Guilty As Sin

anticipating what she’d do, Jaywalker had been able to take a smart defendant with a nice manner of speaking and prepare him for just about every question that would come his way. Now, as he sat and listened to things play out, Jaywalker wondered if the combination of his preparation and his client’s receptiveness would be enough to offset what he was up against: the fact that no matter how well Barnett came off as a witness, he was going to be forced to admit that he’d knowingly and repeatedly sold large amounts of heroin for profit when he, of all people, should have known better.

It didn’t take too long to find out.

SHAUGHNESSEY: If I understand what you said yesterday, Mr. Barnett, you sold heroin to Agent St. James only because you felt you owed some kind of a debt to Clarence Hightower. Is that correct?

BARNETT: Yes, except that I wouldn’t call it “some kind of a debt.” It was a very specific debt. The man saved my life.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And you sold heroin to repay him.

BARNETT: That’s what it came to. I’d hoped to get off the hook by simply introducing Mr. Hightower to someone he could buy from. But it didn’t work out that way. So yes, it ended up with me getting the heroin for his friend, who turned out to be a federal agent.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Did you make any money in the process of repaying this debt?

BARNETT: Yes, I did.

SHAUGHNESSEY: How much?

BARNETT: I’d have to break it down for you.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Please do.

BARNETT: The first time I was given one hundred dollars and spent eighty of it.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So you made twenty dollars?

BARNETT: No, I gave the twenty dollars to Mr. Hightower.

SHAUGHNESSEY: All of it?

BARNETT: All of it. I wanted no part of it.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And the second time?

BARNETT: The second time I was given fifteen hundred dollars and spent twelve hundred. Of the three hundred left over, I gave Mr. Hightower two hundred, and kept one hundred.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Suddenly you did want part of it?

BARNETT: I’m human. I was behind in my rent, and I figured I’d earned it. It was wrong of me to keep it, but I did. I’m not going to lie about it.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And the third time?

BARNETT: The third time I was given five thousand dollars and spent four thousand five hundred.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So you would have made five hundred on that occasion alone, had you not been arrested. Correct?

BARNETT: No, that’s not correct.

SHAUGHNESSEY: No?

BARNETT: No. It wasn’t just a coincidence that Mr. Hightower showed up right after I was arrested. He was there to hit me up for some of the five hundred dollars.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Was your rent paid up by that time?

BARNETT: Yes, it was.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So you would have given him the whole five hundred. Right?

BARNETT: No, ma’am. I’d be lying to you if I said that. I was going to keep one hundred of it again, maybe even two hundred. I hadn’t decided which. I was going to keep it to buy something nice for my daughters. They were in foster care at the time, and were on a pretty tight budget. No new clothes, no new books or school supplies. Nothing but bare essentials. So the way I figured it, it was better spent on them than going into Mr. Hightower’s veins.

Bravo, thought Jaywalker. He and Barnett had worked hard trying to come up with zingers like that, hoping there’d be opportunities to use them. Score one for the bad guys.

SHAUGHNESSEY: You knew Mr. Hightower was using?

BARNETT: He told me he was. It was one of the things he told me, trying to convince me to help him.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So you helped him get money to feed his drug habit. You enabled him.

BARNETT: Actually, I was still refusing to help him at that point. It was only when he reminded me about the debt that I agreed to help him.

SHAUGHNESSEY: I see. You yourself weren’t using drugs at that point, were you?

Here it comes, thought Jaywalker. You’re a seller, not a user.

BARNETT: No, ma’am, I wasn’t.

SHAUGHNESSEY: You had no habit of your own to support, did you?

BARNETT: No, ma’am.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Yet you thought it was okay to sell heroin so others could use it?

BARNETT: I never thought it was okay, not even back when I used to sell to support my own habit. I always knew it was wrong.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And being a member of the Muslim religion, you knew it was wrong to use alcohol or illegal drugs. Did it ever occur to you that it might also be wrong to sell illegal drugs?

Good question, thought Jaywalker, and one he hadn’t seen coming. He bit down on the inside of his mouth, hoping that Barnett wouldn’t try to split hairs and insist that while using was prohibited by the Koran, selling wasn’t covered.

BARNETT: Please forgive me, ma’am, but the religion is called Islam. One who practices it is a Muslim. And yes, it was wrong of me, as a practicing Muslim, to do what I did, and I knew that. I am by no means perfect, and I have never claimed to be. I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in my life, and this was certainly one of them. For a lot of reasons, not just religious.

Not bad for an ad lib.

Looking to regroup, Shaughnessey sought a safe place and apparently figured a good bet could be found in Alonzo Barnett’s criminal record. But she hadn’t counted on the weeks of drilling Jaywalker and his client had put in on just that subject. For the next half hour, she tried to catch Barnett denying his guilt of some twenty-year-old arrest or hedging about some conviction from a decade ago. But she got nowhere. Alonzo Barnett was that rare defendant who truly understood, actually got it, that his record was his record, and as bad as it was, he could only make it worse by attempting to minimize it.

He was, in other words, a Jaywalker defendant.

Finally Shaughnessey turned her attention to the one area Jaywalker expected his client to have real difficulty with. She asked him who’d sold him the drugs.

Not that Jaywalker hadn’t anticipated the question; he had. Still, asking a man to name and identify his drug connection is pretty much the same as asking him to become a snitch. And the problem is only heightened when the man being asked has done time and spent years living under a code that reduces snitches to the lowest of the low. In prison you have your general population, comprised of inmates who are free to mingle with each other. Free to mingle is something of a misnomer in this case, of course, and is generally limited to mealtimes and yard time, with an extra hour thrown in now and then.

Then you have younger inmates, those below twenty-one or maybe nineteen, who are almost always separately housed for a variety of reasons, including preventing them from expanding their knowledge as apprentices of hardened criminals. After them come homosexuals-prison administrators will no doubt get around to adopting the word gay eventually, but seem in no particular rush to do so-psychiatric cases, the very old, the very weak, sex offenders, and anyone else who might be considered a likely target of violence. A corrupt cop or public official, say, or a transgendered individual. And finally, way down at the bottom of the barrel where the scum settles, the snitches.

Alonzo Barnett had no interest in being labeled a snitch, certainly not while he was in jail, and not now, when the overwhelming odds were that he’d soon be shipped back to prison. He’d told Jaywalker that, and Jaywalker hadn’t needed to ask him why. His suggestion to Barnett had been to make up a name and an apartment number on the twelfth floor of 345 West 127th Street, where Investigator Lance Bucknell claimed he’d gone during the third