Los Angeles County Juvenile Defense | Law Offices of Jerod Gunsberg

A guest blogger, Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney Andrew Bouvier-Brown, comes to us this week with his take on a bizarre incident in which a Colorado high school student had his rosary beads confiscated by school authorities?  Why?  They believed that the rosary, which contained 13 beads was a “gang symbol.” As Reported in the Daily Mail:

According to the Loveland Reporter Herald schools across the country have been banning the wearing of the beads because they are known to be used by gangs including the Surenos and the Latin Kings to mark membership.

The district’s fears were furthered by the fact that [the student's] string had on it 13 beads – a number associated with the Surenos – rather than the traditional 10.

But is the 13 bead rosary that unusual?  No.

It is, in fact, quite common for a rosary to have “thirteen” beads, depending on how you describe the arrangement of those beads. A typical rosary is divided into “decades,” strings of ten beads, with a single bead dividing each of the decades. There are five decades on a complete rosary. The five decades of beads (plus four dividing beads) form the main portion of the rosary, linked together by a medallion of some sort (typically, but again, styles vary widely.) Hanging down from the medallion will be five more beads: a single bead, a group of three beads, a single bead, and then a cross or crucifix icon.

However, it is not uncommon for a sort of “mini-rosary” to be sold with a string of ten beads. Such items are in wide use and are certainly a part of traditional Catholic prayer rituals. On such items, there are sometimes only one additional bead between the medallion and the crucifix icon, leaving a total of eleven beads. It is also fairly common, however, to see three beads between the medallion and the crucifix– making a total of thirteen beads on the rosary. An example of one such thirteen bead rosary: the last item for sale here (http://www.totallycatholic.com/single.htm). One can see that the last example is a very cheaply made, inexpensive rosary, all plastic; that is a good indicator of the level of wide distribution this style might be expected to receive. They are meant for giving away… perhaps to a group of school kids, for instance.

But this story brings to light a more perplexing and disturbing problem. These school educators can hardly be blamed for their ill-conceived position on this issue, as they are in many ways simply following a well-established trend in law enforcement towards its next logical step. In courtrooms across Los Angeles, across California and all over the western United States today, one will find law enforcement officers styled as “gang experts” who will tell you, under oath and in the face of cross-examination, that what transmutes an ordinary, innocuous symbol into a gang symbol is the person who is wearing it. They’ll also testify that what transmutes a person into a gang member is the fact that he or she is wearing a gang symbol. The circularity ensues:

Q: “How do you know this person is a gang member?”

A: “For one thing, he’s got a gang symbol. A Raider’s helmet.”

Q:  “Are all Raiders helmet tattoos gang symbols?”

A:  “Only when they’re being worn by suspected gang members.”

Now, of course, merely having a tattoo, possessing a certain symbol, carrying an article, or the like cannot by itself make you a gang member. The other pieces of this equation? Association with “known” gang members, and oftentimes, a shared ethnicity with that gang. In short, a young Latino or Latina who grew up in a neighborhood where there are gangs (thus associating him or her with gang members by default; every kid from that neighborhood went to the same school) with a Raiders helmet tattoo has a gang tattoo.

It’s almost to be expected, then, that this insidious, vaguely circular reasoning would extend to other symbols ubiquitous in Latino culture. The rosary is certainly that, which leads one to wonder: What about images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom the rosary prayer is so often dedicated?

La Virgen is certainly an even more common image, whether on an elaborate mural, a beautify tapestry, a cheaply made candle, or a tattoo. Can we consider this deeply cherished, culturally distinctive, powerful spiritual beacon a gang symbol as well? You’ll find Her associated with young Latinos and Latinas everywhere, including that relatively small percentage of the demographic who belong to a criminal street gang.

When this young Latino boy brings a rosary to campus, he’s bringing a gang symbol to school. When and elderly white woman does the same, most assuredly, no one will ever make the same assumption. If this sounds sinister to you, please know: this kind of thinking merely follows the lead set by the so-called gang experts now dictating public policy and determining the outcome of criminal justice proceedings throughout America.

If a child is accused of murdering two adults, what is a reasonable amount of time to determine whether they should be treated as an adult?

I am a criminal defense lawyer representing juveniles in Los Angeles, so you may think this is a trick question.  It isn’t.

A recent feature article in the Sunday New York Times describes the legal saga of Greg Ousley, from Indiana, who killed his parents when he was 14 years old.

With 24 hours of the killings, Greg “confessed” to the police.  Greg certainly admitted to pulling the trigger, but that doesn’t mean that his confession was legally valid.  There is reason to believe it may not have been.  Indiana law at the time didn’t permit juveniles to waive their Miranda rights-without parental approval.  So what do you do in a case where the parents aren’t alive?  The police were aware of the law, but simply ignored it.  They continued to interrogate Greg.

Greg doesn’t deny that he shot both of his parents with a shotgun. It’s also undeniable that the killings weren’t spontaneous.  There is evidence in the form of diary entries that strongly suggest that he planned the killings over a number of days.  There’s also no denying that this is a shocking crime and it’s difficult to get one’s head around it.

But let’s return to the questions with which I started this entry.  Shocking as this crime is, how much time should we devote to figuring out whether Greg Ousley should have been tried as an adult?  Reasonable people can disagree about the answer to this question, but I hope we can agree that this issue deserves more time than Greg received—one 20-minute hearing in court.

That’s right; two days after “confessing,” and less than three days since the crime was committed, thanks to his court-appointed lawyer, Greg got a single lousy 20-minute hearing.

Two days later, Greg was taken into court for a hearing on whether his case should be routed into the adult legal system. His court-appointed lawyer might have asked for a preliminary psychiatric examination, a procedure that would have at least slowed the process down, but he declined to do so. He might have also asserted that the presence of premeditation — the prosecutor’s chief argument for taking it to adult court — was a particularly poor standard in the context of juvenile parricide; given the physical and psychological power imbalance inherent in child-parent relationships, a not uncommon feature to such murders is premeditation. He declined to do that as well. And so in a single 20-minute hearing held less than 72 hours after the murders, it was decided that the 14-year-old would stand as an adult.

Greg accepted a plea of guilty but mentally ill.  At his sentencing hearing, three psychological examiners hired by defense counsel argued that Greg shouldn’t just be sent to jail; he should receive treatment.  The prosecutor argued that an example should be made of Greg.  The prosecutor won.  And Greg was sentenced to two consecutive 30 year prison sentences. That was 19 years ago.

Today, Greg Ousley is a poster child for how juveniles can turn their lives around, even in jail.  He is by all accounts a model prisoner.  Some of his biggest supporters are the hard-to-impress officials who work for the prison system.  He completed online courses and graduated from college with honors.  He is a good example of why the United States Supreme Court was correct to strike down laws that sentence juveniles to life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Greg’s case raises many difficult and confounding issues.  That’s why his story has received so much attention.  But as a juvenile defense lawyer, I can’t help but focus on those crucial moments in the days following his arrest.  Whatever you think of Greg Ousely and whether he should be released from prison now, it’s clear that a more engaged and aggressive criminal juvenile criminal defense lawyer would likely have made a big difference.