Into the Darklands (15 page)

OK, so right now I’m sure a bunch of people are spinning mad after reading this. I can hear the howls of protest now:
Shorter days? Counselling? Making the lawyers less intimidating? A minder to hold their hand?

My guess is the outrage comes from the idea that a bunch of kids who kill someone shouldn’t get special treatment. They shouldn’t get the
soft
option from some liberal shrink.

I agree. But you have to remember they hadn’t been found
guilty
yet. At this point, in the eyes of the law, they are
innocent.
The burden of proof rests with the Crown, who must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their intention was to murder Michael Choy. What happens to them after they’ve been found guilty is a whole other question. At this stage though, the law says that we
must
afford young people the chance to adequately participate in their own defence. This is the fundamental basis of our current adversarial system of justice.

Don’t blame me, I didn’t make the rules. I don’t even agree with the adversarial system, but those were the rules I had to play by. The recommendations were about increasing the level of their participation, but they were also about how the trial might be run so that the young accused would have the best shot at gaining some understanding of what they’d done, of the impact of their offending. Everyone is always up in arms about making kids accountable, which was exactly the point of my recommendations.

You cannot be held accountable if you don’t understand what people are talking about. You cannot be held accountable if you are so scared of being seen on television that you stare at the floor the whole time. You cannot be made accountable if you’re goofing off with your friends in the dock because you’re bored and there’s no adult there to tell you to shut up and pay attention. You cannot be held accountable if you are recovering from trying to hang yourself in your cell.

Let me be clear: I believed it was important for these young people to participate in the trial if for no other reason than to understand what they’d really done. A man was dead. This was no exercise in liberal excuse-making; I wanted them to listen, to see, to understand.

In the end, thanks in large part to the wisdom of Justice Fisher, decisions were made which counterbalanced the competing needs of our obligations under law, the trial routine, the defendants and the Crown in as fair a manner as was possible.

The young accused would be allowed to sit at a table with a nominated minder. They would also be given paper and pens so they could take notes. The days would run for the normal length but with more frequent breaks. There would be some pretrial education to explain what happened during a trial. Name suppression would be continued till after the verdict. The television cameras would be barred until summing up, by which time the participation of the young accused would be all but over. Justice Fisher also gave counsel leeway to ask for their respective clients to be excused when their presence was not required.

Most importantly for me, I would be required to monitor the wellbeing of all the young accused over the course of the trial. This would take the form of monitoring their demeanour in court as well as brief interviews every couple of days in the holding cells below the court. At that point the trial was set down for six weeks, and I knew that being involved at such an intense level was going to play havoc with my schedule for the next couple of months.

Still, when a High Court Justice asks, what can you say? You nod politely and reply, ‘Yes, Sir.’

Which is exactly what I did.

It didn’t bother me at first, but as time went on it started to grate
on me more and more; everybody called him ‘the Pizza Man’.

The trial had been going for just over four weeks, and I’d been coming and going, mostly towards the end of the day, monitoring how the young accused were doing. My observations of them in court indicated they were handling it about as well you could expect. Mostly they just looked bored.

The older members of the group paid attention to almost everything, but the younger ones pretty much appeared to be doodling on paper the whole time. The spread of attentional ability was distributed much as I would have expected with the oldest doing the best and then panning down to what appeared to be only marginal ability for the younger members.

As the trial progressed I suggested to the court that I conduct less frequent interviews since there weren’t any pressing issues and this would mean a faster conclusion to the trial.

In fact, about the only thing that really bothered me was the constant referral to Michael Choy as ‘the Pizza Man’. Pretty much everybody did it. Now, I can understand at one level that the reason for this was to reduce confusion because there were a lot of names. From this point of view it made sense since everyone knew that Michael was the Pizza Man. Except it just kept grating away at me. It was so impersonal.

I sat in court listening to them talk about him like that, and wondered how I would feel about that if it were my own son. I wondered how it must be for Michael’s family to hear him referred to in that way. He wasn’t ‘the Pizza Man’ to them.

Then I looked over at the defendants, most of them still doodling, and the clinician in me strained at the leash. I didn’t want them to hear Michael Choy referred to in that way. They had depersonalised him when they attacked him, and I didn’t feel comfortable with him still being depersonalised. The clinician in me wanted those
young people to be confronted that this was a real person they had killed. I wanted them to hear his name. I wanted them to think about the fact that they hadn’t killed a ‘Pizza Man’, they had killed Michael Choy.

At one point I looked around the courtroom trying to decide who I could raise the matter with, but there wasn’t really anyone. None of the defence lawyers would want to personalise the victim more. I didn’t have any form of contract with the Crown lawyers, and it would have been inappropriate in the extreme for me to raise it with the Judge. Essentially it was none of my business.

Instead I reminded myself that the trial wasn’t concerned with accountability in the way I might be. The clinician in me wanted to sit all those kids down in a quiet room and make them understand what they’d done. Criminal trials aren’t about that, though, criminal trials are about lawyers and legal arguments.

So I sat on my hands, and every time they said ‘the Pizza Man’ I said Michael’s name in my head.

Someone had to.

THAT WAS THE HEADLINE in the
Sunday Star-Times
on 25 August 2002, just after BJ and his friends were convicted for the attack which led to the death of Michael Choy. Underneath the headline was a half-page picture of BJ himself, looking typically angelic. He looked like a sweet kid. Except of course that he wasn’t; instead he was our youngest killer.

In fact, only two of the six young people were convicted of murder, the 16-year-old boy who had swung the baseball bat and the 17-year-old girl who had been standing beside BJ. The rest of them, including BJ, were convicted of manslaughter. The 14-year-old client of the lawyer who had originally contacted me was acquitted of all charges relating to the attempted aggravated robbery of the KFC driver.

When Justice Fisher pronounced sentence BJ cried.

I didn’t go back to court to hear the verdict or for the sentencing. By the time the jury retired my job was essentially over and so I set about trying to catch up on all the things I’d put off over the six or so weeks of the trial. Besides, I’d had about as much of that
particular tragedy as I could take.

For about a week the fallout from the trial took centre stage on the media merry-go-round. Everyone on the talkback shows wanted to know why this had happened, and what we could do about it. Questions were asked with an earnest tone and there was much beating of the national chest.

And tougher sentencing, yet again everybody wanted tougher sentencing.

Then, as always happens, the world simply moved on. The kids all went off to jail, and disappeared off the national consciousness. BJ’s moment of fame had passed. People stopped asking questions, and things went on pretty much as they always have.

And in the constant state of media-induced Attention Deficit Disorder that the whole world seems to suffer from, we moved our outrage on to the next big issue.

When I did a quick tally of the kids I’ve seen this week alone, I had one kid under the age of 16 who I believe will kill somebody in the next year or so, one more who might in the next five years, three kids that will probably sexually reoffend some time in the next 18 months, and about a half-dozen who, for a variety of reasons, are well down the slippery slope to prison unless some miracle happens.

This is not an atypical week for me.

So we locked up BJ and his mates, but there’s a bunch more of them out there.

And I guarantee you one thing: none of them will be even vaguely influenced by the fact that BJ and his friends went to jail.

‘Do you remember those kids that went to jail for killing Michael Choy?’ I asked one kid. He was up on aggravated robbery charges and didn’t appear to care about anything.

‘Who?’

I sighed. ‘The pizza guy.’

He smiled. ‘Oh yeah, I knew them, bro.’

‘Who did you know?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘What did you think about what they did?’ I asked him.

‘It was funny, man.’

‘You think it was funny? A man died, and you think that’s funny?’

‘Getting busted for pizza, that’s fuckin’ funny, man.’

‘Would you do something like that?’

‘Fuck no,’ he says, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t get caught.’

Fortunately at the time I’m writing this, that particular kid is locked up. By the time you’re actually reading this, he’ll probably be out.

So don’t be under any illusions that any of these kids are going to be stopped by a fear of the consequences. If there’s one thing that distinguishes recidivist juvenile offenders, it’s the fact that consequences don’t appear to have a lot of impact on their behaviour.

There are a number of implications that flow on from this trial about how we manage the criminal prosecution of young people accused of serious crimes. It’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away. My best guess would be that initially defence lawyers will drive this debate, but over time I think we will be forced to examine the way we deal with young accused in a more systematic way. At some point I would imagine the government will ask a group of wise people to develop protocols to address these issues.

I believe that will be a good thing.

You can’t treat a juvenile defendant like an adult defendant. They don’t think or behave the same way. If we ignore that fact then young people will suffer for it. If they’re guilty, well I guess you
could say they brought that suffering upon themselves, but what if they didn’t do it? I would imagine that the only thing worse than an innocent man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit would be an innocent kid in jail.

Still, that’s for the lawyers to work out. I’m a clinician and so my concern is more about how we stop kids from doing these things in the first place.

The thing that struck me the most about this group is that I would not have predicted any of them would have gone on to commit this kind of a crime. The one person with the longest history of behavioural problems was BJ himself. At the time of the attack on Michael Choy, he was out of school and on the run from a foster home.

I guess what really frightens me is that I have boxes and boxes of files on kids just like the ones in that group. I have spent years sitting in rooms with hundreds of young people just like them, more than I can count.

If I’d seen any of this particular group the day before they killed Michael Choy, I would not have predicted they were going to do such a thing. Nothing in their histories would have predicted what they did. I almost certainly would have said some of them were highly likely to keep committing various crimes, even violent ones, but I wouldn’t have said they were going to kill someone.

In hindsight you can look at their histories and say there were signs—like not being in school for instance—but that’s cheating, because looking back is easy. Looking back and blaming is the territory of the media and the politicians. For those of us who actually have to do the work, it’s often a waste of time.

Foresight is the hard thing, but it’s really the only thing that matters. The real question is not ‘who’s to blame for this?’ but rather ‘what do we do next?’

Following the conviction, the Ministers for Justice, Social Services and Employment, and Education asked for an interdepartmental review to examine the actions taken by the various agencies dealing with these young people. The report found there were three ‘common negative influences’:

• Their families were unable to control their behaviour.
  
• They were often absent or performing poorly at school.
  
• They mixed with peers who reinforced their antisocial behaviour.
  

Amazing. Whoever would have guessed?

What’s more, the report went on to identify three key areas where ‘improvements are needed’:

• Identifying the causes of, and effective interventions to address, criminal behaviour.
  
• Keeping young people participating in education.
  
• Ensuring effective training of, and coordination between, those tasked with responding to young offenders.
  

Again, equally amazing. The problem with all these nice reports is that someone actually has to sit down and try and do the things they say. Someone has to sit in a room with a kid like BJ and make him give a shit. Someone has to try ‘keeping young people participating in education’. As one of the people who currently tries to do just that, let me tell you it’s one thing to say it in a report, but it’s a whole other thing to actually do it.

The government is in the process of implementing Youth Offending Teams involving the police, social workers and other state agencies. The intervention model they propose is good, very good in fact, but it remains to be seen if it can overcome the politics. A senior social worker I spoke to said it sounded like a good idea but he wondered if it could survive the bureaucracy.

The way we are doing things at the moment isn’t working. We are being buried in an avalanche of screwed-up kids and families. Traditional approaches seem unable to keep pace with the scale of the problem. So how do we stop kids from doing bad things? How do we stop kids from committing senseless crimes like the killing of Michael Choy? And, just as importantly, how do we stop them from growing into adults who do bad things?