Joseph Teller - Overkill

As soon as the last of the seventy-five prospective jurors had found seats, they were directed to stand up again so they could be sworn in. A couple of them declined to take an oath and were permitted to repeat the word “affirm” in place of “swear.” There was no real difference, of course. Except to Jaywalker. He looked for jurors who were willing to stand up for their beliefs-or their non-beliefs -even if that put them in a distinct and perhaps uncomfortable minority. And he was especially looking for them in Jeremy’s case, which he’d long ago decided was going to be an uphill battle at best. On the rare occasion when he was the favorite going into trial, Jaywalker wanted normal, mainstream jurors. When he was a long shot he wanted misfits, weirdos, people who liked to swim against the current. And he was definitely a long shot in this one. So he jotted down descriptions of the two affirmers and what they were wearing, since he didn’t yet have names to attach to them.

Then Jaywalker turned to Jeremy, seated at the defense table alongside him. He’d dressed Jeremy up for the trial, but only a little. No jacket or tie; that would have been phony. But khakis and a white shirt. Jeremy had wanted to wear his reading glasses, and Jaywalker had said okay, but told him to keep them off most of the time. They were rimless and made him look studious, which was good. But, perhaps influenced by Katherine Darcy’s example, Jaywalker felt they made Jeremy look older. And he wanted the jurors to think of him as young. Hell, he wanted them to think of him as a baby. Now, putting one hand on the young man’s shoulder and using the other to gesture toward the jurors, he explained the significance of what had just happened. Jaywalker liked to keep his client informed of everything. He was forever reminding Jeremy that it was his case, not Jaywalker’s. Except for tactical decisions, that was, like what their defense would be and whether Jeremy would take the stand or not. Autonomy was sweet, democracy noble, discussion fine. But they had no place at the trial table. There, such lofty notions gave way. There, winning trumped everything.

There was quite another reason Jaywalker had gone to the trouble of explaining to Jeremy the difference between swearing and affirming. He wanted the jurors to see the interaction between the two of them, wanted them to see that hand of his resting on Jeremy’s shoulder. In short order those jurors would hear from the judge and the lawyers, but it would be days, perhaps weeks, before they’d hear from Jeremy. So Jaywalker needed to immediately establish what the case was about. It wasn’t about Victor Quinones or Teresa Morales. It wasn’t about justification or extreme emotional disturbance. It wasn’t even about murder as opposed to manslaughter. It was about Jeremy. So the explaining and the hand on the shoulder were about personalizing Jeremy, showing the jurors right off the bat that he was not only approachable and touchable, but he was concerned, he was interested. And above all, he was important.

One by one, the court clerk pulled eighteen slips of paper from a wooden drum and read off eighteen names, mispronouncing as many of them as she possibly could. One by one, eighteen prospective jurors gathered up their belongings, rose from their seats, made their way to the jury box and took the seats that corresponded to the order in which their names had been called. Harold Wexler spent the next hour and a half talking to them, first as a group, then individually. By the time he turned things over to Katherine Darcy, he’d told the eighteen a little bit about the case, but only a little bit; introduced the lawyers and the defendant to them; found out what each of the jurors did, the general neighborhood where they lived, whether they were married or single, and whether they’d ever been convicted of a crime. Those jurors who succeeded in persuading him that they either couldn’t be impartial or had something far more important to do than sit on a murder trial, he excused with a sarcastic comment and a promise to send them across the street to a boring civil trial.

Katherine Darcy rose, gathered her notes and stepped to the lectern. She, too, was wearing her glasses for the occasion, apparently having opted for looking serious at the expense of looking older. Why did Jaywalker dwell on such things? Because they mattered, that was why. If his adversary was going to try to impress the jurors with her seriousness, that meant Jaywalker would need to adjust his game plan. He’d need to both out-serious her at times, while every once in a while undercutting her by injecting a little humor into the proceedings. The idea was to outflank her on both sides.

But as soon as Darcy began to address the panel, he realized it wasn’t going to be easy. She had a nice conversational way of interacting with the jurors. Not that she was entirely comfortable on her feet; a slight quiver in her voice and a bit of fumbling through her notes gave her away from time to time. But Jaywalker knew that those lapses were anything but deal-breakers: a little nervousness often went over well with jurors. He himself had profited from that bit of knowledge in his younger days, when he’d played the role of the new kid on the block. But as he’d aged he’d had to adjust, much the way a veteran pitcher learns to add changeups and sliders to compensate for a fading fastball. By now he’d settled into the role of the experienced, confident defender who’d been around long enough to recognize a bogus prosecution when he saw one. And if it wasn’t as much fun as his former incarnations, it seemed to serve him pretty well.

What Darcy hadn’t learned was what type of questions to ask the jurors. She spent far too much time on their interests and hobbies, what kind of TV shows they watched or magazines they read, and whether they’d ever been crime victims. Jaywalker knew where she was going with that stuff, of course. She was trying to find mainstream, conservative jurors more likely to identify with the People of the State of New York than with a defendant accused of murder. The problem was that every bit of information she learned, Jaywalker learned, too. So even as she succeeded in identifying jurors she wanted, Jaywalker knew to challenge them.

Still, she was good, and by the time she sat down it was clear that the jurors liked her. And Jaywalker knew not to underestimate the importance of that. A prosecutor who comes off as likeable has accomplished something significant. In liking her, the jurors would tend to trust her and believe in the legitimacy of her case, and would be prone to find her witnesses credible. For Jaywalker, the job would be a little trickier. Not only would he have to get the jurors to overcome the affection they’d developed for Katherine Darcy and come to like him and trust him more, he’d also have to get them to like his client, that very same accused murderer.

Only he wasn’t going to get his chance yet, not with Harold Wexler declaring a recess for lunch. So at the moment, all Jaywalker could do was sit at the defense table as close as he possibly could to Jeremy, while fifty-eight jurors-down from the original seventy-five-filed out of the courtroom. Only when the last of them had left and the door had been closed would a court officer lead Jeremy out. But they would use a side door, one that led into the pens instead of out to the corridor. Rather than being free to choose from among the restaurants and coffee shops in the area, Jeremy would spend the next hour and a quarter in a five-by-ten cell. And instead of getting to order the curried chicken salad or the sushi, he’d dine on a bologna or cheese sandwich, washed down with the lukewarm brown water they called coffee. Jaywalker knew; he’d had more than a few of those meals himself over the years. But he’d never been facing twenty-five years of them, as Jeremy was.