Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

Jaywalker nodded. These were significant accomplishments for anyone. For a recovering heroin addict and five-time felon, they defied all the odds.

“So who do you think shows up?”

Jaywalker didn’t bother answering. He knew Barnett’s question was a rhetorical one. They’d both known who was going to show up.

“Catches me as I’m sitting on my stoop at the end of the day, minding my own business. Says he’s been out a month and can’t catch a break. Can I help him out?”

Jaywalker could only wince. He knew where this was going.

“So I reach into my pocket,” said Barnett, “fish out whatever I’ve got on me and offer it to him. I think it was maybe eighteen dollars, something like that.”

Reminded Jaywalker of some of his fees.

“‘I don’t want no charity,’ Hightower tells me.

“I ask him what he does want.

“‘You know,’ he says. ‘I been outa action all this time, I don’ know who’s doin’ what, who to see, who to go to.’

“I ask him, ‘For what?’

“‘To get hooked up,’ he tells me. ‘I need to get back in the business.’ The bidness, he called it. Which is right when I tell him he’s got the wrong guy. I give him the eighteen dollars or whatever it was. I wish him luck. I stand up and I go inside. Lock the door behind me.”

Oh, thought Jaywalker, what a wonderful ending to the story that would have been. An act of charity toward an old friend, a debt repaid. But of course it wasn’t the end of the story. Jaywalker knew that every bit as well as Barnett did. Had it been the end of the story, the two of them wouldn’t be sitting where they were today, talking through the bars.

No, Clarence Hightower would keep coming back. He’d come back five times, six times, each time with a slightly different story. Only they all had the same ending. “He needed to find a connection,” Barnett explained. “He understood that I was finished with that stuff, and he said he was okay with that. But he also knew that I knew who was still around, who was still doing.”

Doing.

“He kept saying that all he wanted was for me to hook him up, to put him together with someone who was in action. He had this customer, he said, a real live one who was looking to buy weight. Had all sorts of cash money. All I’d have to do was find somebody to cut him into. Once I’d done that, I could walk away from it. Keep a piece of the pie if I wanted to, turn it down if I didn’t.”

“And?”

“And I kept saying no.”

“Until…” said Jaywalker.

“Until the seventh time, when he started crying like a baby and threatening to kill himself and all that. Until he played his hole card, and reminded me how he’d saved my life when no one else was going to. And telling me that because of that I owed him now. And you know what?”

“What?”

“He was right,” said Barnett. “He had saved my life, and I did owe him. When it came right down to it, that was the truth. And it was a truth that no matter how hard I tried to look away from it, it kept looking me in the face.”

“So…?”

“So I said okay. The next day I made a few phone calls and found out who was doing what. It wasn’t hard. And I paid off the favor, just like he asked. Just like he told me I owed him.”

They talked for another forty-five minutes about what had followed. Jaywalker jotted down some details on a yellow pad. But he hardly needed to. He knew the story. He’d known it before he’d become a lawyer ten years earlier. He’d known it from his undercover days as a DEA agent. Unbeknownst to both Clarence Hightower and Alonzo Barnett, the customer-the “real live one” with all sorts of cash money, the one looking to buy weight-was the Man. And the story wouldn’t end until both men had been arrested, Hightower for possession and Barnett for sale.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Replaying the story in his mind that night, Jaywalker was struck by the almost tragic aspect of it. Here was a guy who’d done everything right. Given up drugs, found a job and a place of his own, kept his nose clean, even reestablished contact with his daughters. And then along comes his past to catch up with him. He says no half a dozen times, only to be told he has a debt to repay, a favor owed. So he does it. And as a result, his whole world comes crashing down.

Jaywalker could recite the various defenses to crimes laid out in the Penal Law, as well as others mandated by the Constitution, remembered from law school, or grounded in case law or common law. He knew which were complete defenses and which were partial ones, which were primary defenses and which were affirmative ones.

There was alibi. There was justification, coercion and duress. There was entrapment and agency. There was infancy, along with insanity, incompetence, incapacity and impossibility. There were abandonment, renunciation and attenuation, lack of intent and lack of scienter. There were misidentification and mistake, whether of fact or law. Diplomatic immunity, transactional immunity and use immunity, the statute of limitations and the statutory right to a speedy trial. You had voluntary intoxication and involuntary intoxication, ex post facto and post-traumatic stress. Then you had extreme emotional disturbance, malicious prosecution, vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution. Also lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, double jeopardy and double punishment.

But nowhere, absolutely nowhere, was there a defense called “doing somebody a favor.”

The average lawyer would have stopped right there, Jaywalker knew. Here was a client who was flat-out admitting his guilt to every single one of the charges against him. No ifs, ands or buts. The only explanation he could come up with for his actions-that he’d been doing somebody a favor-was no defense at all. Try killing someone and then telling the police it was just a favor you did for a friend, and see how far that gets you.

Yet, as Jaywalker and Barnett had continued to talk, Barnett had made it quite clear that he had no intention of pleading guilty. “Look,” he’d said, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison-and it looks like I am-the last thing I want to do is put myself there. I may not have much of a chance at trial, but if I lose, at least I’ll be able to say I went down swinging.”

Much of a chance at trial?

Try no chance at all, Jaywalker had told him, though not quite in those words. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. Alonzo Barnett was stone-cold guilty. The prosecution could prove it, and in spades. Without even a theoretical defense, Jaywalker had absolutely nowhere to go at trial. Yet a trial was exactly what Barnett was insisting on having.

Not that any of those things, or all of them added up, would have fazed most lawyers. Especially those working on the clock. To most of them, a trial simply meant a bigger payday. Not that you got rich back then on assigned counsel rates. But even at forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court, a two-week trial could generate a nice four-figure check. And since there was no chance of winning, there was also no pressure on the lawyer to knock himself out. If the defendant wanted to take the stand, fine. If he didn’t, also fine. Either way, it was going to be his funeral.

The problem was, of course, that Jaywalker wasn’t your average lawyer. Never had been, never would be. If Alonzo Barnett wanted a trial, then a trial he would get. But that didn’t mean that Jaywalker was going to relax, sit back and listen to the meter click. Doing any of those things would have been constitutionally impossible for him, the functional equivalent of his donning a tuxedo, renting a stretch limo and going out dancing.