Guilty As Sin

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.

JAYWALKER: And that man, the one who gave you the job in the barbershop. Do you happen to recall his name, by any chance?

BARNETT: Yes, I do. His name was Clarence Hightower.

If you watch enough trials, you learn that every once in a while there’s a moment when things start to come together for the jury. Those who make it their business to follow Jaywalker’s trials-and even back in 1986, there was a small but growing number of colleagues, opponents, reporters and retirees who did-had even coined a term for the phenomenon. Right now, with that simple question and the even simpler answer to it, anyone who happened to be lucky enough to be sitting in Part 91 of Manhattan Supreme Court knew they had just been treated to a Jaywalker Moment.

Shirley Levine seemed to know it, too. She declared a midafternoon recess and excused the jury for fifteen minutes.

Jaywalker couldn’t have scripted things better if he’d tried. He loved sending the jurors out of the room on a good note, whether it was for the weekend, the evening, the lunch hour or even just a coffee break. Before each recess, New York law requires the judge to admonish the jurors to refrain from visiting the crime scene, from forming opinions until all the evidence is in and from discussing the case with each other. And although Levine dutifully did all that now for what must have been the twentieth time, Jaywalker knew that jurors were only human, after all. Of course they discussed the case-every chance they got. Maybe not as a group, but certainly in twos and threes. And right now, as they filed out of the courtroom, what they were going to discuss, in one way or another, was Clarence Hightower and the strange coincidence that he had once saved Alonzo Barnett’s life.

All because Shirley Levine had decided to call a recess at a particular moment. Well, that and the fact that Jaywalker had paced his direct examination so that it would be just about time for her to do so, and had then paused for just a moment, as though he were about to go on to a different subject.

Still, he could have hugged her.

“So,” he asked Alonzo Barnett once the trial had reconvened, “who got out of Green Haven first, you or Clarence Hightower?”

“I did,” said Barnett. “I was doing a four-and-a-half-to-nine for a sale I’d pleaded guilty to. I got out in 1981. Mr. Hightower was still there when I left, doing ten to twenty for aggravated assault. He still had another three years to go.”

Jaywalker spent a few minutes getting Barnett to recite the things he’d managed to accomplish in those three years. An okay job, followed by a better one. An apartment of his own. No heroin, no alcohol, no drugs of any sort. No criminal activity whatsoever. Not that he couldn’t see that stuff going on everywhere in the neighborhood. It was the early 1980s, after all, and it was Harlem. Crack was in every doorway, crime on every street corner.

Just not for Alonzo Barnett.

JAYWALKER: Besides working and taking care of your apartment, what else did you do with your time?

BARNETT: I reported to my parole officer. I never missed a single appointment, not one. I took fifteen regular urine tests and eight unannounced ones to check on whether there were drugs in my system. I passed all twenty- three of them. I volunteered at a big brother program. I asked to be paired up with the worst of the worst of the kids they had. Kids with no parents, kids who couldn’t read or write, kids in real danger. I like to think I helped one or two of them a little bit. And, most important-

And right there, Barnett’s voice cracked, and he had to wait just a second before repeating the words most important and continuing. Had you been sitting in the back row of the courtroom, you might have missed it. It was over and done that quickly.

The jurors weren’t sitting in the back row.

As much as Jaywalker would have liked to take credit for the moment, he couldn’t. Sometimes you planned little things like that, choreographed them down to the tiniest detail. But other times, stuff just happened. And when it did, there was no mistaking how real it was. This was one of those times.

BARNETT: — I went to Family Court and won permission to have visits with my daughters.

JAYWALKER: How did that go?

BARNETT: It was hard at first, very hard. My daughters were angry at me, and rightfully so. I’d gone to prison. I’d abandoned them. At first the visits had to be supervised and conducted at BCW, the Bureau of Child Welfare. But after a while, once they were going smoothly and we’d dealt with the anger, the visits became unsupervised and freer. I was allowed to bring my daughters to my apartment, though not overnight. I was working on that, too, when…when…

This time his voice didn’t crack; it just tailed off into silence. Jaywalker waited a few seconds before asking if something had happened.

“Yes,” said Barnett.

“What happened?” Jaywalker asked.

“Somebody showed up.”

Again Jaywalker paused a beat before asking his next question. This was the quiet part of his direct examination, the part conducted in barely a whisper. This was the sad part.

“Who showed up?” he asked.

But he needn’t have. Even before Alonzo Barnett had a chance to answer, the jurors answered for him. They answered in their nods and their grimaces, some of them going so far as to mouth the name silently to themselves, or not so silently to those on either side of them. “Clarence Hightower.”

For the next forty minutes Jaywalker engaged Barnett in a re-creation of the tug-of-war that had taken place between the two men nearly two years ago. They broke it down into seven separate visits in which Hightower played Iago to Barnett’s Othello. Six times Hightower begged Barnett to cut him into his former heroin connection, pleading in turn sickness, poverty, profit, old times’ sake and whatever else he could think of. Six times Barnett refused him. Finally, on the seventh visit, Hightower pulled out his trump card and played it.

“Listen up,” he said. “You owe me. I saved your life. Now it’s your turn to save mine.”

JAYWALKER: What happened when he said that?

BARNETT: For a long time I didn’t say anything. I just thought about what he’d said, as hard as I could. And then, when I was done thinking, I nodded and I said okay.

JAYWALKER: Why did you do that?

BARNETT: Because he was right. He had saved my life. I couldn’t argue with that. I did owe him. At least that’s the way I figured it.

JAYWALKER: Do you still figure it that way?

BARNETT: Yes and no. I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the pressure he put on me. But I’m an adult, and nobody put a gun to my head. My decision ended up costing me everything I’d accomplished. It cost me my freedom, my job, my home, my self-respect. Most of all, it cost me my daughters. So on the one hand, it’s obvious that I figured very wrong.

JAYWALKER: And on the other hand?