Guilty As Sin

Don’t be paranoid, Jaywalker told himself. But it was hard for him to take his own advice. Paranoia wasn’t exactly a prerequisite for being a good defense lawyer, but it sure came in handy from time to time.

They talked for another twenty minutes. Jaywalker assured Shaughnessey that he wouldn’t oppose an adjournment of the trial if she felt she needed one. She agreed to let him know what witnesses she intended to call, along with the order in which she planned on calling them, as soon as she figured those things out. “So why is your guy going to trial?” she asked at one point. “I mean…” Her voice trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid, that it seemed futile on the defendant’s part, futile and self-destructive.

Jaywalker answered her with a shrug. “It happens,” he said.

She nodded as though she understood. She might be inexperienced, Jaywalker decided, but she seemed like a quick learner and a straight shooter. Shirley Levine was a good judge and Alonzo Barnett a nice man. Together they would have a good trial, the four of them. And when it was over, Barnett would shake Jaywalker’s hand, thank him for doing his best, and go off someplace upstate to spend the rest of his life sitting in a cage. For doing a guy a favor. All so a bunch of politicians up in Albany could outshout each other over which of them was toughest on crime.

Even back as early as 1986, Jaywalker knew he could keep doing this work only so long before it would drive him totally nuts, before it would send him rummaging through the bottom of his closet and digging out his gun from his DEA days. Before it would make him want to blow away the sheer insanity of these stupid drug cases, for once and for all.

7

The anonymous caller

“Alonzo Barnett is sitting here at the defense table today for one reason, and one reason only,” Jaywalker told the jury. “And that’s because against his own self-interest and at his own peril, he did what he thought was the right thing to do. He returned a favor. He repaid a debt. In Alonzo Barnett’s eyes, another man had quite literally saved his life several years earlier. And when that man came calling and begging for help, Mr. Barnett at first said no, he couldn’t help him. He said that over and over again, in fact. He said it on six different occasions. Until the other man put it a different way. ‘You owe me,’ is how he put it. And as Mr. Barnett thought about it, he realized that the other man was right, that Mr. Barnett did in fact owe him. So he relented, and he did the favor. And because he did the favor, he was arrested and charged with a series of very serious crimes.

“That’s why he sits here today. And that’s why you sit where you sit today, to render judgment on what Mr. Barnett did almost twenty-one months ago.”

It was one of the shortest opening statements Jaywalker had ever made or, for that matter, would ever make. It was shorter than Shirley Levine’s preliminary explanation of the rules that govern criminal trials, shorter by almost ten minutes than Miki Shaughnessey’s opening, shorter by a full two days than the time it had taken them to pick a jury of twelve regular jurors and four alternates.

Because there was simply nothing else for Jaywalker to say. He couldn’t talk about entrapment, because Clarence Hightower hadn’t been an informer working for law enforcement. He couldn’t talk about agency, because if you were to really analyze Barnett’s role in the transactions, the principal he’d been working for had been Hightower. And Hightower had wanted to obtain drugs in order to sell them to a buyer. A buyer who’d turned out to be an undercover agent.

“Call your first witness,” Judge Levine told Miki Shaughnessey.

Jaywalker reached across the defense table and retrieved a subfile marked Pascarella. True to her word, days earlier Shaughnessey had told him the names of the witnesses she was going to call and the order in which she expected to do so. His initial impression of her had been borne out by everything that had happened since. Where Daniel Pulaski had been two-faced and closefisted at every turn of events, Shaughnessey was open, honest and aboveboard. If she truly represented the next generation of prosecutors at Special Narcotics, the office would soon be rivaling the New York County District Attorney’s in terms of the integrity of its staff. Furthermore, over the past two days Shaughnessey had demonstrated that she was more than just a pretty face. Despite her inexperience, she’d held her own during jury selection, displaying a quick wit and a level of comfort that a lot of seasoned lawyers never achieve. For two full days she’d matched Jaywalker challenge for challenge as they whittled an initial pool of a hundred and twenty jurors down to a final sixteen. If the jurors seemed to like Jaywalker and his client-and he always made it his business to see that they did-they seemed to like Miki Shaughnessey every bit as much.

The jury they ended up with struck Jaywalker as a pretty middle-of-the-road group, neither lockstep pro- prosecution nor bleeding-heart pro-defense. Which, as far as he was concerned, meant that he’d already lost round one. A fair and unbiased jury was great if you happened to have the facts and the law on your side. If you didn’t, those same qualities were likely to work against you.

“The People,” Shaughnessey said now, “call Lieutenant Dino Pascarella.”

Direct sale trials, Jaywalker knew from experience, follow a very predictable pattern. The prosecution usually begins with a team leader who supervised the cops or agents in the field. Then comes the undercover officer, explaining when, where and how he bought the drugs, and who he bought them from. After that, a member or two from the backup team describes the corroborating surveillance they conducted during the buy or buys, and the eventual arrest of the seller or sellers.

Even had Miki Shaughnessey not laid out the structure of her case to Jaywalker in advance, the “Lieutenant” that preceded Dino Pascarella’s name would have been enough of a hint that in this particular operation, he’d been the team leader. Entering the courtroom now through a side door, Pascarella made his way to the witness stand with practiced self-assurance. He was a dark-haired man who looked to be in his late thirties, dressed in what might have passed as a conservative blue business suit, had it not been just a bit on the shiny side.

Shaughnessey began by establishing her witness’s twelve years of experience, first as a New York City police officer, then a detective, and for the past two years as a lieutenant in narcotics. The present case, he estimated, was the five hundredth he’d worked on, and perhaps the twentieth he himself had supervised.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Did there come a time, Lieutenant, back in September of 1984, when you had a telephone conversation with a civilian?

PASCARELLA: Yes, there did.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And as a result of that conversation-

JAYWALKER: Objection.

Because the content of the conversation was hearsay and therefore inadmissible, the phrase “as a result of” improperly asked the jurors to infer the nature of the conversation. Not that they wouldn’t anyway, Jaywalker knew. But he wanted to see how Miki Shaughnessey reacted to being thrown off her rhythm. Unfortunately, Judge Levine, even while sustaining Jaywalker’s objection, proceded to coach Shaughnessey on how to cure the defect.

THE COURT: Yes, sustained. The proper way to phrase the question, Miss Shaughnessey, is “Following that conversation…”

SHAUGHNESSEY: I’m sorry. Following that telephone conversation, did you do something?

PASCARELLA: Yes, I did.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Please tell us what you did.

With that open-ended invitation, Lieutenant Pascarella proceeded to recount how he’d opened an investigation under the authority of the Joint City, State and Federal Task Force into the suspected drug dealings of a subject known up to that point only as John Doe “Gramps.”

SHAUGHNESSEY: Why John Doe “Gramps”?

PASCARELLA: The “John Doe” was because we didn’t know his real name yet. The “Gramps” was because he was an older gentleman who’d been seen with a couple of children, both girls, who we assumed were his granddaughters.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Did you later learn that your assumption was incorrect?

PASCARELLA: Yes. We found out at some point that they were actually his daughters.