Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

BARNETT: From the day I walked into Green Haven, I was a marked man. You have to understand this about prison-there are no secrets. Inmates work in the library, the record room, the administration room, the infirmary. Everywhere but at the front gate. So everything in your jacket-the file that follows you to prison-becomes common knowledge within hours of your arrival. I want to know your wife’s home address or the name of the school your kid attends, I can get it. It may cost me a pack of smokes, but I can get it. My jacket had the rape case and the school-yard thing. They might just as well have painted a target on my back. I wasn’t there three days before I had a contract on me.

JAYWALKER: A contract?

BARNETT: A price tag. To be collected by anyone lucky enough to kill me.

JAYWALKER: What did you do?

BARNETT: Nothing. There was nothing I could do but wait for it to happen, and hope that when it did it would be quick and relatively painless. And then somebody intervened. The inmate who ran the prison barbershop saw what was going on. And he felt sorry for me, I guess. He offered me a job in the barbershop, and by doing that he vouched for me. In other words, he made it clear that I was down with him and I was okay, and that no one was to mess with me. The other thing I did was to join a group. Prison is all about which group you’re down with. For the Hispanics there were the Bloods and the Crips and the Latin Kings. For the whites there were the Aryan Brotherhood guys. And for black people like me there were the Muslims. So I joined up. I got me a Koran and I studied Islam. I embraced Allah and became a Muslim.

JAYWALKER: Are you a Muslim to this day?

Part of being a Jaywalker is reminiscent of Bill Murray’s fate in the movie Groundhog Day. You’re doomed to try cases over and over in your head years after they’ve ended. Decades after they’ve ended. Not just the ones you’ve lost, hoping that by changing a word here or a phrase there you might somehow be able to make them turn out differently in the replay.

Jaywalker retries even the cases he won.

Yet when he looks back today to the trial of Alonzo Barnett, he shudders. Back then, being a Muslim was no big deal. Sure, you had Malcolm X, never a favorite among the synagogue crowd. You had Cassius Clay changing his name to Mohammed Ali and refusing to fight for his country, and Lew Alcindor becoming Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And you had the Ten Percenters, the extremist fringe who’d run out of patience with Dr. King and his preaching about the virtues of nonviolence. But at least you didn’t have to contend with September 11 and its repercussions.

Try playing a game of word association these days with the average American. Toss out the word Muslim and see what you hear in return. Nine out of ten responders aren’t even going to blink before answering Terrorist. So if Jaywalker had some concerns about how the whole Islam business was going to sit with the jurors, at least they were minor ones. At least Muslims weren’t flying airplanes into buildings yet. At least Alonzo Barnett could say he was one of them without fear of being immediately demonized.

BARNETT: Yes, I still embrace Islam and consider myself a Muslim. I don’t call myself by my Muslim name, and I don’t go to a mosque as often as I might. But when I pray, I pray to Allah, and I thank Him for my salvation. And with His help I was able to give up drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and cursing. And after shooting heroin into my veins for over thirty years, I was able to give that up, too. So the way I look at it, Islam and me may have started out with a shotgun wedding, but we turned things into a marriage that lasted. And as I sit here today, it’s no exaggeration to say I wouldn’t be alive without my faith, any more than I would be if it hadn’t been for that man who gave me the job in the barbershop.

JAYWALKER: And that man, the one who gave you the job in the barbershop. Do you happen to recall his name, by any chance?

BARNETT: Yes, I do. His name was Clarence Hightower.

If you watch enough trials, you learn that every once in a while there’s a moment when things start to come together for the jury. Those who make it their business to follow Jaywalker’s trials-and even back in 1986, there was a small but growing number of colleagues, opponents, reporters and retirees who did-had even coined a term for the phenomenon. Right now, with that simple question and the even simpler answer to it, anyone who happened to be lucky enough to be sitting in Part 91 of Manhattan Supreme Court knew they had just been treated to a Jaywalker Moment.

Shirley Levine seemed to know it, too. She declared a midafternoon recess and excused the jury for fifteen minutes.

Jaywalker couldn’t have scripted things better if he’d tried. He loved sending the jurors out of the room on a good note, whether it was for the weekend, the evening, the lunch hour or even just a coffee break. Before each recess, New York law requires the judge to admonish the jurors to refrain from visiting the crime scene, from forming opinions until all the evidence is in and from discussing the case with each other. And although Levine dutifully did all that now for what must have been the twentieth time, Jaywalker knew that jurors were only human, after all. Of course they discussed the case-every chance they got. Maybe not as a group, but certainly in twos and threes. And right now, as they filed out of the courtroom, what they were going to discuss, in one way or another, was Clarence Hightower and the strange coincidence that he had once saved Alonzo Barnett’s life.

All because Shirley Levine had decided to call a recess at a particular moment. Well, that and the fact that Jaywalker had paced his direct examination so that it would be just about time for her to do so, and had then paused for just a moment, as though he were about to go on to a different subject.

Still, he could have hugged her.

“So,” he asked Alonzo Barnett once the trial had reconvened, “who got out of Green Haven first, you or Clarence Hightower?”

“I did,” said Barnett. “I was doing a four-and-a-half-to-nine for a sale I’d pleaded guilty to. I got out in 1981. Mr. Hightower was still there when I left, doing ten to twenty for aggravated assault. He still had another three years to go.”

Jaywalker spent a few minutes getting Barnett to recite the things he’d managed to accomplish in those three years. An okay job, followed by a better one. An apartment of his own. No heroin, no alcohol, no drugs of any sort. No criminal activity whatsoever. Not that he couldn’t see that stuff going on everywhere in the neighborhood. It was the early 1980s, after all, and it was Harlem. Crack was in every doorway, crime on every street corner.

Just not for Alonzo Barnett.

JAYWALKER: Besides working and taking care of your apartment, what else did you do with your time?

BARNETT: I reported to my parole officer. I never missed a single appointment, not one. I took fifteen regular urine tests and eight unannounced ones to check on whether there were drugs in my system. I passed all twenty-three of them. I volunteered at a big brother program. I asked to be paired up with the worst of the worst of the kids they had. Kids with no parents, kids who couldn’t read or write, kids in real danger. I like to think I helped one or two of them a little bit. And, most important-

And right there, Barnett’s voice cracked, and he had to wait just a second before repeating the words most important and continuing. Had you been sitting in the back row of the courtroom, you might have missed it. It was over and done that quickly.

The jurors weren’t sitting in the back row.

As much as Jaywalker would have liked to take credit for the moment, he couldn’t. Sometimes you planned little things like that, choreographed them down to the tiniest detail. But other times, stuff just happened. And when it did, there was no mistaking how real it was. This was one of those times.