Juan Carlos Ortiz (Juice) As
St. Dismas
Juice is a very young member of the club supposedly without any family, and therefore the club becomes his family. Juice starts out as kind of gullible, he believes that Clay is doing what's right. He stays pretty gullible, getting blackmailed by the police into betraying his club. The dominoes fall from there, and Juice makes one mistake after another, betraying the club over and over. Until his last betrayal sends him running, hiding from the club for fear of his life. This last betrayal was to Jax himself. Juice tells Nero about his intentional overdose of a drug-addicted mother whose son was killed after he shot up his school. A mother Nero had intended on saving, but needed to keep quiet. The gun that the boy used to shoot his classmates came from the IRA, through the Sons of Anarchy. They needed to make sure this mother didn’t say so. So they ‘accidentally’ overdosed her on drugs, at Jax’s order, and Juice’s hand. Juice’s telling Nero causes quite a bit of conflict between Nero and the Sons and Juice becomes a fugitive from his only ‘family’. After the police start looking for Juice for information on Tara’s murder, they put out an APB on him, and he becomes a fugitive from the law as well.
While he hides, Juice becomes desperate, more a criminal than ever. He loses his moral direction and winds up killing an innocent man, threatening to kill a friend, and once again, betraying the club for a ticket to mexico from the Mayans, a mexican MC nearby. Of course the Mayans give him up to the Sons, and Juice is back to begging for forgiveness from Jax. In order to get the money to convince the Mayans to take him to mexico, Juice goes into a store and orders a pack of cigarettes from the cashier. When the cashier leans over to get the smokes Juice bashes him over the head with the butt of his gun and steals all the cash from the register. The smokes Juice asked for? Saint Dismas. This is who Juice is, St. Dismas, the “penitent” or good “thief” (O’Hare, 2014). This makes sense as Juice has now robbed a store, betrayed the club multiple times, and made a massive amount of mistakes, and still wishes to receive forgiveness from Jax. Dismas did this as well. As he was being crucified on the cross beside Jesus, Dismas asked Jesus for forgive him, and accepted his fate as atonement for his sins (O’Hare, 2014). Juice also accepts an unfortunate fate to atone for his sins against the club. He allows himself to be arrested, to kill Lin, the chinese gang leader now in prison. Jax thinks that Lin ordered a hit on Tara, and wants him dead to pay. Juice is willing to accept this as his fate in order to receive forgiveness from Jax, and get back into the club’s good graces. Juice is willing to pay for his sins, like Dismas, whereas Gestas (Gemma) is not.
