Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

Alonzo Barnett died last week.

There wasn’t any obituary announcement that ran in the Times, or even the Daily News or the Post. It seems the Alonzo Barnetts of the world don’t rate obituary announcements.

In fact, Jaywalker might never have found out, had he not gotten a phone call from a mutual acquaintance named Kenny Smith. Smith had originally met Barnett through Jaywalker, and had somehow gotten word on the street of Barnett’s death.

Not that the death was a particularly tragic one, as deaths go. Barnett was seventy-six, after all, and even though he’d spent a good portion of those years in state prison, seventy-six is still a pretty fair number, by any yardstick.

There was no funeral or memorial service held for Alonzo Barnett. Still, Jaywalker and Smith did get together to pay a brief condolence call. Though for Jaywalker, it felt like something much more than that. Because over the twenty-five years since their first meeting, he’d come to regard Barnett not just as a former client and a good friend but as a defendant sent his way by something very close to Providence. Not that Jaywalker would ever admit believing in that kind of stuff, not even if his life depended on it.

Still, a year before the Barnett case, he’d represented another defendant, also a likable African-American with a long record, who, like Barnett, had been charged with selling drugs. The guy had been considering taking a plea, but Jaywalker had talked him out of it, telling him the offer wasn’t good enough and there was an excellent chance they could beat the case at trial. So when the jury inexplicably came back with a conviction, Jaywalker had gone into a deep depression. He’d failed his client, he realized, not only by losing but by pushing him to go to trial in the first place. He’d been a “cowboy,” a “gunslinger,” an unpardonable sin in Jaywalker’s book. The resulting funk left him nearly suicidal. He stopped taking on new cases and could barely show up for his existing ones. He might have walked away from his practice altogether, had he not had a wife and daughter to support and tuition payments to meet.

So when Barnett’s case came along, it meant more than just another client, more than just another payday. It represented something of a second chance for Jaywalker, an opportunity to atone for having failed so terribly the last time out. A chance, if you will, for redemption.

That had been then. But there was more to it. Over the twenty-five years that had passed since Alonzo Barnett first came into Jaywalker’s life, his name has become the answer to a trivia question of sorts. A question Jaywalker’s been asked hundreds of times by now, perhaps even thousands. Though to Jaywalker, there’s nothing the least bit trivial about it. It goes like this:

“How can you possibly represent somebody you know is guilty?”

He’s heard it so many times, in fact, that he long ago developed a stock response to it, a little civics lecture he trots out and delivers on cue, punctuated with timeworn phrases like passionate belief in the process, foundation of the adversarial system of justice, and love of the underdog.

And his words seem to satisfy most folks, at least up to a point. Others, he’s come to learn, are never going to get it. Like the earnest young man who appeared to listen intently before smiling and saying, “That’s very nice. I hope you lose all your trials.”

Every once in a while, though, the questioner presses Jaywalker further, and sounds as though he or she is really interested in getting beyond the catchphrases and truly understanding why it is that the guiltiest of defendants, particularly those who readily admit their guilt, nevertheless deserve a champion every bit as much as the wrongly accused. And at that point Jaywalker will look around the room, searching for a couple of empty chairs off in a quiet corner. Then he’ll suggest that the two of them sit down. And once they’ve done so, he’ll look the person hard in the eye. “Do you really, really want to know the answer to that question?” he’ll ask. And if he happens to get a “Yes,” he’ll lean back and close his eyes for a long moment, the better to take himself back over the twenty-five years that have passed since the event. And then, once he’s completed the journey in his mind, he’ll open his eyes again. And if the other chair isn’t empty by that time-as it actually was once-Jaywalker will draw in a deep breath.

“Let me tell you a story,” he’ll say to his listener. “A story about the guiltiest man there ever was. A guy who was, as the old saying goes, guilty as sin.”

Although his client’s name may have been Alonzo Barnett, for as long as anyone could remember he’d been known simply as AB. Which made the two of them a pretty good match, considering that years earlier, long before he’d become Jaywalker the criminal defense lawyer, he himself had been born into the world as Harrison J. Walker.

Barnett came his way in the mid-1980s, which for many New Yorkers was a time of crime, cocaine and crack in epidemic proportions. For Jaywalker, it was also a time to hustle to pay the mortgage and his daughter’s tuition. And one of the ways he hustled was to accept court-appointed cases. The Legal Aid Society, where he himself had been broken in not too long ago, could handle only so many indigent defendants. The rest were doled out to private lawyers. Not the big-firm partners or the hotshots who were even then billing out their services for hundreds of dollars an hour. No, the ones who lined up to take the overflow were the young, the old and the journeymen who hung on but never got rich in the business. The Jaywalkers. Who else, after all, would be willing to work for forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court?

When a person gets arrested and is lucky enough to have money to hire a lawyer-or when his family is-he gets to choose the lawyer. When he doesn’t, the constitutions of both the United States and the State of New York guarantee him free representation. But the catch is, he no longer gets to choose the lawyer; the system chooses for him. Not that money necessarily insures quality representation. To this day, it’s Jaywalker’s firm belief that overall, there’s as much talent at Legal Aid and on the assigned counsel rolls as there is in the private bar. But when somebody else is doing the choosing, the defendant finds himself totally at the mercy of the luck of the draw.

According to Alonzo Barnett, the luck of the draw hadn’t been particularly good to him, and he’d been through two free lawyers already by the time Jaywalker was asked if he was interested in picking up a defendant charged with sale and possession of drugs.

“What is he, a troublemaker?” was his first question.

“No,” said Lorraine Wilson, the clerk who’d phoned him after he’d finally let it be known that he was ready to start accepting court-appointed cases again. “At least it doesn’t seem that way. I mean, I don’t see any ‘DD’ notation next to his name.” DD’s were Difficult Defendants, who earned the designation by punching or spitting at their lawyers, bringing frivolous pro se lawsuits, or lodging spurious complaints to some bar association they picked out of the phone book. Alonzo Barnett had apparently done none of those things, at least so far. The only things that stood out about him, as best as Lorraine could tell, were the multiple previous lawyers and the fact that by now his case was beginning to grow whiskers. More than a year and a half had passed since his arrest, something of an anomaly in a system that owed its very survival to its unfailing ability to rapidly dispose of huge numbers of cases. “Maybe he just tires lawyers out,” she suggested. “Want to give it a try?”