Joseph Teller - Overkill

JAYWALKER: How about the friend you were with? What can you tell us about her? Or him?

LOPEZ: Her.

JAYWALKER: Okay, her. What’s her name?

LOPEZ: I don’t know.

Jaywalker had known that would be her answer. A month ago he’d asked Katherine Darcy for the name of Ms. Lopez’s friend so he could try to find her on his own and see what she’d seen and heard. A week later Darcy had reported back that Lopez had never supplied the name and could no longer recall it.

JAYWALKER: Well, did you ever know her name?

LOPEZ: Yes, sure, back then. But that was a long time ago, like a whole year or more.

JAYWALKER: So let me get this straight. Today you’re telling us you can no longer remember the name of your own friend who was with you that day?

LOPEZ: That’s right.

JAYWALKER: Not even her first name?

LOPEZ: No.

JAYWALKER: A nickname?

LOPEZ: No.

It wasn’t much, but he figured it was as good a place to quit as he was going to get. Come summation time, he’d point out to the jurors that if Magdalena Lopez’s memory was so faulty, they should discount her account of the incident itself, which had actually taken place a year and a half ago. Or, in the alternative, if they disbelieved her testimony that she couldn’t remember her friend’s name, they might want to wonder why she’d lied about that. Had she been afraid, perhaps, that if identified, located and called to testify, her friend might have described the events in quite different terms?

Katherine Darcy followed up Lopez’s testimony by calling Wallace Porter to the stand. Porter was the second of the prosecution’s three eyewitnesses, and in some ways he would prove to be the most damaging to the defense.

Porter hadn’t come to court alone. Rather than being summoned from the witness room or the hallway, he was led in through a side door and escorted to the witness stand by a pair of uniformed court officers. Accompanying him was a young man whom the judge introduced to the jury as Mr. Porter’s lawyer. The reason for all this special attention would soon become obvious. Wallace Porter was, like Jeremy Estrada, a guest of the state. Several weeks earlier he’d pleaded guilty to a low-level sale of drugs, and he was awaiting sentencing.

Porter was a slender, dark-skinned African-American, dressed in a gaudy red satin warm-up suit. Both his appearance and his demeanor suggested something slick and evasive, and Jaywalker eyed the jurors to see if they were responding to him the same way he was. That said, Jaywalker knew better than to sit back and relax. He’d learned over the years that the same juror who’s tough on crime is at the same time fascinated by criminals. Having already pleaded guilty to the charges against him, Porter had nothing to lose by admitting that he was a drug seller. And Katherine Darcy would have worked long and hard with him to make sure he did just that. His willingness to do so, and to go into the details of his own crimes, would end up earning him points for candor. “Look at how honest he was in talking about his past,” Darcy would argue to the jury. “That shows he’s telling you the truth about what he saw.”

It didn’t, of course, not for a minute. Still, there was a logic of sorts to the argument. And Jaywalker knew that if he chose to underestimate either it or Wallace Porter, he’d be doing so at his peril and, more importantly, at Jeremy’s.

Darcy wasted no time in bringing out Porter’s criminal record. In addition to the case he was awaiting sentencing on, Porter admitted to two prior arrests, a larceny bust in Massachusetts back in 1999, and a drug possession in Brooklyn in 2005. Both were misdemeanors, minor crimes. From there Darcy moved on to the day of the shooting.

DARCY: Do you recall that day?

PORTER: Yup.

DARCY: Where were you about five o’clock that afternoon?

PORTER: I was playing cards in a little park area in the projects, the Jefferson Houses.

DARCY: How many people were playing cards?

PORTER: It was four of us, and two others on the side.

DARCY: Other than playing cards, what were you doing?

PORTER: We was barbecuing. We had chicken, franks and burgers. Stuff like that.

DARCY: As you were playing cards and barbecuing, did something happen?

PORTER: Yeah. We was sitting there, we was playing cards. And I seen this girl and this dude walk by, and this guy running behind them, and another girl following him. And they started fighting, the two guys. The one was pretty good, and he beat up the other one pretty bad. He was bleeding a little from his nose and his mouth. He reached into his socks. He had like two or three pairs of sweat socks on. I thought he was pulling out a knife, but he had a gun, he pulled out a gun. And he just shot the guy, he shot him. Then he chased him and shot him like three more times. When he fell to the ground, he picked him up by the collar and he shot one or two more times at him.

Katherine Darcy had to back up and have her witness clarify who was who. It was the guy who’d won the fight, Porter explained, who’d pulled the gun and done all the chasing and shooting.

DARCY: Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again today?

PORTER: Yup.

DARCY: Would you look around the courtroom and see if you see him?

PORTER: I see him right there.

And he pointed directly at Jeremy.

It got worse. Porter described seeing the shooter pull back the slide of the gun just before firing it. He recounted how the victim had begged for his life before the final shot, asking, “Why you gotta shoot me?” He recalled looking at the victim close-up following the shooting, seeing the police arrive and telling them that he’d witnessed the incident. He concluded by saying he knew neither the shooter nor the victim, nor the two girls who’d been with them, nor a woman named Magdalena Lopez, the witness who’d preceded him.

During the short span of twenty-five minutes, Wallace Porter had transformed himself from a sleazy-looking drug dealer to an astute, impartial observer. An observer who, if believed, had described a scenario in which Jeremy Estrada was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer. As Jaywalker rose from behind the defense table, he knew he had to go after Porter. Ridiculing him for claiming he’d ducked a bullet whizzing by his head, as he’d been able to do with Magdalena Lopez, wasn’t an option and wouldn’t have been good enough, anyway.

JAYWALKER: It was hot that day, wasn’t it?

PORTER: In more ways than one.

JAYWALKER: Well, let’s stick with the weather for a moment, okay?

PORTER: Okay.

JAYWALKER: It was hot?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: So in addition to the burgers and franks you were barbecuing, you and your group were having something to drink, right?

PORTER: No, we wasn’t drinking at all. We just had food and beers. Not beers, soda and stuff.

JAYWALKER: Didn’t you just say food and beer?

PORTER: You confused me.

JAYWALKER: How did I confuse you?

PORTER: By mentioning beer.

Jaywalker had the court reporter read the exchange back from her stenotype notes. Then he got Porter to agree that he himself had made the first mention of beer. He’d made an honest mistake, Porter then explained.

JAYWALKER: No beer?

PORTER: No beer.

JAYWALKER: Just soda and stuff.

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: The kind of stuff you smoke? Or the kind you might sniff through a straw?

PORTER: No, man. None of that kind of stuff.

JAYWALKER: What did you mean by “stuff,” then?

PORTER: Just soda.

JAYWALKER: So when you said “just soda and stuff,” you really meant “soda and soda.” Is that right?

PORTER: You messin’ wid me, man.

JAYWALKER: Sorry.

It wasn’t much, but at least it restored some of Porter’s slipperiness. From there, Jaywalker moved on to an inconsistency he’d noticed between Porter’s testimony and something he’d told the detectives at the scene, shortly after the incident.