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permitted to have one. He was presumed guilty, not innocent, from the moment he sat down on the hard wooden chair reserved for him in the judge’s chamber. No transcript was made of this secret “trial.” No transcript was needed, his parents learned later, because juvenile delinquents like Gerald had no right to appeal. He had no rights, period. Whatever the judge said, that was it. And Gerald and his family soon learned that this was not some high-handed, backroom Star Chamber peculiar to Gila County. This was how juvenile courts throughout the country operated, the judge curtly informed them.
    Three years passed before the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to do something about Gerald Gault’s case. When the High Court finally acted, its sweeping decision became a landmark: Juvenile courts throughout thenation were transformed by the simple notion that children should not be convicted of crimes without evidence of their guilt, without fair trials and lawyers and the chance to face their accusers. The turn-of-the-century intent behind the creation of a separate juvenile justice system—that it be informal, stripped of legal ritual, and dedicated to quickly helping troubled kids get back on track—was all well and good, the Supreme Court observed. But those noble intentions had spawned outrageous abuses—not only against poor Gerry Gault, but against thousands of other kids convicted more on whim than evidence, imprisoned on charges for which no adult could serve even a day behind bars.
    â€œUnder our Constitution,” reads one particularly caustic passage of the Supreme Court decision, now know as In Re Gault, “the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court.”
    And so, on May 15, 1967, Gerry Gault’s adolescent prank had the extraordinary effect of bringing every juvenile court in every state of the Union to a grinding halt so that lawyers and court reporters and all the other trappings of real courtrooms could be put into place. When they started up again, the way in which society dealt with its troubled youth had forever changed.
    Thirty years later, the system has yet to recover from that one lewd phone call, or from the hidden price tag attached to the reforms it spawned.
    Los Angeles County Juvenile Court
    Los Padrinos Branch
    April 27, 1994
    Richard Perez, aka Shorty, a scrawny sixteen-year-old with an adolescent mustache atop an adolescent smirk, walked into the court Gerry Gault built exactly twenty-nine years and ten months after that fateful phone call in Gila County. It was Richard’s thirty-first court appearance in Los Angeles’s massive Juvenile Court, and his sixth criminal arrest. This time, though, he was in for murder, his world’s surest right of passage to adulthood—or, at least, to adult court and adult prison.
    Richard’s criminal career began with a car theft in 1990, when he was thirteen. At least, that’s when he officially entered the system. Truth is, he had been getting into trouble for years before that—cutting classes, throwing chairs and disturbing classrooms when he didn’t skip school. Long before his voice had changed, he had begun to disobey his parentswith impunity. He joined a street gang, stayed out all night, stole from his family. Under old juvenile laws, such classic delinquent behavior would have been enough to get him into the system at age eight or nine. Today, such conduct can’t be used to incarcerate kids. If it’s not a crime for adults to run away or skip school or to tell their parents to fuck off, it would be unconstitutional to make it a crime for children. “I’m sorry,” a police desk sergeant had told Richard’s mother once, when she called desperate for help with her wayward son. “There’s nothing anyone can do unless he commits a crime.”
    So it took a car theft for the system to get hold of Richard, not at age eight, when programs to reform