Joseph Teller - Overkill

DARCY: How old was Victor when he died?

QUINONES: Twenty.

The absolute silence of the courtroom told Jaywalker all he needed to know about the impact the witness was having upon the jury. When it came his turn for cross-examination, he said he had no questions. He tried to say it in a tone and with a shrug that implied “Why would I?” without being too heavy-handed about it, but it was a fine line to dance.

At one point he’d thought about asking Mr. Quinones a series of questions about his son, like whether he’d known he belonged to a gang, had half a dozen arrests and got a special kick out of terrorizing people. He’d given the idea some serious consideration for about five seconds before abandoning it. He could see Darcy jumping to her feet, Wexler not only sustaining her objection before she could make it but also warning Jaywalker he was seriously out of line, and the jurors nodding in agreement.

Quite apart from having no legitimate questions to ask Cesar Quinones, Jaywalker wanted him out of there as quickly as possible. But the man wouldn’t go away. Instead of leaving, he made his way from the witness stand to the spectator section, where he took a seat next to his wife. Together they would sit there for the remainder of the trial, these two destroyed people, dressed all in black. Their English was virtually nonexistent, and they would understand little of the proceedings. But their silent vigil would continue, their very presence a powerful witness for the prosecution.

The jurors, having followed Mr. Quinones’s every step as he limped to his seat, now tried to look away from him and back to the judge, but Jaywalker could see they were finding it almost impossible. At the table next to him, he felt Jeremy slip away from him just an inch, just that much closer to spending the rest of his life in prison. He wondered if Jeremy felt it, too.

Katherine Darcy hadn’t counted on Jaywalker’s summation to eat up an entire hour. She’d let him know in advance that she intended to call one of the eyewitnesses to the shooting next. But with only fifteen minutes left to the one-o’clock lunch recess, she decided to shift gears and put on a short witness, in more ways than one.

Adalberto Garcia was the detective who’d originally been assigned to the investigation into the death of Victor Quinones. He stood barely five feet, a height that once would have disqualified him from becoming a police officer. And his entire testimony, direct and cross, would take barely five minutes.

DARCY: Did there come a time when you identified a suspect in connection with the shooting?

GARCIA: Yes, there did.

DARCY: Can you tell us the name of that suspect?

GARCIA: Jeremy Estrada.

DARCY: And what, if anything, did you do with respect to him?

GARCIA: I began to look for him, to arrest him.

DARCY: Do you happen to know when he was eventually arrested?

GARCIA: [Referring to notes] Yes. That was on May 14th of last year.

Jaywalker’s only interest on cross-examination was in amplifying the term arrest for the jurors.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever find Jeremy Estrada?

GARCIA: No.

JAYWALKER: Ever arrest him?

GARCIA: Me personally? No.

JAYWALKER: In fact, the arrest in this case was an arrest only in the technical sense. Correct?

GARCIA: I’m not sure what you mean.

JAYWALKER: What I mean is, on May 14th of last year, Jeremy Estrada walked into a police station voluntarily and gave himself up, knowing full well he’d be arrested. And he was. Isn’t that in fact what happened?

GARCIA: Yes.

It was a much better note to go to lunch on than Cesar Quinones’s testimony. Not that Jaywalker had any plans of going to lunch; he never did when he was on trial. Which didn’t sit well with Jeremy’s mother.

“Jew gotta eat,” said Carmen. “Jew gotta be strong.”

Jaywalker tried explaining that habits were habits, and that he needed to spend the hour preparing for the afternoon’s witnesses. Never mind that he’d been prepared for them for months now.

“That’s no good,” Carmen told him, shaking her head sadly, like the concerned mother she was. But she let it go, walking off with her daughter, Julie, in tow. Both had been in the audience all morning, but on the defendant’s side of the courtroom, as opposed to prosecution’s side, where the parents of Victor Quinones had sat. Trials are a little like weddings in that respect, where guests of the bride often sit across the aisle from those of the groom.

It had actually taken some doing on Jaywalker’s part, as well as some generosity on Katherine Darcy’s, to seat Carmen and Julie Estrada anywhere in the courtroom. Either side may ask that potential witnesses be excluded prior to testifying, and such requests are routinely granted. But Jaywalker had felt that the rule worked a special hardship in this case. Though he intended to call both Jeremy’s mother and sister, neither of them would be testifying to the same events the prosecution’s witnesses would be describing-the fistfight and the shooting-and their presence during the testimony of those witnesses would give them no advantage. Jaywalker had taken his concern to Darcy, who’d agreed to give it some thought.

“I’ll tell you what,” he’d added. “I’ll agree to call them at the very beginning of the defense case.”

“And keep whoever you’re calling second outside while the first one’s on the stand?”

“You got it,” Jaywalker had said, and they’d had a deal.

That afternoon Darcy called Magdalena Lopez to the stand. She was an eyewitness, one of the people who’d observed the fight and the shooting. She was a middle-aged, dark-skinned woman employed as an outreach worker at a cancer center for women. On the morning of the incident, she’d been walking through the projects with a friend when she’d noticed two young males arguing. As she’d watched, they’d begun fighting.

DARCY: What did you see?

LOPEZ: I seen them hitting each other.

DARCY: With what?

LOPEZ: Their fists.

DARCY: What happened next?

LOPEZ: One of them reached down the front of his pants. And when I looked at him, he had a gun in his hand. He started shooting at the other one, from very close to him. I heard one shot, then another. I got scared, and I started running toward the building. My friend grabbed me, pulled me back. There was a stray bullet coming our way. It passed me so close I could hear it as it went by. I seen it hit the building we was running to, cracked a piece of the brick. I looked back and I heard one more shot. They were in a different spot now, but I could still see good. And I seen the person down on the ground, the other one.

DARCY: The man who did the shooting. Do you see him in the courtroom?

LOPEZ: Yes, I do.

DARCY: Can you point him out for us?

LOPEZ: [Pointing] He’s over there.

Over there was Jeremy.

Jaywalker had a loose rule of thumb that went something like this. When he was going to put his client on the stand to dispute the testimony of an eyewitness who was pretty much telling the truth, he wanted to get that eyewitness off the stand quickly. He’d found over the years that too many lawyers spent too much time cross-examining such witnesses. They rarely made much headway, and their efforts often served only to reinforce the witness’s testimony in the minds of the jurors.

Still, he couldn’t resist asking Magdalena Lopez about the bullet she’d heard whiz by her and then seen strike the building. To have actually observed either of those things was a long shot up there with winning the lottery. To have observed both of them was flat-out impossible, the stuff of grade B Westerns or video games. Yet Ms. Lopez stuck to her story, insisting that her memory of what she’d heard and seen was still vivid.