There was alibi. There was justification, coercion and duress. There was entrapment and agency. There was infancy, along with insanity, incompetence, incapacity and impossibility. There were abandonment, renunciation and attenuation, lack of intent and lack of scienter. There were misidentification and mistake, whether of fact or law. Diplomatic immunity, transactional immunity and use immunity, the statute of limitations and the statutory right to a speedy trial. You had voluntary intoxication and involuntary intoxication, ex post facto and post-traumatic stress. Then you had extreme emotional disturbance, malicious prosecution, vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution. Also lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, double jeopardy and double punishment.
But nowhere, absolutely nowhere, was there a defense called “doing somebody a favor.”
5
The average lawyer would have stopped right there, Jaywalker knew. Here was a client who was flat-out admitting his guilt to every single one of the charges against him. No ifs, ands or buts. The only explanation he could come up with for his actions-that he’d been doing somebody a favor-was no defense at all. Try killing someone and then telling the police it was just a favor you did for a friend, and see how far that gets you.
Yet, as Jaywalker and Barnett had continued to talk, Barnett had made it quite clear that he had no intention of pleading guilty. “Look,” he’d said, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison-and it looks like I am-the last thing I want to do is put myself there. I may not have much of a chance at trial, but if I lose, at least I’ll be able to say I went down swinging.”
Try
Not that any of those things, or all of them added up, would have fazed most lawyers. Especially those working on the clock. To most of them, a trial simply meant a bigger payday. Not that you got rich back then on assigned counsel rates. But even at forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court, a two- week trial could generate a nice four-figure check. And since there was no chance of winning, there was also no pressure on the lawyer to knock himself out. If the defendant wanted to take the stand, fine. If he didn’t, also fine. Either way, it was going to be his funeral.
The problem was, of course, that Jaywalker wasn’t your average lawyer. Never had been, never would be. If Alonzo Barnett wanted a trial, then a trial he would get. But that didn’t mean that Jaywalker was going to relax, sit back and listen to the meter click. Doing any of those things would have been constitutionally impossible for him, the functional equivalent of his donning a tuxedo, renting a stretch limo and going out dancing.
The problem was, where to begin?
A lawyer who comes into a case late finds himself at a serious disadvantage. Prior to his arrival, his adversary has been at work lining up witnesses, cementing and reconciling their stories, boning up on the law if necessary, and doing hundreds of other little things to maximize his head start. Which isn’t to say that Jaywalker’s predecessors on the defense side hadn’t been doing some of those things, too. But occasionally there’s a good reason-or even a number of good reasons-behind a client’s dissatisfaction with his representation.
Jaywalker had come into Alonzo Barnett’s case a full year and a half late, and had had not one predecessor, but three of them. The day after his second sit-down with Barnett, he took stock of what those lawyers had done, or failed to do, before his arrival.
First was the fact that none of them had made a serious attempt to get bail set in the case. While that might have made sense early on in the proceedings, at a time when Barnett had a parole violation detainer on him and couldn’t have gotten out in any event, there’d soon come a time when the detainer had been lifted. Barnett had had so little time remaining on his parole that the authorities had simply terminated him, marking his file closed with the notation “unsatisfactory adjustment.” Whether whoever was representing him at the time had noticed or not, or even bothered to check, was unclear. The result had been that on the new arrest, Barnett continued to be held in remand status. Jaywalker checked, of course, and when he discovered the omission, he went back in to see his client and bring him the news.
“Is there any amount of bail you could make?” he asked. “Anything at all?” He knew that even a defendant on a bad case with a bad record had a chance of getting a reasonable bail in Shirley Levine’s courtroom. And in addition to knowing his client would much prefer to be out than in, Jaywalker had selfish reasons of his own in mind. It’s much easier for the lawyer when he can meet with a defendant in his office than it is when he’s got to visit him in jail. Even a jail around the corner from the courthouse, like the Tombs. And after all, Barnett had been caught selling heroin, and in pretty substantial amounts. It was only logical to figure he might have some money stashed away somewhere.
But Barnett surprised him.
“Don’t get me bail,” he said.
Which marked a first for Jaywalker. Because the thing is, every detainee ever locked up in the history of the world wants to get out, with the possible exception of some homeless drunk in the middle of winter who’s happy to have “three hots and a cot” while he sleeps things off.
But Alonzo Barnett was neither homeless nor drunk, and instead of it being midwinter, it was mid-May. So Jaywalker was forced to ask him why he didn’t want to get out.
“It would be too hard on my daughters,” Barnett said. “I’ve told them to give up on me, that I won’t be coming out for a very long time, if ever. And it would be too hard on
In the end, Jaywalker convinced Barnett that it made sense to have a bail amount set, even if he had no intention of ever trying to post it, and the following day went before Judge Levine and had her set bail at $25,000. If nothing else, it downgraded Barnett’s classification as a threat within the Tombs, freeing him up from having both his cell and his person subject to constant searches.
Another thing the trio of earlier lawyers had screwed up were the pretrial motions. They’d filed them-at least Lawyer Number 2 had-but done a pretty half-assed job. Long on paper but short on persuasion, they’d failed to recite sufficient grounds for the ordering of any evidentiary hearings prior to trial. The only thing that remained to be decided was how many of the defendant’s convictions the prosecutor would be able to bring out if Barnett were to take the stand. As for discovery, a lot of things had been asked for, but Daniel Pulaski had successfully resisted turning over just about all of them. As a result, Jaywalker knew the dates and approximate times and locations of the three sales, as well as the amounts of heroin involved in each. That and the fact that the prosecution claimed to know of no exculpatory material that might in any way materially assist the defense.
Not much to work with.
But in addition to being a compulsive overpreparer, Jaywalker was a former investigator. Not all of his time at the Drug Enforcement Administration had been spent buying narcotics. When he hadn’t been undercover, Jaywalker had been, like any other federal agent, an investigator. He knew how to slip a lock, tap a phone and bug a room. He could make a crime scene speak to him. He could walk into an apartment or pull over a car, and have a pretty good idea where the drugs were hidden. He was good with a camera and had a working knowledge of ballistics. He knew how to lift a fingerprint and match it to one on file. And he knew the back channels, the ins and outs of the criminal justice system.
It was that last piece of knowledge that he put to work now. And he began at the only place he could possibly think of.
Other than the cops and agents and state troopers who’d made the case against Alonzo Barnett and weren’t about to speak with a defense lawyer, there was only one person who was in a position to know anything at all about the facts. His name was Clarence Hightower, and he was the guy who’d called in the favor. According to
