Your Baby v. The Law
		Sean’s Sad Story
	Sixteen-year-old Sean* sat in the back seat of the old Mustang grooving on one of Snoop Dogg’s latest sides blaring on the car radio. “Shut the f--- up,” he wolfed at his two chattering friends in the front seat. But once they did, Sean heard a distant police siren growing louder by the second. He looked back to see the charging black and white and the ominous rainbow of lights spinning faster than his head. “Hey man, pull over,” Sean told his homies. The rest of the story is so familiar it's become a cliché. Instead of stopping the car, the driver, a 17-year-old African American high school dropout, slammed the peddle to the metal and they were off; Sean glued to the back seat in utter terror. “What’s goin’ on, man?” Sean wined, then shrieked, tears rolling down his chubby clean-shaven cheeks. He had never been in trouble before. [Well, not any serious trouble.] When his grades dropped, he'd been cut from the basketball team and he didn't have any other serious interests to fill in the slack. Sean’s real problem, his mother warned him time and again, was the company he kept. Cutting to the chase [no pun intended] the boys were captured by the police who chased them for 20 city blocks. After intensive interrogation and a search of the car by the arresting uniformed officers, Sean, who had a $10 bag of weed on him, was approached about his knowledge of the contraband under the back seat: a stolen gun and two grams of what looked like crack cocaine. At first one of the two boys in the front seat admitted that Sean had no knowledge of either the drugs or the gun. He blamed his other friend, the driver of the stolen vehicle. [Oh, did I forget to mention that when the driver picked Sean up in front of school he told him that it was his grandma's car?] Sean's homey copped to taking the car. [There was a witness, don't you know.] But he said that Sean was the drug dealer and that's why Sean had the gun. He claimed that he was with Sean when he bought it from some street thug and that the other homey, the second passenger, was a witness to the transaction. Sean didn't know that his two friends, both with prior criminal convictions, were offered a deal if they agreed to finger Sean as the criminal mastermind. Turning snitch at the trial, both youths testified that they were running from the police so that Sean—the ringleader hiding in the back seat—would have time to wipe the gun clean. Today Sean's homies are running amok among us, free, and Sean, a basically clean kid with no previous criminal record, will reside in CYA until he turns 18 and then, for eight more years, he will be a guest of one of California's state prisons. As Sean's story illustrates, the homies or our children's “friends” often make the difference between their freedom and their incarceration. ----------- *Sean’s story is actually a composite of two juvenile cases with similar outcomes. I've taken liberties for brevity, to protect the privacy of those who spoke to me in confidence, and to illustrate the seriousness of keeping bad company.