Disorder in the court

Try as he might, David couldn’t fall asleep. All night he struggled with the same images playing over and over in his head, like a movie that kept flashing back and never ending.

The man, the woman, the knife, the chase.

Fifteen-year-old David was so obsessed with the images, a murder story he’d seen earlier on America’s Most Wanted, that he decided on the advice of the voices in his head to do something about it. Act it out. “Kill a woman,” the voice told him, and the movie would stop.

So David rose from his bed at about 2 a.m. and went downstairs into the kitchen where he found a 7-inch-long serrated steak knife, tucked it, point down, in his front pocket and exited out the front door. Nobody else in the house was awake to stop him and no one knew where he was for the next four hours.

In the darkness of the early morning, June 25, 2001, David walked three miles until he arrived at a shopping center in the northern Sacramento suburb of Natomas.

At about 5 a.m., Sarah Volp was among the early morning commuters who stopped at the Starbucks coffee shop in the shopping center.

Volp noticed David lingering outside the Starbucks front door as she entered. Something about the pale, skinny teen loitering alone outside the store stuck her as not quite right. Indeed, she found his presence unsettling enough to look out the window before leaving the store to make sure the boy was gone, which he appeared to be.

But as Volp exited the store, David stepped from his hiding place and plunged the steak knife into her back.

In David’s mind, he ran after his victim, intent on “finishing her off,”—an odd, seemingly TV-inspired phrase he would later use when talking to the police. In reality, Volp ran back inside the coffee store where the police were called. According to court documents, witnesses said David then shuffled around on the sidewalk until the police arrived and arrested him.

Later in the morning, when David’s horrified parents came to visit him in custody, he leaned close to his mother and whispered, “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you.”

He bashfully pulled the lining out of his front pocket, confessing that the knife had poked a hole in his nice pants. Was she angry? He wanted to know.

Certainly David Maggi was in serious trouble, more trouble than he was likely to understand, given the way his brain works.

David, now 16 years old, has autism. Over the course of his short life, he has also been diagnosed with a host of other developmental disabilities, including mental retardation (his IQ is somewhere around 60), obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder.

Prior to the attack, David had been living at the Gary Knight Group Home for the Developmentally Disabled, where his parents had placed him because his mental disabilities were causing ever more erratic, sometimes violent, behavior, and because they couldn’t control him anymore.

Despite David having the intellectual capabilities of an 8-year-old boy, at best, the criminal justice system came down on him just as it would on an 18-year-old, or any adult accused of a crime. What happened to David and his family following the attack offers a glimpse into the workings of California’s recent get-tough-on-juvenile-crime law—Proposition 21—wherein prosecutors have unprecedented powers to drag mentally retarded minors into the adult court system and demand the harshest penalties.

Sarah Volp was hospitalized overnight, then released. She has refused to talk to the SN&R, but her lawyer, Ronald Haven, said her injuries were never life threatening, although she still feels pain and weakness due to the nerve damage caused by the single knife wound.

Shortly after the attack, the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office charged David in adult court with attempted murder while using a weapon. Then in October, the DA amended its complaint against David, charging him with attempted premeditated murder and a possible sentence of 15 years to life in state prison.

The DA was able to bypass the juvenile court system because of Prop. 21, which voters passed overwhelmingly in March 2000.

Called the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, the 48-page measure was a massive overhaul of criminal law that, among other things, stiffened penalties for gang-related offenses, loosened restrictions on police use of wiretaps and added to the list of crimes that could be counted under the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law passed by voters a few years earlier.

The law also made it much easier for children as young as 14 or 15 years old to be tried as adults for violent crimes. Under the old law, only juvenile court judges could determine whether 14- or 15-year-olds could be tried as adults. (Of course, the “old law” in this case had only been on the books since 1995, an earlier reform in the frenzy of tough-on-crime laws that marked the 1990s. Prior to that, no juvenile under the age of 16, no matter how serious the offense, could be tried as an adult.) Under the new law, prosecutors are allowed to file charges directly in adult court, without any review by juvenile court judges.

During the Prop. 21 campaign, opponents of the new law raised concerns that juveniles with mental disabilities would be railroaded into the adult system, and so the law would unfairly deny mental health services to troubled minors. But Dan Macallair with the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) said those fears were dismissed by the initiative’s backers, including many of California’s district attorneys, who argued that prosecutors would be able to tell who belonged in the adult system and who didn’t. The initiative was heartily endorsed by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully.

“What the DAs were saying was ‘Trust Us. We’ll be judicious,’ ” Macallair explained.

But the Sacramento DA’s decision to bring David into the adult court hardly seemed judicious to the Maggis. He was now being swept up into the harsh new world of holding minors, even severely disabled ones, accountable as if they were adults.

“We’ve always been somewhat conservative, politically speaking. I was raised in a family of staunch Republicans,” David’s mother, Joan Maggi, explained while sitting in the kitchen of her Fair Oaks apartment. She is a pediatrics nurse, and in her denim skirt and checked blouse and eyeglasses, she looked something like a kindergarten teacher. She is now separated from her husband, David’s father John Maggi, who is a tax accountant.

In the past, she said, she has generally supported tough-on-crime laws like Prop. 21, and when the initiative appeared on the ballot, she thought it was a good idea. Like many voters, when she cast her vote she had in mind the archetypal juvenile gang-banger—cold-blooded and calculating, mature beyond their years. Certainly, she believed, this class of evil people, even if they were under 16, needed to be kept off the streets.

“I never dreamed that the law would be applied to a child with the intellectual level of an 8-year-old,” Maggi said.

She doesn’t dispute the ghastliness of David’s crime, or even that it occurred. This was no whodunit. But it seemed unlikely to her that David would face trial in adult court. To her, David is a scared, frustrated boy, who doesn’t understand how the world works. By turns, he could be unpredictable and even violent, or charming and affectionate. But he had no criminal record, and was not the hardened gang member that Maggi assumed Prop. 21 was written for.

“I just thought for sure that once they figured out how disabled he was that they would send it back to juvenile court,” Maggi recalled.

Supervising Deputy District Attorney Rick Lewkowitz, who heads up the DA’s juvenile justice department, said that the seriousness of the crime David was accused of gave prosecutors little choice but to charge him as an adult.

Before Prop. 21, the DA would have to petition the juvenile court to try certain juvenile offenders as adults. Lewkowitz said the Sacramento County DA filed about 50 of these petitions a year before the new law went into effect. In each instance, a “juvenile fitness hearing” would be held, with both prosecution and defense arguing their case before a judge. Of those, prosecutors were only successful about half of the time in getting juvenile cases sent to the adult court.

Since Prop. 21, the DA has similarly filed charges directly in adult court against about 50 juveniles per year. But the new law has removed the step of going through a juvenile fitness hearing, and the possibility of losing such a hearing. “The big difference now is that we never lose,” Lewkowitz said.

Interestingly, although the law allows prosecutors to file adult charges against a whole range of juvenile offenses, violent and non-violent, Lewkowitz said that 90 percent of the juveniles charged as adults fall into three main categories: homicide, attempted homicide, and felonies involving firearms. The office almost never pursues adult charges in lesser crimes, although there are dozens of possible candidates each month, because the individual circumstances don’t warrant the harsher penalties in the adult system.

“The juvenile system is about rehabilitation. The adult system is about deterrence and punishment,” Lewkowitz explained, adding that many juveniles who could fall under Prop. 21’s tougher penalties really belong in the juvenile system.

By contrast, crimes in the three most serious categories almost automatically end up going to the adult court. Indeed, Lewkowitz said that it is District Attorney Jan Scully’s standing policy that for these more serious crimes her deputies must file charges directly in adult court unless supervisors agree there is some compelling reason not to. Since the passage of Prop. 21, he said only two such exceptions, out of more than 100 cases, have been made.

Given the seriousness of his crime, and despite being aware of his mental disabilities, prosecutors saw no reason to send David Maggi’s case back to the juvenile court. Faced with a possible state prison term, the Maggis borrowed heavily to get the best lawyer they could. They retained Robert Blasier, who had once been one of the lawyers on O.J. Simpson’s fabled “Dream Team” of defense attorneys.

Blasier defended David by going on the offensive squarely against Prop. 21 and the power it gives DAs.

“If there is any case which reveals the problems inherent with the unfettered discretion of the District Attorney to directly file a criminal complaint against a juvenile, it is the case of the People of the State of California vs. David Maggi,” wrote Blasier in an early argument. He contended that the law was unconstitutional, and asked the court to throw David’s case back to juvenile court.

Blasier noted the tragedy of David Maggi’s short life. He wasn’t diagnosed with autism until he was 10 years old, and for years his parents struggled simply to learn what caused his problems. Getting the services he needed, medically and in school, had been a never-ending, never totally successful battle with caseworkers, doctors, teachers and David himself. By age 15, David had been on and off a whole range of powerful drugs, including Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, Wellbutrin and Haldol.

“Putting this case in adult court is an acknowledgement that the system has failed David Maggi, that all of the resources the state can muster can do nothing for David Maggi, that we must figuratively throw our hands in the air and give up and lock him away forever,” Blasier argued.

“The judge looked at it for about five minutes,” David’s father, John Maggi, remarked. And the DA was allowed to proceed.

After his argument challenging the constitutionality of the law, Blasier took another tack. He said that David was not mentally competent to stand trial, and the long process of a competency hearing began. Two doctors, one chosen by the defense and one by the prosecution, were asked to examine David and determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial.

Doctors found that David could not understand the charges against him, or even meaningfully assist his attorney in his own defense. Both deemed him incompetent to stand trial.

Still, the DA pressed for a full hearing, asking the judge to find David competent, in spite of the doctors’ findings.

Meanwhile, David spent over a year in Juvenile Hall, awaiting a trial or some resolution of his case. Because of his disabilities, David was kept separate from other Juvenile Hall inmates. He did attend school classes with the other youths, but Joan Maggi said his incarceration made it impossible for him to get many of the services he needs.

On the morning of his competency hearing, there was a soft, collective gasp as David was brought into the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies, his hands cuffed behind his back. He was thin and gangly, even for a 16-year-old, and looked very much like a bemused, bedheaded kid, wide-eyed with a splash of acne on his face and a cow-lick sticking straight up on the back of his head.

It was obvious that, immediately upon entering, his eyes sought out his parents. He found them, sitting in the front row of the courtroom seats, and turned to them as his handcuffs were being removed and mouthed the word, “Hi.”

In the back of the room, Sarah Volp and her husband also looked on from the last row of seats. From where they sat, all they could see of David was the back of his head.

During the hearing, Deputy District Attorney Robert Gold suggested that David knew well what he was doing when he attacked Volp, saying that David told police he hated his parents and hated his group home. Gold suggested that the attack was planned as a way to get away from the home, and asked that David be allowed to stand trial for his crime. “He knew that if he stabbed someone, he wouldn’t have to go back to the group home.”

Gold also pointed to David’s recent, escalating history of violence, toward himself, his parents and others.

Just a few months earlier, David had threatened his own father with a knife, though John Maggi said the incident occurred when he was trying to stop the anguished David from hurting himself. Gold also revealed that David had once assaulted one of his school classmates and, most disturbing, had even tried to smother his own mother with a pillow as she slept. He was apparently frustrated because she refused to let him watch a movie she deemed too mature for him. Although she was asleep when he covered her face, she awoke and restrained him easily. “He’s not coordinated enough to murder someone,” she contended.

David’s parents acknowledged his violent behavior leading up to the stabbing incident, saying that is precisely why they sought to get him placed in a secure facility. At home, without constant professional supervision, he was a danger to himself and others. Indeed, his mother said, David will probably have to be in some kind of secure facility for the rest of his life.

Gold said he was never set on David going to prison per se, and even tried to work out a deal in which David would plead guilty and possibly go to someplace like the Porterville Developmental Center, an alternative to prison for people with mental disabilities. One way or the other, Gold said, he was trying to keep David off the streets. David’s attorney and his parents refused the deal, saying it wouldn’t guarantee that he’d avoid a prison term.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for this history of violence,” Gold explained. “I firmly believe that if he is out in public, he is going to kill someone, or at least try to kill them.” He added that it is David’s disability that makes him a threat to society. In a way, Gold is saying that David’s mental impairment is the reason he should be imprisoned. “I’m not saying he is a hardened criminal. But because of his disabilities, he will always be a dangerous person.” Gold said he felt he had no choice but to seek the maximum confinement possible.

“I know people want to criticize us for not being sensitive to his disabilities. I would rather that, than to be criticized later when somebody is killed, that we didn’t try harder,” Gold added.

During the hearing, David often seemed removed from what was going on around him. He spent much of his time during the competency hearing with the palms of his hands pressed firmly against his eyelids. Seeing this, David’s father remarked, “You know what he’s doing? He’s playing a movie in his head when he does that.”

Indeed, David’s parents and doctors say he is obsessed with movies. He spent much of his time reading novelized versions of films, mostly geared to young children. While David languished in Juvenile Hall, the Maggis would regularly bring him downloaded scripts of movies such as The Little Mermaid, which David would memorize and repeat back to them, word for word.

Dr. John Wicks, one of the court-appointed psychologists who examined him, explained that David, like many autistics, has no real emotional connection to his parents or anybody else. People who suffer from autism, he explained, aren’t capable of forming normal emotional bonds; they can’t really empathize with other people’s pain.

His autism also makes it very difficult for David to control his own emotions and to discern the difference between his own fantasies and reality. The disability also causes extreme incidents of “perseveration,” where the sufferer is compelled to repeat some word or action over and over again, or is gripped by some idea that repeats itself endlessly in the mind—as David was gripped by the idea of a grisly TV show that night.

Wicks added that David’s verbal skills, vocabulary and his ability to memorize great amounts of information by rote can mask his disabilities enough to make it seem like he understands what is going on. But based on his examination, Wicks said there was “no gray area” in his assessment of David’s competency. “Someone as mentally retarded as he is, and who has autism, is never going to be competent to stand trial.”

Joan Maggi later said that David is remorseful, to the extent he understands he hurt somebody. But she added she doesn’t believe he really understands the pain and terror he caused for his victim, or that the incident itself is very real to him. At one point he told her, “Whatever I did must have been really bad, because this is the worse consequence I’ve ever had.” David understands that he is being punished, even if he doesn’t clearly understand why.

The judge agreed with the doctors. David was found incompetent, for now, to stand trial and was ordered to the adolescent unit at Porterville Developmental Center in a rural stretch of the valley between Fresno and Bakersfield. After the ruling, David spoke his only words during the whole hearing. “Thank you Mister Blasier,” he said as the deputies led him away.

After the hearing, Volp declined to be interviewed. “I’m not ready to talk about it,” she said before leaving the Sacramento Superior Court Building.

For the next year, David will undergo what is called competency training. Experts at Porterville will train David in the basics of court proceedings, who the judge, jury and the attorneys are, for example, as well as explaining the charges against him. He will remain at the facility for at least a year, during which time officials at Porterville will report periodically to the court on David’s progress, or lack thereof. Beyond a year from now, David’s future is murkier.

Prosecutors hope that eventually David will exhibit enough of an understanding of court procedures and the ability to assist his attorney that the criminal case against him can resume.

“It is our goal that he ultimately be held responsible for his actions,” said Gold.

Even if David is found competent, it could be hard to prove premeditated murder. Prosecutors would have to prove that he could, in fact, premeditate anything. According to David’s mother, he can’t even handle his own hygiene.

Wicks said it is unlikely that David can be made truly competent, but he added there is a danger that he could be made to appear so “on paper.” David could memorize enough information about the parts and players of the court system that a judge could be made to believe David has an adequate comprehension of the process.

Which leaves open the possibility that David could still be tried, convicted and end up in adult prison for some time. There, he would likely get none of the services he needs to keep his mental condition from deteriorating. Worse, he would likely end up being victimized by other inmates.

“He’d be dog-meat,” lamented Wicks. “You could use a stopwatch to predict how long it would take for him to get raped.”

Aside from fretting about David’s fate, the Maggi family will spend the next few months, and possibly years, dealing with the legal aftermath of the stabbing.

Volp sued the Maggis, the group home and Alta Regional Center—the quasi-governmental state agency that placed David in the Knight Home—claiming that all of them are in some part responsible for the attack.

Volp’s lawyer, Haven, said she continues to have nightmares about the attack, and sometimes breaks down in tears.

“She’s jumpy. You certainly don’t want to walk up behind her and tap her on the shoulder,” Haven explained. Even walking in public places like a shopping mall, she becomes afraid of strangers approaching her.

Haven couldn’t say exactly how Volp felt about the criminal proceedings against David. He said they were happy to see that David would be spending time in a secure facility. “They think he is a time-bomb,” Haven explained. But he said even Volp has been somewhat ambivalent about David.

“At first she was very angry at him. Now I think she has more anger toward the people who were responsible for him,” Haven explained, meaning the group home and Alta Regional. Gary Knight said “no comment” when he was reached by telephone for interview. Alta California Regional Center also declined to comment on the case.

However, court documents show that Alta Regional has attempted to deflect responsibility back onto the Maggis and the group home in documents responding to the suit. The Maggis have in turn sued the group home and Alta Regional, claiming breech of contract. The Maggis’ contract with the group home, which the state was paying nearly $5,000 a month for, promises “continuous in-home supervision,” which the parents believed to mean round-the-clock attention. “If he wasn’t going to be supervised at night, we should have just kept him at home,” said Joan Maggi.

Since David’s arrest, the Maggis have racked up $50,000 in legal bills, just for the criminal case. It should be noted that although the Maggis aren’t wealthy, Joan is a nurse and John is a tax accountant, they are not exactly poor. They had the resources, the family connections, to come up with the money for David’s defense. Had they been poor, Joan worries that they might not have been able to fight off a state prison sentence. She said that their early experiences with the public defender’s office left her with the feeling that the attorneys there were too overworked, or too inexperienced, to handle David’s case.

Aside from the cost and difficulty of defending David against the criminal charges, Joan is more bitter about the fact that David has spent a year sitting in Juvenile Hall, not getting any of the mental health care that he needs, services he is getting now that he has arrived at Porterville. “This could have been resolved several months ago,” if David’s case had remained in the juvenile court, Joan said.

Dan Macallair said the Maggi case is exactly what opponents of Prop. 21 feared would happen.

“I’m astounded that a DA would even proceed with a case like this. The kid obviously belongs in the mental health system, not in the criminal justice system,” said Macallair, adding that Prop. 21 law short-circuits the court’s ability to look at each juvenile case individually. “This case was obviously handled in a very bureaucratic way,” he said, noting that Sacramento County’s policy ensured that David would automatically appear in adult court.

The Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Macallair’s organization, was one of the groups that lost a bid last spring to overturn Prop. 21 in the state Supreme Court. He said CJCJ and other like-minded groups are now looking at ways to change what they see as the most egregious parts of the law, including the discretion it gives to prosecutors and the way it treats youths with mental disabilities.

Although the Maggis and others have criticized the DA for filing adult charges against David, the prosecutors are in a way stuck with the law themselves.

What prosecutor, given the political world that DAs operate in, wouldn’t seek the maximum penalty allowed by the law? As Deputy District Attorney Gold said, wouldn’t he and his boss Jan Scully look bad if David Maggi did hurt someone later on, and the District Attorney’s Office hadn’t done everything they could to put him away for as long as possible?

Opponents of Prop. 21 say DAs are bound to feel political pressure to seek the harshest penalties.

“If something happens, down the road, everybody in the food chain is going to have some explaining to do,” explained Steve Birdlebough with the Friends Committee on Legislation, a Quaker organization that is active on law and justice policy issues, and has been a vocal opponent of Prop. 21.

But that only further shows the flaws in Prop. 21, said Birdlebough. If you’re going to charge juveniles as adults at all, which Birdlebough doesn’t believe you should, at least have judges make the decision, he said. Otherwise, DAs will make decisions that are more motivated by politics than by concern for the welfare of individual juveniles. As it is, the system’s one-size-fits-all approach is bound to unfairly damage some individuals.

“And if someone who is mentally retarded finds their way into that meat grinder, it’s just too bad,” Birdlebough added.

Joan Maggi said she’s considering getting involved in trying to change the law. At least, she said, exceptions should be made for juveniles like David who have serious mental disabilities. She’d also like to see the law amended to take away some of the power DAs now have in determining who is charged as a juvenile and who is charged as an adult.

“I’ve always given people in positions of authority the benefit of the doubt,” Joan Maggi explained. “But I can’t believe the DA would simply put on blinders and plow ahead like this. Who benefited from it?”

Now she says she is “embarrassed” to have voted for Prop. 21. “It was such a reckless law. Nobody really thought it through at all.”