Guilty as Sin

by Joseph Teller

  Three additional witnesses had been called by the prosecution. Two members of the backup team, Agent Angel Cruz and Investigator Lance Bucknell, had described their roles in the surveillance and arrest of the defendant. And a chemist, Olga Kasmirov, had certified that on each of the three occasions, the drugs sold or seized had contained heroin.

  So it was all there, neatly laid out, wrapped up and tied with a bow. An absolute lock, in the jargon of prosecutors. A dead-bang loser, any defense lawyer would have called it. And were you to take those two polar opposites and try to reconcile them, you’d end up with a third phrase. A guilty plea, it was called, and it was how such differences were invariably settled.

  Only not in this case.

  In the matter of The People of the State of New York versus Alonzo Barnett, the rule had been broken, the script tossed aside. There’d been no guilty plea. Instead there’d been a trial, a trial that had finally come down to its last witness.

  Now, as Jaywalker sat and listened as his client swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he knew how powerless he was to change the story the prosecution witnesses had recounted. This wasn’t one of those cases, after all, where there were two competing versions of the facts. Just about everything Pascarella and St. James and Cruz and Bucknell and Kasmirov had testified to was true. Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin twice and been caught in the act of doing it a third time. Now he was about to confirm that, waiving his constitutional right to silence so that he could admit it under oath in open court. He was going to tell the jurors, in other words, that he was guilty, exactly as charged.

  Why?

  It was a question Jaywalker had been asking for several months now, first of Barnett and eventually of himself. A question that had occurred to him even before the two of them had met, way back when Lorraine Wilson had called him with the assignment, and he’d read the charges and examined the court file. A question that had nagged at him when he’d realized early on that only two things were likely to result from a trial. First, Barnett would end up serving substantially more time than if he had taken a plea. Second, Jaywalker would lose. Now, a week into the trial, those two things seemed as inevitable as they ever had.

  Yet a few things had changed.

  For starters, the way the investigation had been conducted had raised more questions for Jaywalker than it answered. Had there really been an anonymous phone call, or was that a fabrication? Had the case truly been made without the use of a confidential informer? Why had Stump, now known to be Clarence Hightower, been treated with such unusual deference? And why hadn’t more of an effort been made to identify, arrest and prosecute Barnett’s source of supply?

  But it wasn’t just the answers to these questions that eluded and intrigued Jaywalker. It was the way each question interlocked with the next one. Was it merely coincidental that they had all arisen in the same case? Or was there a pattern to them, a pattern that Jaywalker was for some reason unable to discern? Was he onto something that lay just out of sight? Or was his searching for it just the latest example of his penchant for tilting at windmills? A comment came back to him, something uttered by a client of his long ago, as he’d sat on a secure psychiatric ward in Bellevue Hospital. The guy’s name had been Simberg, William Simberg, and he’d been locked up—again—this time for accusing the police commissioner of watching his every move or the mayor of monitoring his thought waves. Something along those lines.

  “Just because I happen to be a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,” Simberg had whispered to Jaywalker, “doesn’t mean I’m not being followed.”

  So maybe Jaywalker was just being his usual obsessive self, asking questions for which there were no answers, searching for patterns where there were none to be found. But then again…

  Something else had changed, too.

  Over the weeks since Jaywalker had accepted the assignment and agreed to represent a defendant who’d already been through several other lawyers, he’d gotten to know the man behind the name. The charges and the court papers and the rap sheet had promised a hard case, a career criminal who’d spent half his life in prison without ever learning a thing from it. And when Alonzo Barnett had predictably insisted on a trial in spite of his admitted and demonstrable guilt, Jaywalker had resigned himself to a menu of extremely limited choices. Talk him out of it or go down with him.

  But the Alonzo Barnett who’d gradually emerged from the file had surprised him. Here was a man who’d come from absolutely nothing, been through terrible adversity, and finally managed to turn things around completely. And then, just when he’d been firmly on the road to redemption, a tragic flaw had tripped him up, a misguided sense that he still owed a debt he’d incurred long ago. Yet even when things had imploded and he’d landed back in jail, he hadn’t rued repaying that debt, railed against the fates or whined over his predicament. He’d simply asked for a chance to tell his story, to speak and to be heard. And Jaywalker?

  Jaywalker had been drawn to this defendant as he’d been drawn to few others in his career. There was a nobility to Alonzo Barnett, a calm, quiet grace that Jaywalker had never quite encountered before in a client, whether through the bars of a jailhouse or across the desk in his office. In spite of Barnett’s long and serious criminal record, in spite of the horribly self-destructive life choices he’d made, in spite of his ultimate willingness to trade heroin for money, Jaywalker had come to feel a unique connection to this particular man. By the time he rose from his seat and stepped to the podium to ask his first question on direct examination, he’d gotten to know and like Alonzo Barnett in a way he would have had great difficulty describing to a stranger. Hell, he’d had great difficulty describing it to his wife, who’d accused him of getting soft and mushy in his old age, and over an admitted heroin dealer, of all people.

  So the question people would be forever asking Jaywalker would turn out to be the wrong one after all. It shouldn’t be “How can you possibly represent someone you know is guilty?” The answer to that one was easy. It was because it was his job, so he did it the same way he would have done any other job, the best way he knew how. The far more interesting question, at least in this particular case, had become “How do you go about representing a defendant who admits his guilt, but whose conviction would bring about an infinitely greater injustice than his acquittal would?”

  And the only answer Jaywalker had to that question was the same as he had to the first one. He would do his damnedest. He would spend the next day and a half trying to get twelve strangers to know Alonzo Barnett as well as he himself had gotten to know him. He would show them the man behind the criminal record, the man who’d somehow broken free of the revolving door of justice and finally made something of his life, only to be tripped up because, in a moment of blindness, he’d decided that no matter what the possible cost, honoring a debt was the right thing to do.

  And while Jaywalker was busy trying to show all those things and more through the strange choreography of questions coupled with answers, maybe—just maybe—some clue would shake loose from the story, some pattern would emerge from the shadows, and he’d figure out how to win what until this moment looked like an absolutely unwinnable case.

  JAYWALKER: How old are you, Mr. Barnett?

  BARNETT: I’m fifty-one.

  JAYWALKER: Where were you born?

  BARNETT: I was born on a farm outside Forked Creek, Alabama.

  JAYWALKER: How far did you go in school?

  BARNETT: Not very far. About the middle of fourth grade, I guess. I was nine when they put me to work tending hogs.

  It had always been Jaywalker’s belief that life stories count almost as much as facts do. Sure, he’d won acquittals for defendants whose backgrounds and demeanor combined to make them less than likable, but those acquittals had come hard, after long uphill battles. In Alonzo Barnett, he had a lot of raw material to work with. Here was a man who was good to look at, for starters. Even as he’d sat silently at the defense table,
he’d projected an inner calmness, a quiet dignity. Once he’d begun speaking in a resonant baritone that hinted ever so slightly at a distant West Indian heritage, those qualities had been not only confirmed but reinforced. Add to all that a backstory about an impoverished, exploited childhood on a Southern farm and you had the whole package: a defendant fully capable of winning the jurors’ hearts.

  Which was good, Jaywalker knew, but could get you only so far. Empathy was a great place to start, but it wasn’t enough to get you across the finish line. On the way, there were the facts to trip you up. Including the nastiest of them all, that Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin to an undercover agent not once, not twice, but three times. So winning the jurors’ hearts wasn’t going to be good enough. If Jaywalker wanted to win their votes, as well, he was first going to have to draw them a road map showing them how to get there. And here he was, three questions into direct examination, and he still had no idea how to do that.

  Then again, he couldn’t let a little thing like that stop him from trying, could he?

  JAYWALKER: Had you learned how to read and write by the time you left Alabama?

  BARNETT: No, I hadn’t.

  JAYWALKER: Did you ever?

  BARNETT: Yes, in my forties. In prison.

  JAYWALKER: How old were you when you came to New York?

  BARNETT: I was fourteen.

  JAYWALKER: Who did you come with?

  BARNETT: Myself. I came alone.

  JAYWALKER: Who took care of you?

  BARNETT: I took care of myself.

  JAYWALKER: Where did you live?

  BARNETT: Days, I lived on the street. Nights, I slept in a shooting gallery.

  JAYWALKER: What’s a shooting gallery?

  BARNETT: It’s where drug addicts congregate to shoot up heroin or smoke crack, and then sleep it off.

  JAYWALKER: How did you support yourself?

  BARNETT: Any way I could. When you’re fourteen, they don’t let you work legally, on the books. So you hustle, you do anything you can for a meal or a buck. Some kids, they steal or sell their bodies. Me, I swept the place up, cleaned the toilets, washed up the vomit, ran errands, whatever I could.

  JAYWALKER: And did any of those errands you ran get you into trouble?

  BARNETT: Yes, they did.

  Jaywalker ran him through his rap sheet, beginning with his first arrest ten days after his fifteenth birthday and culminating in the charges he was on trial for. The jurors had known about Barnett’s record ever since jury selection, when Jaywalker had made a point of warning them about it. Still, he went into greater detail now, for a couple of reasons. The first was preemptive. He knew if he didn’t do it, Miki Shaughnessey would. The second was a little more counterintuitive. By having Barnett go into the particulars of his criminal past, Jaywalker hoped to demonstrate his client’s honesty through his willingness to let them know the bad stuff. A guy who’s going to level with you about having repeatedly broken the law is a guy you’re going to be likely to trust to tell you the truth—about everything. Finally, Barnett’s record, as long as it was, was the record of a drug seller. Almost all his arrests and convictions were for sale or possession. There were a few property crimes mixed in, but they were minor things. Nothing a Manhattan juror couldn’t take in stride.

  Except, that was, for the two charges that jumped off the page, just as they had on Barnett’s arrival at Green Haven Prison a dozen years earlier. “Forcible Rape of a 15-year-old Female” and “Sale of a Controlled Substance on School Grounds,” they’d read. Jaywalker needed to defuse them by having Barnett explain the rather innocuous facts that lay behind the damning labels. At the same time, he needed the jurors to understand how those labels had instantly made Barnett a target, a man literally marked for death.

  JAYWALKER: Who was the fifteen-year-old female?

  BARNETT: Her name was Jasmine Meadows, and she was the mother of my son. She later became my wife, and we had two more children together, two daughters.

  JAYWALKER: Are you still married?

  BARNETT: No, I’m not. My wife died four years ago. She was killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was crossing Edgecombe Avenue.

  JAYWALKER: What became of your son?

  BARNETT: My son was killed in Vietnam.

  JAYWALKER: And your daughters?

  BARNETT: My daughters are eleven and nine. They’re in foster care right now. I see them on regular visits to my home. At least, I did until my arrest. And it’s my hope to be reunited with them, if things work out.

  If things work out.

  They’d settled on that phrase together, Barnett and Jaywalker had. They’d rejected “if I’m lucky,” “God willing,” “if the jury sees fit,” “if it’s written,” “if it’s meant to be,” “if it’s Allah’s will” and a dozen others.

  They’d spent an hour deciding.

  Add up enough of those hours and you begin to understand what it’s like to be a Jaywalker. But you’re also going to understand what it takes to win.

  JAYWALKER: And the school grounds case. Were you in fact selling drugs on school grounds?

  BARNETT: Yes, according to the law. But I honestly had no idea at the time. And I certainly wasn’t standing in a school yard or selling drugs to children, or anything like that. It turned out that the law on the books at that time said school grounds were anything within half a mile of any school.

  JAYWALKER: Would you be surprised to learn that under that definition, you’re on school grounds right now?

  Actually, Jaywalker had no idea if that was true or not. But he wasn’t about to let that stop him from asking the question.

  SHAUGHNESSEY: Objection.

  THE COURT: Overruled. You may answer.

  BARNETT: No, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

  JAYWALKER: Yet those two charges remained on your rap sheet, which was in your file when you arrived at Green Haven. Is that correct?

  BARNETT: That’s correct.

  JAYWALKER: Would you explain to the jurors, as best as you can, the problem that that created for you?

  It was an open-ended question, the kind that Jaywalker might have hesitated to ask an ordinary witness. But Alonzo Barnett was no ordinary witness. And if there was any chance whatsoever of winning an acquittal in this case, Barnett was going to have to do his share of the heavy lifting. No “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” answers were going to do the trick. He was going to have to sell himself to the twelve men and women sitting in the jury box, and he was going to have to do it in his own words. Or at least in words that he and Jaywalker had arrived at together.

  BARNETT: From the day I walked into Green Haven, I was a marked man. You have to understand this about prison—there are no secrets. Inmates work in the library, the record room, the administration room, the infirmary. Everywhere but at the front gate. So everything in your jacket—the file that follows you to prison—becomes common knowledge within hours of your arrival. I want to know your wife’s home address or the name of the school your kid attends, I can get it. It may cost me a pack of smokes, but I can get it. My jacket had the rape case and the school-yard thing. They might just as well have painted a target on my back. I wasn’t there three days before I had a contract on me.

  JAYWALKER: A contract?

  BARNETT: A price tag. To be collected by anyone lucky enough to kill me.

  JAYWALKER: What did you do?

  BARNETT: Nothing. There was nothing I could do but wait for it to happen, and hope that when it did it would be quick and relatively painless. And then somebody intervened. The inmate who ran the prison barbershop saw what was going on. And he felt sorry for me, I guess. He offered me a job in the barbershop, and by doing that he vouched for me. In other words, he made it clear that I was down with him and I was okay, and that no one was to mess with me. The other thing I did was to join a group. Prison is all about which group you’re down with. For the Hispanics there were the Bloods and the Crips and the Latin Kings. For the whites there were the Ar
yan Brotherhood guys. And for black people like me there were the Muslims. So I joined up. I got me a Koran and I studied Islam. I embraced Allah and became a Muslim.

  JAYWALKER: Are you a Muslim to this day?

  Part of being a Jaywalker is reminiscent of Bill Murray’s fate in the movie Groundhog Day. You’re doomed to try cases over and over in your head years after they’ve ended. Decades after they’ve ended. Not just the ones you’ve lost, hoping that by changing a word here or a phrase there you might somehow be able to make them turn out differently in the replay.

  Jaywalker retries even the cases he won.

  Yet when he looks back today to the trial of Alonzo Barnett, he shudders. Back then, being a Muslim was no big deal. Sure, you had Malcolm X, never a favorite among the synagogue crowd. You had Cassius Clay changing his name to Mohammed Ali and refusing to fight for his country, and Lew Alcindor becoming Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And you had the Ten Percenters, the extremist fringe who’d run out of patience with Dr. King and his preaching about the virtues of nonviolence. But at least you didn’t have to contend with September 11 and its repercussions.

  Try playing a game of word association these days with the average American. Toss out the word Muslim and see what you hear in return. Nine out of ten responders aren’t even going to blink before answering Terrorist. So if Jaywalker had some concerns about how the whole Islam business was going to sit with the jurors, at least they were minor ones. At least Muslims weren’t flying airplanes into buildings yet. At least Alonzo Barnett could say he was one of them without fear of being immediately demonized.

  BARNETT: Yes, I still embrace Islam and consider myself a Muslim. I don’t call myself by my Muslim name, and I don’t go to a mosque as often as I might. But when I pray, I pray to Allah, and I thank Him for my salvation. And with His help I was able to give up drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and cursing. And after shooting heroin into my veins for over thirty years, I was able to give that up, too. So the way I look at it, Islam and me may have started out with a shotgun wedding, but we turned things into a marriage that lasted. And as I sit here today, it’s no exaggeration to say I wouldn’t be alive without my faith, any more than I would be if it hadn’t been for that man who gave me the job in the barbershop.