Overkill

more times. When he fell to the ground, he picked him up by the collar and he shot one or two more times at him.

Katherine Darcy had to back up and have her witness clarify who was who. It was the guy who’d won the fight, Porter explained, who’d pulled the gun and done all the chasing and shooting.

DARCY: Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again today?

PORTER: Yup.

DARCY: Would you look around the courtroom and see if you see him?

PORTER: I see him right there.

And he pointed directly at Jeremy.

It got worse. Porter described seeing the shooter pull back the slide of the gun just before firing it. He recounted how the victim had begged for his life before the final shot, asking, “Why you gotta shoot me?” He recalled looking at the victim close-up following the shooting, seeing the police arrive and telling them that he’d witnessed the incident. He concluded by saying he knew neither the shooter nor the victim, nor the two girls who’d been with them, nor a woman named Magdalena Lopez, the witness who’d preceded him.

During the short span of twenty-five minutes, Wallace Porter had transformed himself from a sleazy-looking drug dealer to an astute, impartial observer. An observer who, if believed, had described a scenario in which Jeremy Estrada was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer. As Jaywalker rose from behind the defense table, he knew he had to go after Porter. Ridiculing him for claiming he’d ducked a bullet whizzing by his head, as he’d been able to do with Magdalena Lopez, wasn’t an option and wouldn’t have been good enough, anyway.

JAYWALKER: It was hot that day, wasn’t it?

PORTER: In more ways than one.

JAYWALKER: Well, let’s stick with the weather for a moment, okay?

PORTER: Okay.

JAYWALKER: It was hot?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: So in addition to the burgers and franks you were barbecuing, you and your group were having something to drink, right?

PORTER: No, we wasn’t drinking at all. We just had food and beers. Not beers, soda and stuff.

JAYWALKER: Didn’t you just say food and beer?

PORTER: You confused me.

JAYWALKER: How did I confuse you?

PORTER: By mentioning beer.

Jaywalker had the court reporter read the exchange back from her stenotype notes. Then he got Porter to agree that he himself had made the first mention of beer. He’d made an honest mistake, Porter then explained.

JAYWALKER: No beer?

PORTER: No beer.

JAYWALKER: Just soda and stuff.

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: The kind of stuff you smoke? Or the kind you might sniff through a straw?

PORTER: No, man. None of that kind of stuff.

JAYWALKER: What did you mean by “stuff,” then?

PORTER: Just soda.

JAYWALKER: So when you said “just soda and stuff,” you really meant “soda and soda.” Is that right?

PORTER: You messin’ wid me, man.

JAYWALKER: Sorry.

It wasn’t much, but at least it restored some of Porter’s slipperiness. From there, Jaywalker moved on to an inconsistency he’d noticed between Porter’s testimony and something he’d told the detectives at the scene, shortly after the incident.

JAYWALKER: Did you hear the shooter and the victim arguing about money?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell the detectives you had?

PORTER: I mighta.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell them [reading], “Right before the shooting, I could hear the two of them arguing about money?” Were those your words to the detectives, just minutes after the incident?

PORTER: Yeah, I said that to the detectives. But it was a mistake.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us how it is that you made that mistake?

PORTER: I don’t know. It just came out.

JAYWALKER: You just said it, even though there was absolutely no truth to it?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever correct it?

PORTER: They never asked me again.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever take it upon yourself to say, “Hey, I made a mistake back there. I said I heard them arguing about money, but I didn’t. I just decided to make that part up”? Did you ever say anything like that?

PORTER: No.

Jaywalker had done a little amateur boxing back in his youth. Right now he felt like he was seriously behind in the last round and needed a knockout in order to win the fight. But all he seemed capable of doing was scoring a few points here and there on jabs. He knew it wasn’t going to get the job done.

He moved on to Porter’s criminal record. Katherine Darcy had done her best to preempt the subject by bringing it out herself. But that didn’t mean Jaywalker couldn’t take a shot at it.

JAYWALKER: How many times have you been locked up, Mr. Porter?

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: May we approach?

Up at the bench, Judge Wexler reminded Jaywalker that only convictions, not arrests, were relevant to the witness’s credibility.

“I know that,” said Jaywalker. “But Ms. Darcy asked about prior arrests. By doing so, she opened the door. I have a right to ask if there’ve been more arrests than the two the witness admitted to. If there are, he lied, and that goes to credibility, too.”

It wasn’t often that Harold Wexler was forced to reverse himself on a ruling, but when Darcy nodded meekly at Jaywalker’s account of her direct examination, Wexler did just that. But in order to make it look otherwise, he directed Jaywalker to rephrase the question, without using the objectionable words locked up.

JAYWALKER: How many times, in total, have you been arrested, Mr. Porter?

PORTER: No more than five or six.