“You got it,” Jaywalker had said, and they’d had a deal.
That afternoon Darcy called Magdalena Lopez to the stand. She was an eyewitness, one of the people who’d observed the fight and the shooting. She was a middle-aged, dark-skinned woman employed as an outreach worker at a cancer center for women. On the morning of the incident, she’d been walking through the projects with a friend when she’d noticed two young males arguing. As she’d watched, they’d begun fighting.
DARCY: What did you see?
LOPEZ: I seen them hitting each other.
DARCY: With what?
LOPEZ: Their fists.
DARCY: What happened next?
LOPEZ: One of them reached down the front of his pants. And when I looked at him, he had a gun in his hand. He started shooting at the other one, from very close to him. I heard one shot, then another. I got scared, and I started running toward the building. My friend grabbed me, pulled me back. There was a stray bullet coming our way. It passed me so close I could hear it as it went by. I seen it hit the building we was running to, cracked a piece of the brick. I looked back and I heard one more shot. They were in a different spot now, but I could still see good. And I seen the person down on the ground, the other one.
DARCY: The man who did the shooting. Do you see him in the courtroom?
LOPEZ: Yes, I do.
DARCY: Can you point him out for us?
LOPEZ:
Over there was Jeremy.
Jaywalker had a loose rule of thumb that went something like this. When he was going to put his client on the stand to dispute the testimony of an eyewitness who was pretty much telling the truth, he wanted to get that eyewitness off the stand quickly. He’d found over the years that too many lawyers spent too much time cross- examining such witnesses. They rarely made much headway, and their efforts often served only to reinforce the witness’s testimony in the minds of the jurors.
Still, he couldn’t resist asking Magdalena Lopez about the bullet she’d heard whiz by her and then seen strike the building. To have actually observed either of those things was a long shot up there with winning the lottery. To have observed both of them was flat-out impossible, the stuff of grade B Westerns or video games. Yet Ms. Lopez stuck to her story, insisting that her memory of what she’d heard and seen was still vivid.
JAYWALKER: How about the friend you were with? What can you tell us about her? Or him?
LOPEZ: Her.
JAYWALKER: Okay, her. What’s her name?
LOPEZ: I don’t know.
Jaywalker had known that would be her answer. A month ago he’d asked Katherine Darcy for the name of Ms. Lopez’s friend so he could try to find her on his own and see what she’d seen and heard. A week later Darcy had reported back that Lopez had never supplied the name and could no longer recall it.
JAYWALKER: Well, did you ever know her name?
LOPEZ: Yes, sure, back then. But that was a long time ago, like a whole year or more.
JAYWALKER: So let me get this straight. Today you’re telling us you can no longer remember the name of your own friend who was with you that day?
LOPEZ: That’s right.
JAYWALKER: Not even her first name?
LOPEZ: No.
JAYWALKER: A nickname?
LOPEZ: No.
It wasn’t much, but he figured it was as good a place to quit as he was going to get. Come summation time, he’d point out to the jurors that if Magdalena Lopez’s memory was so faulty, they should discount her account of the incident itself, which had actually taken place a year and a half ago. Or, in the alternative, if they disbelieved her testimony that she couldn’t remember her friend’s name, they might want to wonder why she’d lied about that. Had she been afraid, perhaps, that if identified, located and called to testify, her friend might have described the events in quite different terms?
Katherine Darcy followed up Lopez’s testimony by calling Wallace Porter to the stand. Porter was the second of the prosecution’s three eyewitnesses, and in some ways he would prove to be the most damaging to the defense.
Porter hadn’t come to court alone. Rather than being summoned from the witness room or the hallway, he was led in through a side door and escorted to the witness stand by a pair of uniformed court officers. Accompanying him was a young man whom the judge introduced to the jury as Mr. Porter’s lawyer. The reason for all this special attention would soon become obvious. Wallace Porter was, like Jeremy Estrada, a guest of the state. Several weeks earlier he’d pleaded guilty to a low-level sale of drugs, and he was awaiting sentencing.
Porter was a slender, dark-skinned African-American, dressed in a gaudy red satin warm-up suit. Both his appearance and his demeanor suggested something slick and evasive, and Jaywalker eyed the jurors to see if they were responding to him the same way he was. That said, Jaywalker knew better than to sit back and relax. He’d learned over the years that the same juror who’s tough on crime is at the same time fascinated by criminals. Having already pleaded guilty to the charges against him, Porter had nothing to lose by admitting that he was a drug seller. And Katherine Darcy would have worked long and hard with him to make sure he did just that. His willingness to do so, and to go into the details of his own crimes, would end up earning him points for candor. “Look at how honest he was in talking about his past,” Darcy would argue to the jury. “That shows he’s telling you the truth about what he saw.”
It didn’t, of course, not for a minute. Still, there was a logic of sorts to the argument. And Jaywalker knew that if he chose to underestimate either it or Wallace Porter, he’d be doing so at his peril and, more importantly, at Jeremy’s.
Darcy wasted no time in bringing out Porter’s criminal record. In addition to the case he was awaiting sentencing on, Porter admitted to two prior arrests, a larceny bust in Massachusetts back in 1999, and a drug possession in Brooklyn in 2005. Both were misdemeanors, minor crimes. From there Darcy moved on to the day of the shooting.
DARCY: Do you recall that day?
PORTER: Yup.
DARCY: Where were you about five o’clock that afternoon?
PORTER: I was playing cards in a little park area in the projects, the Jefferson Houses.
DARCY: How many people were playing cards?
PORTER: It was four of us, and two others on the side.
DARCY: Other than playing cards, what were you doing?
PORTER: We was barbecuing. We had chicken, franks and burgers. Stuff like that.
DARCY: As you were playing cards and barbecuing, did something happen?
PORTER: Yeah. We was sitting there, we was playing cards. And I seen this girl and this dude walk by, and this guy running behind them, and another girl following him. And they started fighting, the two guys. The one was pretty good, and he beat up the other one pretty bad. He was bleeding a little from his nose and his mouth. He reached into his socks. He had like two or three pairs of sweat socks on. I thought he was pulling out a knife, but he had a gun, he pulled out a gun. And he just shot the guy, he shot him. Then he chased him and shot him like three
