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.
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 Aryan 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
Jaywalker retries even the cases he
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
