Guilty as Sin

by Joseph Teller

  Even Barnett seemed to sense it. At one point he nudged Jaywalker and drew his attention to a juror in the second row, a woman who’d turned away from the judge and was staring out the window. Jaywalker nodded grimly, having already noticed her. Then he shrugged. What was he supposed to do? Point her out to the judge and get the woman admonished? All that would do would be to guarantee her vote for conviction.

  Not that it mattered.

  Not that any of it mattered anymore.

  Shirley Levine’s charge took just under an hour. It helped that Jaywalker had dropped his agency argument from his summation. As a result, the judge barely felt compelled to instruct the jurors on it. But having said she would, she did. And she spent fifteen minutes on entrapment, but they struck Jaywalker as a bland, bloodless fifteen minutes, the highlight of which seemed to be that the defense bore the burden of proof on the issue.

  By the time Levine reached the last of her instructions, that the jury’s verdict would have to be unanimous and that they were to communicate with her only through written notes from their foreman, Jaywalker found himself looking through his pocket calendar, wondering what might be a good day to come back to court to stand up on Alonzo Barnett’s sentencing.

  It was that bad.

  “Now,” the judge was telling them, “you may follow the court officer and retire to the jury room to begin your deliberations.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the foreman.

  21

  Up yours, Mac!

  It wasn’t as if Jaywalker was a complete stranger to convictions. Even if he’d accumulated less than his fair share of them, he’d had enough to know they were a fact of life for every defense lawyer this side of Hollywood. And now he was looking at two in a row. A losing streak, in sports parlance. Back-to-back defeats.

  Worse yet, he’d never had one quite like this.

  He’d never had a jury convict without even showing the courtesy to go back to the jury room. He knew that jurors discussed cases long before the evidence was completed and they were told they could begin their deliberations. But to arrive at an actual verdict without retiring to the jury room? If nothing else, they could have sat around and eaten the sandwiches brought in for them at the taxpayers’ expense. And even if none of them wanted to wrestle with concepts like entrapment and inducement and encouragement, common decency still dictated that they kill an hour before marching back into the courtroom to convict the defendant. They could have thought of his lawyer, if nothing else.

  No, this was a new low.

  This was embarrassing.

  This was fucking humiliating, is what it was.

  “Excuse me?” The judge was staring at the foreman, a small bald man who’d given his name as Runyon and had described himself as an accountant, although not a CPA.

  “I said it won’t be necessary for us to retire and deliberate,” he repeated in a voice that to Jaywalker sounded somewhere between indifferent and downright cruel. “We’ve reached our verdict.”

  “Not another word, sir,” cautioned the judge. “Remember that I told you to communicate with the court only through a written note?”

  “Here you are,” said Runyon—and extended a folded piece of paper that apparently had been in his hand the whole time. Hell, thought Jaywalker, it might have been there for days, perhaps a week. Why in God’s name had he ever let an accountant onto the jury? A guy who did nothing but sit around all day crunching numbers, and was either too dumb or too lazy to even get certified?

  I deserved this, Jaywalker decided. I really did.

  But Alonzo Barnett didn’t.

  “Objection!” Jaywalker shouted, jumping to his feet. The sudden intensity of his own voice surprised even him. “The jury has to deliberate.” Even as the judge banged her gavel in an attempt to silence him, he continued to stand, at the same time frantically thumbing through his dog-eared copy of the Criminal Procedure Law. “Here it is!” he shouted triumphantly. “Section three-ten point ten, subdivision one. ‘The jury must retire to deliberate upon its verdict in a place outside the courtroom. It must be provided with suitable accommoda—’”

  “Sit down, Mr. Jaywalker, and please shut up.”

  The judge’s last two words, even with the “please” that prefaced them, accomplished what the banging of her gavel hadn’t been able to. Jaywalker sat down, and he shut up. But even as he did, he held the book aloft for Levine to see the words. As if she’d be able to make out the microscopic print from twenty-five feet away.

  With Jaywalker’s ranting finally cut off, the courtroom gradually grew quiet, except for a bit of residual snickering coming from the direction of the jury box. Great, he thought, looking down at his shoes, the black one and the brown one. Not only have they gone and convicted my client without so much as deliberating, now they’re laughing at me. Well, fuck them. He lifted his gaze and turned to stare at them. He wanted to see if collectively they had an ounce of shame left.

  Apparently they didn’t. They were staring right back at him, every last one of them. Even the alternates. A couple of them were even gesturing derisively now. One was raising and lowering both hands, palms down, as though trying to calm down an unruly child. Another was rudely shushing him with a finger pressed to her lips. Yet another, a guy in the second row, had made a fist and was pointing his thumb upwards, as if to say, “Up yours, Mac!”

  Off to one side, Jaywalker could feel a tugging on his sleeve. He tried to pull away from it, but it only grew more insistent. He turned in annoyance. Looking directly at Alonzo Barnett, he snapped, “Back off, will you? Getting railroaded like this might be okay with you, but it’s not okay with me.”

  Barnett’s only response was to smile gently.

  Fucking lunatic, was all Jaywalker could think. Here he’s going off to die in prison, and he’s all serene and Zen-like about it, while I’m the one who’s totally bat-shit. “It’s not okay,” he told Barnett again. “It’s not okay at all.”

  “I think maybe it actually might be,” said Barnett, pointing toward the jury box. “I think they might be trying to tell us something.”

  22

  Doyle’s pub

  The fact that it was barely one o’clock when the courtroom emptied out for the last time didn’t stop fourteen of the sixteen jurors from bodily grabbing Jaywalker in the hallway and spiriting him off to Doyle’s Pub, a local watering hole and restaurant behind the courthouse. Twice he tried to break free before giving up. Not only was he seriously outnumbered, but he soon realized that as kidnappings go, this was going to be a pretty benign one.

  Standing around a hastily set table of food and drinks—none of which Jaywalker would be allowed to contribute a penny toward—the jurors took turns peppering him with questions. Where were Alonzo Barnett’s daughters? Would Lieutenant Pascarella be prosecuted? What would become of poor Lance Bucknell? Why hadn’t Jaywalker argued agency, when they would have acquitted Barnett just as quickly under that theory? How had Kenny Smith managed to drag Clarence Hightower down to court? What had happened to cute little Miki Shaughnessey? Why was Daniel Pulaski such a pompous prick? And why hadn’t Jaywalker realized they were about to acquit Barnett, rather than convict him?

  He did his best to answer the questions he could and deflect the ones he couldn’t. He lost track of how many Bloody Marys he downed, and he actually ate lunch. Not Cheez-Its or Wheat Thins, but fresh seeded rye bread covered with real chicken salad, or maybe it was tuna. And then, just when he thought the time might be ripe for him to thank his hosts and make his getaway, there was a tumultuous roar at the doorway, and the two missing jurors showed up, flanking a beaming Alonzo Barnett. They’d stationed themselves outside the Tombs, they explained, and had pounced on him the moment he’d been released.

  To this day, Jaywalker can’t tell you how long the celebration lasted or how much he had to drink before the jurors finally let him leave. He remembers being surprised to find it was dark outside when he emerged, and that he was totall
y disoriented, having no idea which way to walk. A friendly cabdriver not only drove him home but walked him into his building and brought him upstairs to his apartment, where his wife first sympathized with his need to drown his sadness, and then, upon learning the actual outcome of the case, put him to bed and applied some smothering of her own.

  He awoke a day and a half later with a serious headache, a terrible taste in his mouth and an ear-to-ear grin that wouldn’t go away for a week. That said, he did find enough time to wipe it off and put in a call to Lorraine Wilson, the clerk who’d assigned him the case more than two months earlier, just as he’d promised he would. But he needn’t have bothered. She’d already heard. A lot of people had, it seemed.

  The party at Doyle’s was by no means the last Jaywalker saw or heard of Alonzo Barnett. Three weeks after the trial, Barnett called to report on his efforts to reestablish contact with his daughters.

  The news wasn’t good.

  Early on during Barnett’s twenty-month confinement, it turned out the girls had been placed with a foster family. The Bureau of Child Welfare had been lucky enough to find a childless couple willing to take them both, no small thing. The placement had gone well enough that the couple now wanted to formally adopt the girls. Under the law, that could happen only if their father’s paternal rights were first legally terminated.

  A social worker for BCW confided to Barnett that the couple had been reluctant to begin proceedings to do that. Apparently they felt that would be a hurtful thing, not only for Barnett but the girls themselves. There was no mother to worry about, Barnett’s wife having died years earlier, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. So BCW itself had submitted a petition, setting forth their reasons to believe that it would be in the best interest of the girls to end their relationship with their father and let the adoptions proceed.

  “What do you want to do?” Jaywalker asked Barnett.

  “I want to fight to get my daughters back. Will you help me?”

  Jaywalker had learned a half a dozen years earlier that a case didn’t end when you lost it. Now he was about to learn a corollary to that rule. A case didn’t end just because you won it, either. He called a friend, a young woman he’d known at Legal Aid who’d left to practice family law. Over lunch he told her the story of Alonzo Barnett and begged her to help Barnett get his daughters back.

  “I’ll pay your fee,” he said, forgetting that he had nothing to pay it with.

  “There won’t be a fee,” she told him. “But here’s the deal. You’re going to be my first witness at the hearing.”

  “What could I possibly contribute?” he asked. “I never even met the girls. I’ve never once seen Barnett interact with them.”

  “That may be,” she agreed. “But you can contribute something equally important. You can testify to how he’s turned his life around.”

  And so it was that two months later Jaywalker found himself in a cramped makeshift courtroom on the eighth floor of Manhattan Family Court.

  The eighth floor.

  There was no jury present, and no spectators in sight. The foster parents had already testified on a previous date. Not even the girls themselves were there. In the criminal courts, the Constitution guarantees every defendant the right to a public trial. In family court, privacy reigns supreme.

  Jaywalker wasn’t three minutes into his testimony when he broke down. He was there to tell the judge what a changed man Alonzo Barnett was, how he’d single-handedly kicked his addiction and turned his life around, and that his arrest two years earlier was no evidence of a relapse. But the story overwhelmed him, and the notion that the state could now step in and take away the man’s children left him all but unable to continue. But continue he did, and somehow he got through it. And afterward, outside the courtroom, his friend told him that he’d been terrific, that the judge had been deeply moved, and that it was highly likely that the petition to terminate Alonzo Barnett’s paternal rights would be denied.

  So it came as a total surprise when Barnett came to see Jaywalker two weeks later to tell him that he’d decided not to contest the petition after all.

  “My girls are becoming teenagers,” he said. “They’re growing up, getting their periods, having boyfriends, going through issues at school. I don’t know anything about that stuff. I grew up in prison. I don’t know about periods and boyfriends and school. My lawyer tells me the girls say they’re happy where they are, and that they’ve learned to rely on their foster parents. That’s something they could never do with me. Every time they tried to rely on me, I let them down.”

  “But you’re their father,” said Jaywalker.

  “I know that,” said Barnett. “But I have to understand that this isn’t about me. This has to be about them.”

  Jaywalker said nothing. All he could do was think about his own daughter, and what he’d do if anyone ever tried to take her away from him and his wife. But it wasn’t the same.

  “Do I dream of them?” Barnett asked no one in particular. “Every night. But in my dreams, my girls have become doctors and lawyers, grown women with husbands who go off to work, and children of their own. And they’re happy, truly happy. Does it absolutely kill me to let go of them? Sure it does, it tears my guts out. But I’ve come to understand that it’s something I owe them, something I have to do for them.”

  Right before leaving, Barnett fulfilled a promise made months earlier by handing Jaywalker a sealed manila envelope with what felt like a thin booklet inside it. Opening it twenty minutes later, Jaywalker discovered a collection of handwritten poems, neatly stapled together along the left-hand margin. The poet was identified only by the initials “AB.” And though the punctuation was imperfect and the spelling erratic, the sentiments expressed were surprisingly moving. Together they described a man’s lifelong struggle to reclaim his soul. The title of the slender volume was lifted from the last word in the last line of the last poem.

  “Redemption,” it was called.

  Shirley Levine died two years later. She had no family, and Jaywalker was one of the few who visited her in her hospital room. She was down to seventy pounds by then but still had a sparkle in her eyes. They traded war stories, Levine at last talking about the wartime exploits she’d never before shared with anyone. Jaywalker tried to match her with some stories from his undercover days at the DEA, but they were pale stuff in comparison.

  Daniel Pulaski left the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor a year after the trial to run for Congress. He lost, getting twelve per cent of the vote in the Republican primary.

  Miki Shaughnessey left, too, disillusioned with the job. She had a brief career doing courtroom commentary, first for Court TV and then for one of the networks, before picking up and moving out to the West Coast.

  Clarence Hightower was never heard from again.

  None of the detectives, agents or investigators who’d testified at the trial were ever prosecuted or disciplined in any way for being less than honest in their reports and testimony.

  A week after the trial, Jaywalker and Kenny Smith got together over cheeseburgers and Coke, and had a good laugh over the stunt they’d managed to pull off.

  “How could you be so sure the judge wouldn’t let you reopen the evidence and put him on?” Smith wanted to know. “What would you have done then?”

  “I’d researched the case law,” Jaywalker told him. “That’s why I told you to make certain you waited until I’d begun my summation before you came into the courtroom pretending you had Hightower with you.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Smith, standing up and coming around to Jaywalker’s side of the booth. There they exchanged high fives and hugs, Jaywalker stretching on his tiptoes.

  To this day Jaywalker continues to defend men and women charged with crimes. Even the ones who tell him they did exactly what they had been accused of doing. Even the ones he knows are guilty as sin.

  Even the Alonzo Barnetts of the world.

  And Barnett? In the twenty-five years
that he lived following the trial, he stayed completely drug-free and out of trouble. He eventually retired from the restaurant he’d worked at, and toward the end got by on his modest savings and his Social Security check. And up to the very end he volunteered three days a week at a drug rehabilitation facility in the Bronx, and he mentored teenage boys in trouble. He never stopped writing poetry and living in the same apartment in the same building as before. His daughters came to visit him there on a regular basis, having found their way to him with a little help from Jaywalker. Not too long ago the younger one got married, and at her urging and with her adoptive parents’ blessing, both her fathers walked her down the aisle, one on either side of her. Jaywalker knows that for a fact, because he was there to witness it. When he mentioned to Barnett how touched he was that Barnett had helped give his daughter away, Barnett replied with a smile that it was something he certainly ought to be good at.

  “After all,” he explained, “I’ve had practice.”

  So next time you’re feeling cynical about the criminal justice system and find yourself tempted to ask some defense lawyer how he can possibly represent somebody he knows is guilty, stop for just a moment and think of Jaywalker.

  Better yet, think of Alonzo Barnett.

  Think of redemption.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The story you’ve just read is drawn from an actual case I myself tried some years ago. Thus there really was an Alonzo Barnett, a Clarence Hightower, a Trevor St. James, a Kenny Smith, and a Shirley Levine. There was even a gathering at Doyle’s Pub. That said, I’ve changed a few things, including the names of the participants from the real-life drama, just as I’ve substituted Jaywalker’s identity for my own.