defendant, Alonzo Barnett, a man who’s been selling drugs for most of his life, sold drugs once again. But this time he sold them to an undercover officer. Not just drugs, but heroin. Not just in small amounts, but large ones. Wholesale amounts. A-1 felony amounts. And not just once or twice, but three times, if you count the third time, when he was interrupted in the process. His claim that he did all that to repay a debt is supported by nothing but his own words, and is belied by his own admission that he kept-and was about to keep once again-part of the money he skimmed off the top. That’s not the act of someone who’s repaying a debt. That’s the act of someone who’s looking to profit from his own criminal acts.
“What a shame the defendant couldn’t own up and take responsibility for those criminal acts. Instead he asks you to believe that he was forced into committing them, that the Devil made him do it. Only this particular devil, he tells you, was named Clarence Hightower. How convenient-and how cowardly.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, just because the defendant refuses to take responsibility for his criminal acts doesn’t mean you can’t assign responsibility to him. How do you go about doing that? Very simple. Tomorrow, right after the judge has finished instructing you on the law, she’s going to tell you that you may retire to the jury room to begin your deliberations. You know what you’re going to do? You’re going to tell her that won’t be necessary. Because there’s nothing to deliberate about in this case. The defendant takes the stand and admits selling or trying to sell heroin to Agent St. James on the three dates specified in the indictment, exactly as Agent St. James testified. Agent Angel Cruz tells you that when he arrested the defendant he searched him and found more than four ounces of white powder and five hundred dollars. The serial numbers on those five hundred dollars match the numbers of the bills given the defendant by Agent St. James some twenty minutes earlier. Finally, a United States chemist comes in and verifies that it was indeed heroin each time, and that the weights more than satisfied the requirements of the statutes the defendant is charged with violating. End of case. Forget about this entrapment nonsense. That’s nothing but a red herring brought in by a desperate defense lawyer in order to distract you. A smoke screen to keep you from focusing on your job.
“So,” Pulaski told them, “you tell the judge that there’s no need to retire, and no issues to deliberate. You tell her that the defendant may not think people are responsible for their actions, but you do. You tell her that you find the defendant guilty as charged.”
And turning to face the defense table, he added, “Now that, Mr. Jaywalker, is what justice
There are lawyers who sleep like babies after summing up. All the pressure is finally over. All that’s left are the judge’s charge, the jurors’ deliberations and the reading of the verdict.
Jaywalker, of course, is different.
Even though it had been more than two weeks since he’d gotten a good night’s sleep, that night would be no exception. Daniel Pulaski’s surprisingly strong summation had unnerved him, caused him to have second thoughts- make that third thoughts-about not having gone into the alternative defense of agency. He was convinced he’d picked a bad jury, not smart enough to understand the nuances of something as complicated as entrapment. Shirley Levine’s upcoming charge worried him. Worst of all, he’d noticed that the same jurors who’d struck him as receptive during his summation had seemed equally attentive to Pulaski’s arguments. He should have called other members of the backup team, on the theory that one of them might have slipped up and confirmed that Hightower had been an informer. He shouldn’t have spent so much time cross-examining the chemist and numbing the jurors with nonsense about weights and additives and percentages. He should have stayed at the DEA, or gone to medical school instead of law school.
Because by now it was absolutely clear: Alonzo Barnett was going to be convicted. Jaywalker was going to lose.
Again.
The last time he looked at the clock beside the bed it said two forty-four.
20
Among the many things he is, Jaywalker is a jury watcher. He watches potential jurors as they first enter a courtroom at a point when they have no idea about the type of case they’re being screened for. He studies their reactions like a hawk as the judge reads off the charges or reveals something particularly distasteful about the facts. He looks for the jurors’ reactions to himself and to his adversary, trying to gauge which one of them is going to be their favorite. He checks to see whom they’ve chosen to sit next to in the audience, and whether they whisper to the man on their left or the woman on their right once they’ve been seated in the jury box. What are they wearing? What have they brought with them? Are they excited at the idea of being there, or do they see jury duty as an imposition? If a recess is called, are they willing to walk close by the defense table as they enter or leave the courtroom, or do they instinctively go out of their way to give the defendant a wide berth?
These things count, every one of them and a hundred more like them. And even early in his career, even as early as 1986, Jaywalker had learned to read jurors the same way a sailor learns to read clouds or a firefighter learns to read smoke.
And as he watched and tried to read the jurors’ faces that Tuesday morning as they sat and listened to Shirley Levine’s charge, he was almost immediately seized by panic.
They weren’t listening.
Oh, they were listening, but not
And right then, he knew it was over.
Had the case been a whodunit, or a simple he-said/she-said, he could have lived with their inattentiveness. Other than reasonable doubt and burden of proof, there wouldn’t have been too much the judge could have told them that they didn’t already know from having heard the evidence.
But the case
Yet they were barely listening.
They’d already made up their minds.
They’d done exactly what Daniel Pulaski had told them to do. They’d heard Trevor St. James say he’d bought heroin from Alonzo Barnett twice and had been in the process of buying it a third time when Barnett had been arrested. They’d learned that Barnett had not only had an eighth of a kilogram of heroin when he’d been searched, but five hundred dollars of the prerecorded buy money.
That had been all they’d needed to know.
Everything else had gone right over their heads. All the business about the eighth-floor/twelfth-floor, all the nonsense about the weights and additives and percentages, all the suggestions that Clarence Hightower might have been working with the police. They couldn’t care less.
And who could blame them? The crack epidemic was taking the city by storm. Drugs were a scourge, and heroin was among the very worst of drugs. There was a war being waged, and men like Trevor St. James and Dino Pascarella were the soldiers in the front line, while scum like Alonzo Barnett and Clarence Hightower were the enemy. In the final analysis, there was no need for nuance, no room for clever defense lawyering. It all came down to a choice between the good guys and the bad guys. And that was no choice at all.
Even Barnett seemed to sense it. At one point he nudged Jaywalker and drew his attention to a juror in the
