Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

“I’d researched the case law,” Jaywalker told him. “That’s why I told you to make certain you waited until I’d begun my summation before you came into the courtroom pretending you had Hightower with you.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Smith, standing up and coming around to Jaywalker’s side of the booth. There they exchanged high fives and hugs, Jaywalker stretching on his tiptoes.

To this day Jaywalker continues to defend men and women charged with crimes. Even the ones who tell him they did exactly what they had been accused of doing. Even the ones he knows are guilty as sin.

Even the Alonzo Barnetts of the world.

And Barnett? In the twenty-five years that he lived following the trial, he stayed completely drug-free and out of trouble. He eventually retired from the restaurant he’d worked at, and toward the end got by on his modest savings and his Social Security check. And up to the very end he volunteered three days a week at a drug rehabilitation facility in the Bronx, and he mentored teenage boys in trouble. He never stopped writing poetry and living in the same apartment in the same building as before. His daughters came to visit him there on a regular basis, having found their way to him with a little help from Jaywalker. Not too long ago the younger one got married, and at her urging and with her adoptive parents’ blessing, both her fathers walked her down the aisle, one on either side of her. Jaywalker knows that for a fact, because he was there to witness it. When he mentioned to Barnett how touched he was that Barnett had helped give his daughter away, Barnett replied with a smile that it was something he certainly ought to be good at.

“After all,” he explained, “I’ve had practice.”

So next time you’re feeling cynical about the criminal justice system and find yourself tempted to ask some defense lawyer how he can possibly represent somebody he knows is guilty, stop for just a moment and think of Jaywalker.

Better yet, think of Alonzo Barnett.

Think of redemption.