No Matter How Loud I Shout Read Online Free

Elias says. “Why couldn’t God help me learn how to be a father?”

PART ONE
We’re Drowning
    Take a trip in my mind
    see all that I’ve seen,
    and you’d be called a
    beast, not a human being. . . .
    Fuck it, cause there’s
    not much I can do,
    there’s no way out, my
    screams have no voice no
    matter how loud I shout. . . .
    I could be called a
    low life, but life ain’t
    as low as me. I’m
    in juvenile hall headed
    for the penitentiary.
    GEORGE TREVINO, sixteen, “Who Am I?”

PROLOGUE
Two Boys, Thirty Years, and Other Numbers
    Gila County, Arizona
    June 8, 1964
    A MILDLY irritating, lewdly suggestive telephone call and a fifteen-year-old boy named Gerald Francis Gault: that’s all it took to bring the nation’s juvenile justice system to its knees.
    At the time, Gila County was, to put it charitably, something of a backwater. Arid even in winter, it was a place of trailer parks and gritty two-lane roads peeling ruler straight through the scrubby fry pan of the Upper Sonoran Desert. There are no major cities here. The county’s principal claims to fame include the fact that Zane Grey’s cabin was located here, and that the county seat, Globe, had a neighborhood so contaminated with asbestos-laden mining debris that the U.S. government had to remove its families and entomb its soil beneath gigantic concrete caps. Conservative and insular, it is safe to say that Gila County has never been the sort of place in which obscene phone calls, even pubescent ones, went over very well. So when young Gerry Gault and a snickering friend decided to while away the afternoon by telephoning a certain Mrs. Cook to tell her just how much they admired her physique, the local sheriff did not hesitate to act on the irate woman’s complaint.
    The sheriff hauled the fifteen-year-old to jail that same day, charging him as a juvenile delinquent. No one explained to Gerald his constitutional rights before demanding that he confess. No one offered him a lawyer or adime to make a phone call. No one even took the trouble to tell his parents what had happened. They simply came home from work and found him missing. After canvassing the neighborhood, Gerald’s worried mother and father finally learned their son had been arrested. They went to the county detention hall, where a probation officer reluctantly told them that a court hearing had been scheduled to determine their son’s fate.
    A week later, without any formal charges filed and without ever hearing any testimony from the simmering Mrs. Cook, or anyone else, for that matter—in other words, without any actual evidence against the boy—the juvenile court judge for Gila County pronounced Gerald guilty and proclaimed him a delinquent.
    During the hearing, the judge forced Gerald to testify—there would be no claiming the Fifth in his courtroom, thank you. Then, when the boy failed to incriminate himself sufficiently, the judge proclaimed him “habitually immoral.” The judge based this finding upon his vague recollection of an allegation two years earlier—never proven or even heard in court—that Gerald took another boy’s baseball bat and glove. Again, this ruling was made without evidence or testimony from anyone.
    An adult found guilty of making such a lewd phone call—a misdemeanor roughly as serious as running a stop sign—could have been fined five to fifty dollars or, in rare instances, could have received a brief jail sentence under Arizona law in effect at the time. But the consequences for a juvenile judged guilty of such a charge and designated habitually immoral were profoundly different. As Gerald’s horrified parents sat in the judge’s chambers, stunned and intimidated into silence, the judge sentenced the boy to the state of Arizona’s juvenile prison for up to six years.
    Gerald had no attorney to represent him at this hearing, nor was he