Judge Tries to Steer Young Killer in the Right Direction

PONTIAC, Mich. — When Nathaniel Abraham was arrested in a 1997 killing outside a convenience store in this gritty city 30 miles north of Detroit, he stood 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 65 pounds. He was 11 years old. In the defense chair at his trial, his feet didn’t reach the floor.

Prosecutors said the boy had hidden the rifle, told people that he intended to kill and voiced worry about gangs coming after him. The defense argued that the shooting of 18-year-old Ronnie Greene Jr. was accidental, that the boy was aiming at trees, not Greene’s head.

Jurors found him guilty of second-degree murder. He became the youngest person in Michigan convicted of murder as an adult, and one of the youngest in the country.

With the verdict in, Judge Eugene Arthur Moore had to make a decision.

He could send the boy to adult prison. He could combine juvenile detention with adult prison. Or he could send him to juvenile detention until his 21st birthday, when he would automatically be released.

For this defendant, age 21 was still a long way off. And Moore, son of a juvenile court judge whose portrait hangs in his courtroom, believes that the vast majority of children can be rehabilitated.

“If we can’t change a kid’s behavior in eight or nine years, then maybe the juvenile system needs to take a good look at itself and what we’re doing wrong,” the judge, now 69, said recently.

In the course of seven years, Moore has watched the boy, Nate, become a young man. Their relationship has been a kind of periodic parenting for a virtually fatherless teenager who is now in the home stretch of his incarceration.

Moore has overseen the 19-year-old’s years of rehab and training, including anger management, and hopes that it is readying him for the adult world he’ll enter in less than two years.

Sitting just feet apart, the two have met again and again, exchanging frowns, apologies, promises, ultimatums, encouragement and the occasional spontaneous laugh.

Abraham has told the judge of his ever-changing dreams: to become a professional basketball player, entertainer, carpenter, lawyer, barber, inspirational speaker who steers kids from crime.

Moore listens, nodding, looking him in the eye, interrupting with questions. How? Why? What do you need? And: Who’s the only person who can get you there?

The young man still sometimes stares down at the table in front of him and mumbles confused, teenage answers. But often he holds his head up, meets the judge’s gaze and answers succinctly.

He recently told Moore that he plans to get out of detention, avoid his old neighborhood, go to college and start a business.

“I also want to make you proud, and thank you for taking a chance on me,” he said.

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Each decision a judge makes is a risk. In keeping Abraham’s case in the juvenile system, Moore said he took a big chance at a time when states were cracking down on juvenile crime.

“Not just for the judge and not just for the kid,” he said. “For the system, for everyone involved in the system. Because if it doesn’t work, then you’ve just given fuel to the people who said from the beginning that it wouldn’t work.”

Abraham’s was the first murder case brought under a Michigan law that gave prosecutors unilateral authority to decide whether to try someone as an adult, previously a judge’s decision. A rise in juvenile crime had prompted lawmakers in many states to enact measures making it easier to treat juveniles as adults.

Abraham, whose broad shoulders don’t quite fill out the navy blue blazer he wears to court, will receive his high school diploma in June. Moore wants him in classes at Washtenaw Community College, and Abraham says he’s interested in cosmetology, which he’s learned by helping with barber duties at the detention home.

When the judge ordered community service, Abraham started speaking to groups of at-risk kids about the perils of crime. He tells them that when you’re sent away, you don’t get to wear Nikes.

Over and over, Moore has ordered Abraham to take responsibility for himself. He demands that the detention center, W.J. Maxey Boys Training School, teach and discipline the teenager and exorcise his self-pity.

Abraham’s mother, Gloria, and his lawyer say Moore has been a “godsend,” dishing the strong-willed teenager a consistent dose of tough love.

“He’s continually kept the hammer over Nate, never let up on him, never let up on telling him his responsibility to himself and to society,” defense attorney Daniel Bagdade said. “And Nate has responded.”

But social workers and the prosecutor are concerned that Abraham still has serious problems controlling his temper. He was recently punished for mouthing off and threatening one of his counselors after being fouled during a basketball game.

They hope that more anger-management training and increased socialization with the outside world will help him prepare to live on his own, starting when he turns 21 in January 2007.

“One thing that can be said is that the system did not fail him,” prosecutor Deborah Carley said. “This court has done everything I’ve ever seen a court do.”

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“There’s an old doctrine that the juvenile judge is supposed to provide for the youngster what the child should have gotten in its own home,” Moore said. “I think most judges still believe that they have this responsibility.”

Adopting this parental role, Moore is blunt. He discards, even disparages, the social-worker language in the review reports brought to him, and demands that caseworkers translate phrases like “cognitive distortion” into clear English.

Frustrated that he wasn’t getting a complete picture of Abraham’s successes and failures, he recently took the unusual step of appointing a guardian ad litem to investigate and give him the undiluted facts.

In court with Abraham, Moore sometimes interrupts to ask the teenager if he understands what’s going on. Or he’ll suddenly order him to regurgitate a complicated set of instructions. Abraham can do it.

“This case is really the ultimate test for a judge, to work with a kid for a long time and pull the kid through the system,” Bagdade said. “In this particular relationship, it’s probably come closer to some kind of a parental influence than in most of them.”

Moore traces his outlook to his father and grandfather, a Methodist minister, who both believed in squeezing out bad behavior by accentuating the positive.

“Most of us in life make it because we had somebody -- whether it’s a parent, if we’re lucky, or a sibling, or a teacher or a coach or a piano teacher -- that we believe cared about us. If we think that people care about us, then we begin to care about ourselves,” he said.

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One of those rooting for Abraham is the mother of his victim.

Robin Adams, Ronnie Greene’s mother, said she had forgiven him, although she too was concerned about his temper problems.

Her family has attended many of Abraham’s court hearings over the years, and it’s been hard for her to watch him grow up when her own son never got that chance. Greene would be 27 if he were still alive, Adams said.

But she said once she realized that she had forgiven Abraham, she was able to pray that he got his life together, to “be saved, be close to God, take responsibility and be a man.”

“I want him to grow up to be everything he can,” she said.

Social workers say Abraham has expressed remorse for his crime, and he has apologized publicly in court.

He believes that he’s headed in the right direction.

“I don’t think the average 11-year-old would have handled it as well as I have.... Not to be arrogant in no shape or form, but I just don’t see it,” he told Moore.

Lately, he’s shown an increasing awareness of his evolving relationship with the judge.

“I guess I never really looked at it as you being in my corner 100%, you wanting to see me become the best person I can,” he told Moore at February’s review hearing. “Now that I’m older ... I can see that.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Moore responded. “We need to keep you on the road you’re on ... then you can thank yourself.”