Overkill

that down?

“The answer is, he wasn’t. So he pulled his gun.

“Jeremy reacts instinctively. Too close to turn and run, he lunges at Victor and grabs for the gun. When it goes off, the sound of the explosion and the burning sensation to his abdomen convince him he’s been shot in the gut. Still, he manages to wrestle the gun away from Victor and turn it on him.

“Does Jeremy shoot Victor at that point? You bet he does, and he’s never once denied it. He shoots him, and he keeps shooting him until Victor’s motionless, until the nightmare’s over. And he tells you that.”

Now came the hard part, Jaywalker knew, the part about the forty-five feet and the no more than four or five inches. Up till now, everything had been easy. Right now was when he would win the case-or lose it.

“Much has been said about Jeremy’s having chased Victor down after the first shot, and having fired the final shot at a point when Victor was defenseless. Maybe those things happened. Witnesses have said they did, or must have. Ms. Darcy will tell you that if they’re right, it was an execution. Here’s what I tell you-it doesn’t matter.

“Not one bit.

“And here’s why. In order for you to decide this case, to truly decide it, you have to stop being William Craig and Lucille Hendricks and Gladys Leach and George Gonsalves and Miriam Goldring and Sanford Washington. You have to forget you’re Lillian Koppelman and Vincent Tartaglia and Consuela Marrero and Desiree Smith-Hammond and Walter van der Kaamp and Jennifer Wang. And instead, you have to become Jeremy Estrada. Because in a very real sense, that’s precisely what the law requires you to do in this case.

“Here’s what you may not do. You may not ask yourselves what a reasonable person would have done standing in Jeremy’s shoes. Nor may you ask yourselves what you yourselves would have done. Because you didn’t fall in love with Miranda. You didn’t spend your seventeenth summer wetting your bed and defecating in your pants. You weren’t reduced to the status of a prisoner in your own apartment because you were too afraid of a gang of thugs to go outside. You didn’t live with that kind of pain and panic and paranoia.

“Jeremy did.”

Jaywalker turned again, this time to face his client directly. “But you know? You were mistaken about something, Jeremy. You used the wrong word when you said you felt paranoid. When you’re really being followed, when you’re actually being chased, we don’t call that paranoid. We call it terrorized.”

He told the jurors that although the shooting of Victor Quinones had played out in slow motion during the testimony, to Jeremy it had taken place in real time, and taken only seconds. All of the witnesses had described it as having happened very fast, so fast that they disagreed on something as basic as the number of shots fired. “To Jeremy,” he told them, “it must have been nothing but a blur. So when he’s confronted twenty months later in the sterile confines of a courtroom and asked about the forty-five feet and the precise geometry of the fatal shot, all he’s able to say is that he honestly doesn’t remember it happening that way. That’s his truth. And that’s the only truth that matters.

“You want to know how to decide this case the right way?” he asked the jurors. “Here’s how you do it. You listen to Jeremy’s own words. Here they are.” Picking up the transcript, he found the page he’d marked with a paper clip, and read to them.

JAYWALKER: Jeremy, you say you killed Victor Quinones.

JEREMY: Yes, I did.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us why you killed him?

JEREMY: I can only tell you what was in my mind at the time.

JAYWALKER: And what was that?

JEREMY: In my mind, I was trying to save my life.

“In my mind,” Jaywalker repeated, “I was trying to save my life. Unless you can say you not only disbelieve those words, but disbelieve them beyond all reasonable doubt-something you cannot possibly do if you put yourselves in Jeremy’s shoes-this case ends right there. Because that, jurors, is the absolute, undistilled essence of what justification is all about. In my mind, I was trying to save my life.”

Jaywalker would have loved to stop right there, on an emotional high, but he knew he couldn’t afford to. There was simply too much other stuff he had to talk about. Like whether or not Jeremy had been telling the truth or lying about Sandro, Shorty, Diego, Mousey and the rest of the gang, and the fact that they called themselves the Raiders and wore black jackets with pirate motifs. He couldn’t come right out and comment on the arrival of the Raiders in court that very morning; that event wasn’t in evidence. But just as some things said from the witness stand were “in the ear” even when stricken from the record, so too were some things “in the eye” even when they couldn’t be mentioned. Like intent to kill, which was one of the elements, or essential ingredients, to murder. And how if Jeremy had honestly been trying to save his life, however unreasonably he may have perceived things in the moment, then intent to kill was nowhere to be found in the case. And burden of proof, which was the prosecution’s, not the defense’s, even on the presence or absence of justification. Especially on the presence or absence of justification. And despite anything that Judge Wexler might tell them to the contrary, how utterly absurd it would be for them to sit in the relaxed atmosphere of an eleventh-floor courtroom twenty months after the fact and try to draw a bright line where justification ended. And extreme emotional disturbance, which in this case presented nothing but a trap for the jurors, a convenient out by which they could find Jeremy guilty of manslaughter instead of doing the hard work of deciding whether to convict him of murder or acquit him altogether.

“Don’t you dare do that,” he told them. “Neither Katherine Darcy nor I spent four full days rejecting dozens of other prospective jurors before picking you just to have you come to the only real issue in this case and have you duck it. If you think she’s proved that Jeremy wasn’t justified in what he did, and proved it beyond all reasonable doubt, then tell us, tell us to our faces by convicting him of murder. But if you’re left with even the slightest reasonable doubt on that issue of justification, then tell us that.

“How do you that? Well, it’s been said that the prosecutor has the last word at trial, because she gets to sum up last. It’s not like during the testimony, where there was an opportunity for redirect examination and recross. No, when it comes to summations, there’s no such thing as rebuttal. Once I sit down, as I’m about to do, I’m done. Even if Ms. Darcy makes an argument to you that I have the perfect answer to, the rules simply don’t allow me to make it.

“But you know something? In spite of that huge advantage, the prosecution doesn’t really have the last word at all. Not even the judge does. You know who does? You do. And you get to speak that last word, each of you, shortly after Mr. Craig here, as your foreman, rises from his seat to tell us that you’ve found Jeremy Estrada not guilty on each and every last count of the indictment. At that point the court clerk will address each of you individually, by name. She’ll ask you if that is your verdict. And you’ll get to look us squarely in the eye and wipe the tears from your face, and surely Jeremy’s face, and probably my face, too. And at that point you get the last word. Because that’s the moment you get to say as loudly and as proudly as you possibly can the words that will echo in your memory for the rest of your life.

“Yes, that is my verdict.”

And then it’s over.

No “Thank you.” No “I appreciate your attention.” No “You’ve been a great jury.” As he always did, Jaywalker left the pleasantries to others. Instead he simply turned from the jury box, returned to the defense table and took his seat next to Jeremy. By that time he’d been on his feet for an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes. He’d put everything he had-every ounce of sweat and every drop of blood-into that hour and a half. It wouldn’t have been an under-statement to say that he’d been working on it for a year. Though never as hard as he had at three o’clock that morning, when, finally more or less satisfied with what he wanted to say-more or less being as good as it ever got when you were Jaywalker-he’d downed yet another pot of black coffee and forced himself to memorize the first and last names of all twelve jurors. In order.

And yet as good as he felt about what he’d said and how he’d said it, and as buoyed as he was by what he took to be the jurors’ uniformly positive reactions, Jaywalker sat down not just in relief and exhaustion, but in dread. Dread that all he’d said and done might not be enough to save the young man seated beside him.