nice to have visitors, but Sasha wanted to go home. It was hard to sleep at the hospital. The room was always too hot or too cold, and it was often permeated with odd noises. For a while, Sasha’s roommate was a man in a medically-induced coma who was hooked up to a breathing machine that hissed and thumped in a rhythmic pattern. Their next roommate had burns over half his body—he’d gotten them in a house fire after running back to save his dog. He was friendly and chatty at first—more chatty than Sasha was in the mood for, actually. Then his burns became infected and he grew quieter. At night he moaned and murmured in his sleep.

  NOT VISITING

  Andrew didn’t visit. He planned to. But when the day arrived there was always a reason not to go. “I could have done it if I just set aside my bullshit feelings and been there for them,” he said.

  The “bullshit feelings” had to do with a worry that he hadn’t been as good a friend to Sasha as Sasha had been to him. That year he’d had his first real boyfriend. The relationship was all-consuming in a not entirely healthy way and Sasha had felt like a third wheel whenever they were together. And of course Andrew and Sasha went to different schools and had different friends, and it was totally normal to grow apart. Except that Sasha had once been the most important person in the world to Andrew and he felt bad and weird about the fact that they weren’t close anymore. Like maybe it was his fault. And then he felt bad and weird about feeling bad and weird. So maybe it would be uncomfortable if he showed up at the hospital.