Child-Size Skeleton Speaks Volumes

Two things are striking about Courtroom 33. First, the emptiness. The other day, two or three reporters sat there, notebooks in hand, trolling for the daily story. Some 50 green padded seats were vacant. A sheriff’s deputy also lolled in the gallery, softly whistling the theme from “Jeopardy,” generally keeping the peace. The other notable thing in Courtroom 33 is what they call People’s Exhibit 6.

Standing on a table before the jury, People’s Exhibit 6 is a 3-foot-tall white plastic skeleton--a child-size stand-in for young Joselin Hernandez, who couldn’t attend herself because she died last year, allegedly as a result of abuse by her parents.

People’s Exhibit 6 has no voice, of course, but it speaks anyhow. Strips of red tape mark the places where fractures somehow showed up on Joselin’s ankles and legs and hands and ribs. These were serious injuries for one so young, agreed everyone who came to know Joselin in her 24 months; she must have been an extraordinarily unlucky child.

Since People’s Exhibit 6 has no skin, it doesn’t show the burns--or what were described in the maddeningly detached parlance of the courtroom as “marks on the body that are consistent with burns”--on Joselin’s fingers and hands and back and near her genitals.

On the witness stand, Dr. William Starr, an Oxnard plastic surgeon, talked in a slow monotone as he shuffled through photos and notes. He saw Joselin when she was 6 weeks old and he had studied photos from the autopsy 22 months later.

“A third-degree burn over the dorsal aspect of the right middle phalanx,” said the doctor.

“Multiple discrete marks over the perineal area . . . “

“Markings on the right and left feet . . . “

“Here’s a full-thickness wound. It’s into the fat . . . “

In one photo (People’s Exhibit 112), Joselin was crying and her mouth was wide open. Inside, the doctor spotted “an ulcer at the junction of the hard and soft palate just in front of the superior pole of the left tonsil.”

Could be a burn, he said. But the lack of splatter marks made him think it wasn’t caused by something like overheated milk.

Joselin’s mother, Gabriela Hernandez, was listening through earphones as a translator whispered Spanish into a microphone. Her husband, Rogelio Hernandez, sat staring straight ahead. There is no imagining what they felt. Grief? Remorse? Anger? Faith that one day this dreadful mistake will be corrected? Nothing?

Their lawyers did lawyerly things. They raised a few objections. They raised the possibility that all those marks could be easily explained: severe diaper rash, Crohn’s disease, a canker sore, abscesses. Perhaps Joselin picked up something dripping with battery acid, they suggested.

People’s Exhibit 6 kept her own counsel.

This is not the Trial of the Century, or even the year.

Soon, Michael Dally is expected to go on trial in the now-famous death of his wife, Sherri. The courtroom will be packed, just as it was in the trial of Dally’s girlfriend, Diana Haun. Wannabe observers will line up for seats. Dally trivia will be fodder for discussion at a thousand coffee breaks.

But who can pretend surprise that no one discusses Joselin? Unlike the Dally case, the case against Joselin’s teenage parents holds no sex, no greed, no hints of witchcraft, no entertainment value whatever.

Unlike 8-month-old Matthew Eappen, whose death in Boston generated headlines around the world, Joselin wasn’t the child of well-to-do physicians. She didn’t die in the care of a British au pair. Joselin’s parents are poor, brown and uneducated. Her case would make a terrible TV movie. It’s about nothing more glamorous than cruelty. The details of her torment make us flinch. We don’t ask for more. We don’t demand details of the 7,000 other child abuse reports the county fields each year. We don’t want to know.

The best we can eke from it all is an encouraging postscript. Last week, President Clinton signed a bill that might have helped Joselin if it had been law three years ago. It allows agencies to forgo elaborate efforts to reunite abused kids with their abusive parents--a bit of common sense that has been counter to government policy since 1980.

The new law allows abused kids to be placed immediately with families who have expressed an interest in adoption, said Frank Ferratta, a county social services official. Efforts to bring families together could still take place--but meanwhile, kids could form strong ties with people who stand a chance of becoming their full-time, permanent, adoptive parents.

But all that is too little, too late for Joselin. In Courtroom 33, they will plow on in ritual search for a truth that seems all too apparent. The system is working, but it’s small solace. The motto on the Great Seal of the State of California hanging behind the judge seems somehow inappropriate.

It says: Eureka.