Real in L.A.

Outside the downtown criminal courts building in the early morning, an observer would be forgiven for thinking that the stream of 150 or so glum-looking adults reluctantly heading into the building were defendants arriving for sentencing.

Follow these same folks through security and up the elevator, however, and you’d land on the 11th floor, their destination being the northeast corner suite of the Juror Service Division of the California Superior Court. They are not the ones being judged; they are the judgers.

I joined this parade the fourth week of December. 

Receiving a jury summons in the mail will cramp the stomach of even the most civic minded citizen. Suddenly, your future is one big question mark. Every appointment you agree to is prefaced with, “If I’m not on jury duty.”

The court has at least made things as convenient as possible. Registration and the 90 minute orientation can be completed online, resulting in a midmorning start time. You may not have to show up at all: You call their automated service every evening to see if they need you the next day. If you’re  called in but are not empaneled by the end of your day, you’re excused for another 12 months.

At the same time, the courts have made it more difficult NOT to serve. Not so long ago, you could return your summons with an excuse for not serving: I’m a teacher, I’m a student, my employer doesn’t pay me when I’m on a jury, etc. These days, unless you’re physically unable, don’t speak English, or on active duty military, you’ve got to show up. Once there, if empaneled—called to a courtroom with 20 to 40 others to be questioned about your fitness to serve as a juror for a specific case—you have to make your case for being excused in person.

I heard more than a few people grumbling about missing a day of school or work when they would most likely be excused from service by the judge. And yet, how else to ensure an accused person’s constitutional right (Article III, Sec. 2, Para. 3) to trial by jury?

I’ve responded four times to a jury summons and served on a jury once. I found it one of the most engaging and meaningful experiences of my life, and not just because we put a serial rapist back into custody where he could do no more harm (to women, anyway). I felt I was doing something vital. Our work really mattered to the defendant and his accuser.

 We’ve all watched courtroom dramas on TV or the big screen. Who could forget the tension and dynamism of Twelve Angry Men? The action in real courtrooms, however, is both more dramatic and more mundane. Judges, defendants, attorneys and prosecutors all have their strengths and quirks that they enact right in front of you. There’s also the real-time boredom of waiting for lawyers and judge to settle procedural matters that arise.

Jury service is also quintessentially American. On one occasion when I was empaneled but ultimately not required to serve, the judge spent what I felt was an inordinate amount of time explaining our judicial system and the function of juries. Boring. Then I took a good look at the people gathered in the courtroom. Possibly half had not been born in the United States. Jury summonses go out to citizens in all sorts of occupations and with varying levels of education. So, yeah, the judge had to inoculate people with a dose of Civics 101.

The week before Christmas, I didn’t get as far as a courtroom, which was fortunate because the only group empaneled that day was for a four-week trial beginning in mid-January. As meaningful as I’ve found jury experience, four weeks of sitting in a windowless courtroom is more civic service than I’m prepared for.

  It’s been a while since anything has annoyed me as much as the new 365 store in Silver Lake.

Maybe I just don’t like 365’s parent company, Whole Foods Markets.

You’ve heard the common complaint, that the stores should be called “Whole Paycheck” because of the high prices.

But I’ve got a few more grievances:

• John Mackey, a Whole Foods founder and current co-CEO, is an anti-union, libertarian jerk who felt so strongly about Obamacare that he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing it.
• Mackey expanded Whole Foods by scooping up regional chains, e.g. Fresh Fields in No. Virginia and Mrs. Gooch’s in SoCal, to create a near monopoly on what we used to call health food stores. Independent stores, with clerks who knew you and their products, got pushed out of business.
• Whole Foods masquerades as a health food store but is actually an up-scale big-box merchandizer selling gourmet products to a monied constituency.

 And now along comes 365, designed to cut costs by requiring only 100 employees to operate, as opposed to the typical Whole Foods Market that employs 250 to 500 workers. The preponderance of prepackaged produce and a DIY regimen for what isn’t—customers must weigh and tag their own, a task done by check-out clerks at Whole Foods Markets—also cut labor costs.

The company says prices at 365 are cheaper than at Whole Foods, but that’s more appearance than reality. The store brand—365—dominates inventory; shoppers looking for  high-priced specialty items won’t find them. A Los Angeles Times consumer review of five basics found 365’s priced about the same as Trader Joe’s.

  Whole Foods is gambling on the success of its 365 stores. According to the L.A. Times, full-sized Whole Food Markets open a year or more have shown three straight quarters of declining revenue; this year’s sales are flat. Shares are trading at less than half their $65 high in the fall of 2013. The company has announced its intention to open five more 365 locations in SoCal.

The company is upfront about banking on Millennials to pull them out of their hole. The stores employ technology Millennials have grown up with: iPads to place orders with the store kitchen and a wine section where you find reviews by scanning labels with a smartphone.

And then there’s the not-too-subtle marketing. The company ran three full-page ads targeting Millennials in the Times’ “Saturday” section just before opening day. They border on being parodies of themselves: good-looking young people, not all of them white and some of them tattooed, with phrases such as “good choices,” “good times,” “good vibes,” and “good things” liberally sprinkled about.

The ads represent 365 as being a gift to this demographic, “Because we believe making good choices should be a lot less effing time consuming.”

Seriously, could they get any more effing annoying?

I can’t be the only one who grabs the California section of the L.A. Times each morning and races through to the obituaries.

In part it’s a response to aging: mortality seems so much more real than it did even 10 years ago. I check out ages of the deceased, do the calculations, think, “Okay, 94, that sounds good. Hmm, 83, I could accept that.” As if I actually could bargain for longevity.

Mostly, though, I read obituaries because they are mini-biographies, often fascinating glimpses into another’s otherwise private life. Written by a family member or friend, they attempt to sum up a life, say what made the person special. Not that that’s possible in 200 or so words, but those left behind try because that’s how we honor people we love.

There’s a certain predictability to many of the obituaries. Men are summed up through their careers, women by their families and volunteer work (unless they’re under 60, in which case careers also matter). In lieu of corporate success, hobbies, athletic accomplishments, travel, and pets’ names are mentioned.

Language, too, tends towards the conventional. The deceased has “gone home to the Lord.” They “bravely battled cancer” and “adored” their grandchildren. They were universally “loved and admired.” She/he married after meeting “the love of her/his life.” * It seems important to survivors to mention, when they can, that their loved one “died peacefully at home, surrounded by family,” which often leads to thanks and appreciation of the (usually Filipina or Latina female) caregivers who enabled the deceased to stay at home.

Even if spoken in platitudes, the stories these obituaries tell hint at interesting lives well lived. Folks arrive here from far-flung places: Skopje, Yugoslavia; Chuquicamata, Chile; County Donegal, Ireland; Tokyo, Japan, brought by parents or lured by jobs or relatives or the Golden State mythos.

I marveled at the man from Belfast, Ireland, for instance, who emigrated to the U.S. as a youth and served in the Air Force during WW II as navigator bombardier. He not only survived 30 missions over Germany but lived to be 100.

Occasionally, a good piece of writing appears, usually written by friends. A painter and print-maker was recently eulogized as “playful with his grandchildren and demanding of his students. He inspired all who knew him to expand their horizons and to accomplish more than they believed possible.”

More rare still are the profiles that detail a life not spent climbing the corporate ladder, such as the Japan-born, 18th generation Pure Land Buddhist priest who, later in life, studied in Switzerland and returned to Los Angeles as a Jungian analyst.

For all the richness of L.A. Times’ obituaries, many, many lives are unremarked upon. Prices for death notices start at $105 for five lines and go up from there. It’s a very white crowd one reads about, with just a sprinkling of Black people and Japanese-Americans. Latinos show up mostly when the Sheriffs benevolent society posts a notice about one of their own.

No, the obituary section is neither democratic nor truly representative of our community. Given that death is the most universal of all life experiences, isn’t this a most ironic shortcoming?

  On occasion, you encounter someone whose life experience is so different from yours that it forces you to recalibrate your understanding of humankind.

That’s how I felt meeting the Lakota counselor at a summer camp where I worked. And that’s how it was with Big Ern.

His full name: Ernest Shepard III and his reputation preceded him. About three years ago, my partner Joe told me he had met this amazing guy. “He spent 45 years in prison and now he’s working with Youth Justice Coalition.”*

Meeting the formerly incarcerated wasn’t anything new—Joe himself was a Vietnam-era federal prisoner, in for draft resistance, and is deeply involved with criminal justice reform movements—but forty-five years! I couldn’t imagine it.

Plus, a hefty sentence like that might mean an unnervingly hefty crime, though it was hard to know. Sentences often don’t match the violation and it’s a breach of prison etiquette to ask, “What are you in for?”

Anyway, Joe said Ernie was okay and that was enough. We invited him to our Christmas open house and were delighted that he came.

It was immediately clear how Ernie got his nickname— he was tall, robust, muscled—and seen on the street, he could appear intimidating. In fact, he was gentle and kind.

That Christmas, Ernie mentioned that his father had been a musician, that a clip of him playing with the Duke Ellington orchestra was posted on YouTube. I pulled out a laptop and we all watched a performance of “Take the A Train,” with an extended solo by Ernest Shepherd pere playing the bass and scat singing. The man was good! And his son was so proud.

In the months afterwards, I’d get reports about Big Ern from Joe when he’d run into him at demonstrations or county supervisors’ meetings where Ernie spoke up on behalf of the formerly incarcerated. One Saturday, I tuned into Geri Silva’s KPFK radio program, “Think Outside the Cage,”   and heard Ernie’s warm baritone. He sometimes spoke haltingly, not because he didn’t know what to say but because he was reaching deep inside himself to access wisdom that had come from decades of struggle.

 Through the grapevine, I learned Ernie was was working with the Fair Chance Project, “a movement led by liberated lifers (formerly incarcerated men and women), prisoners and loved ones of term-to-life prisoners organized around the demand for just sentencing laws and fair parole practices.”

That’s what Ernie was doing on Friday, February 19, waiting for an elevator that would take him to a Fair Chance meeting, when untreated cancer claimed him. He had celebrated his 71st birthday only the week before.

Since his death, I’ve learned more about Ernest Shepard’s life. He grew up in segregated Los Angeles, in the Black community surrounding Central Avenue. He was academically accomplished, but, as he told YJC students, “Like a lot of Black youth, I wanted to be a student, but I was forced to be a fighter.”

In one of those fights, another man died, and though manslaughter would have been an appropriate charge, the prosecutor called it second degree murder and demanded the death penalty.

Ernie spent three years on death row, but studied the law, filed a writ, and was granted a new trial. He then represented himself in court, getting his sentence reduced to 7-years-to life. Lamentably, “tough on crime” policies kept him in prison decades beyond seven years.

I last saw Ernie at a theater performance by former prisoners. During the panel discussion that followed, he said that to remain whole while locked up he’d had to do a lot of inner work. To be free, he told us in an impassioned voice,  “You’ve got to FREE YOUR MIND.”

Coming from anyone else, this would have sounded New Age-y and glib. But from Ernest Shepard III, with a lifetime of struggle behind him, it was Truth with a capital T.

The panel ended shortly after Ern’s pronouncement because what more was there to say?

A memorial for Ernie will be held on Saturday, March 5, 2016 in Hardy Hall, 6501 Crenshaw Blvd., Inglewood.

~~~~~

You can see Big Ern yourself in this five-minute video interview shot in 2012 by Robert Corsini.

* From their Facebook page: “The Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) is working to build a youth-led movement to challenge race, gender and class inequality in the Los Angeles County juvenile injustice system.” Their continuation high school is located at Chuco’s Justice Center, 1137 E Redondo Blvd., Inglewood, California.