"Something's bound to go wrong"

A boy who played games with the police and the justice system couldn't outrun the cost of defiance.

By Nicki Blake

Jun 2, 1999 | Benny Armande was a 15-year-old loner and the child who most intrigued me of all the children on my case load. I was his public defender for a year and a half, replacing the defender who had represented him for three years prior. He brought out all things maternal within me. He tricked me into spending "family time" with him, those selfishly amassed moments of peace, grabbing pizza on Broadway or in the attorney-client visit area during the periods of his incarceration at the juvenile justice center. My own son would be waiting for me at home while Benny and I prepared for trial over pizza and pop.

Benny was brilliant, charming, poor and black. We routinely separate these adjectives in our minds so that the blending of them can sound somewhat unnatural to the ear. He was legendary. A handful of black professionals -- other lawyers, court staff and I -- thought if we could just come up with the right words for his ears, somehow, one day, the bell would chime; he'd understand in a flash of light, see his way through to the other side of adolescence. But what Benny wanted most, I think now, was to be seen as a cowboy, the black-horsed desperado. The cops were foolish enough to play Benny's game, chasing him from suburb to suburb. He'd flee on foot and then disappear in fields, parking lots and housing developments.

His favorite game was petty theft in the plushest department stores of south King County, Wash. The end result of his afternoon sprees was the trials: me and Benny, alone, in the Seattle courthouse. The sterile, air-conditioned courtroom with faux oak paneling was the theater where his plots culminated. It must have felt to him so different from the grassy summer air, the excitement of hot pursuit across tar-covered parking lots and into the surrounding fields. His world was spacious, outside. But the chase always brought him back to the stale, indoor world of the legal system. Benny sat next to me at counsel table in dark blue pajamas. "D.Y.S." in white, gummy letters tagged the back of his shoulders; he was in the custody of the Department of Youth Services -- again. I acknowledged with pen strokes to a yellow legal pad the parade of witnesses required to evidence one child's theft of one clothing item from one store. At his last trial, I'd encouraged him to accept the state's offer of 10 days in jail and a year on probation. He declined despite the fact that he'd already served all of the time they were asking. It looked from the police reports that if the state's witnesses just managed to show up, they'd have this one in the bag: Benny would be convicted. Around the courthouse, this was called an attendance drill.

Like all of the other eight trials that I represented Benny through, he kept wagging his head over his shoulder, distracted, as though he expected someone to walk through the door that divided the public from us.

The last day of trial, a key witness failed to appear. The judge acquitted Benny after my closing argument highlighting the absence. She brought down the gavel on the case and the curtain on this scene. Benny sat slouched back in the institutional chair, grinning at her without an ounce of surprise in his eyes and demanded the guard to remove his cuffs. Benny was smart and lucky. He wasn't convicted of stealing that pair of pants from the Bon Marche, even though the cops had the pants in a sealed evidence bag that they'd hauled back and forth to the courthouse between recesses. Officers Jackson and Laramie left court, infuriated that little Benny could have the nerve to take such a case to trial and then to win or, as they said, "win on a technicality." That's what they call it when all of the resources of the state, the cops, the prosecutors, court staff, when all of these government employees are unable to rally into court one witness. In this case, it was Mrs. Jones, who'd been shopping for her son in the boys department on the Sunday in question.

Jones was the only person who actually saw Benny ball up the jeans and thrust them into his backpack that afternoon. I'd spoken with her, my investigator on hand taking notes. I knew her better than the prosecutors, better than the cops. They had time to chase Benny on their mottled black and white horses around the county but, in the end, all of their efforts couldn't make Jones care about that pair of jeans. I'd seen her home, the cars in the driveway: hers, her husbands, her oldest son's. Her boys were safe, college-bound. She and her husband were salaried and she could have taken the time to appear in court without losing a cent. She'd even gain the $18 that King County would pay her for returning her subpoena to the front desk at the end of her testimony. But she didn't show up. Why would she? That is the part that the good guys just hadn't put together. The look of surprise on their faces as they walked out of the front door, after the botched trial, amazed me. They hadn't given much consideration to the whys of the case: why a kid as smart as Benny spent so much time doing nothing of value; why they invested their own time in the chase; and why Jones would consider taking time off so some boy she didn't know could do time in jail for stealing a pair of pants.

Next Page: Benny knew how to work the justice system, but did he know how to survive?

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