Eli, Mia thought as she took the elevator to her office. Representing one of the teens Frank wanted her to charge as an adult. She hadn’t seen that coming.
Oh sure, she had figured that someday they would work opposing sides of the same case, but she had always pictured it involving an adult. She was in Violent Crimes, after all, not the Juvenile Unit. But the public defender’s office didn’t have the budget for their lawyers to specialize.
Before she met with Tracy Lowe, the head of the Juvenile Unit, Mia tracked down the footage of the kids dropping the cans of Mountain Dew. All three kids had leaned over the railing and tried it. Manny had dropped one, and Dylan and Jackson had each dropped two. The remaining can they had passed back and forth to drink. Two of the cans had been dropped when people were passing by, although neither had hit anyone. One man had been sprayed, judging by the way he had swiped at his pants and then shaken his fist at the three laughing boys.
After she had watched it twice, Mia headed for Tracy’s office.
“Hey, Mia.” Tracy looked up from her computer. Her thick, straight golden-brown hair fell to her shoulders. Looking at it always made Mia think of wheat fields, a comparison that didn’t really factor in Tracy’s brightly painted nails and face.
“Tracy, I thought I had all three boys’ records, but then I heard Raines on the radio this morning. What’s this about a second-degree murder charge that was dropped? Frank isn’t happy he didn’t know about that, but it wasn’t in any of the paperwork I got.”
Tracy made a face. “Raines was exaggerating. Dylan broke into a neighbor’s house. And that is in the records you got. What isn’t is that when the guy came home and found Dylan sitting at his kitchen table, eating his leftover chicken out of his refrigerator, he had a heart attack. He died two days later.”
Mia nodded. She shouldn’t be surprised that Raines’s story had a backstory.
“And this guy was pushing eighty, extremely obese, and on a million meds for high blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol.” Tracy ticked off her points on her red fingernails. “The medical examiner who did the autopsy said he was a heart attack waiting to happen—and that certainly wasn’t Dylan’s fault.”
“But why was he charged with second-degree murder at all?”
“The preliminary complaint did have that charge, but it was to encourage Dylan to plead guilty and get the help he needed. He was never formally charged with it, just with the B&E. Dylan never raised a hand to the man and actually never stole anything. All he did was eat some leftover chicken.”
Mia thought of Dylan’s dark, malodorous apartment. “Charlie Carlson and I were over there yesterday to talk to the mom, and afterward I ended up asking Children’s Services to check on the other kids. As far as I could tell, they had no electricity.”
Tracy made a tsk-tsking sound as they raised their eyebrows at each other and shook their heads. “Poverty’s no crime,” she said, “but Dylan’s mom is not equipped to deal with it. She’s not really raising those kids. They’re raising themselves—and falling through the cracks. In fact”—she steepled her fingers—“I have to tell you, Mia, that neither of these two kids who dropped the shopping cart seems to me to rise to the level of someone who should be tried in an adult court. If Dylan’s anything, he’s a victim of a system that hasn’t intervened enough for him. And while Jackson may be more culpable, he’s still only fifteen. The frontal lobe of a fifteen-year-old’s brain is simply not capable of foreseeing the possible consequences of their behavior. They’re impulsive and they don’t consider the future. I’m not even talking about the results of poor parenting or abuse, although those things certainly don’t help. It’s simply because they’re too young. Trying these kids as adults is like punishing a baby for not being able to walk yet.”
“But these are particularly serious offenses.” Mia made the arguments Frank would. “And both kids have juvenile records. And you can’t tell me that they couldn’t foresee the consequences of their actions, especially given that they were dropping cans of soda right beforehand.”
“And I heard you spent yesterday interviewing people who know these two boys.” Tracy’s voice underlined the word boys. “Then you must know that these are kids who truly come from nothing. If you put them into adult prison, you’ll make them into criminals. You’ll ruin their lives, and for what? It won’t undo what’s been done. I chose to work with juveniles because I sometimes have a chance to help these kids turn their lives around before it’s too late.” She shot Mia a pointed look. “You yourself know how important that is.”
When Gabe had agreed to give up the names of the other kids in the flash mob, Tracy hadn’t prosecuted him.
“No decision has been made,” Mia said. “We’re still investigating. We’re talking with both boys and their attorneys today. One of them may be guiltier than the other. And if the other one agrees to cooperate, he might have a very different outcome.”
Tracy shook her head. “Just don’t let Raines—or Frank, for that matter—get in the way of doing the right thing. We can’t run this office based on politics. We have to run it based on what’s right, and let the chips fall where they may.”
When Mia went back to her office, Frank had sent her a draft of a statement he was planning to release to answer Raines’s charges.
Sadly, my opponent is trying to score political points by capitalizing on the tragedy that has left Tamsin Merritt gravely injured. But this case will not be tried in the press.
Instead, it is the prosecutor, and the prosecutor alone, who is officially charged with the duty of seeking the truth and pursuing justice in this case. The prosecutor is in the best position to know the gravity of the crime, the evidence that supports the filing of charges, the criminal history of the accused, and the impact of the crime upon the victim.
Thus the prosecutor has the best reference point from which to make the critical decisions that will affect the victim as well as the offenders. I trust Mia Quinn, a prosecutor in the Violent Crimes division, to carefully weigh all sides in this case before making her decision on how to proceed.