Joseph Teller - Overkill

JAYWALKER: Did you hear the shooter and the victim arguing about money?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell the detectives you had?

PORTER: I mighta.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell them [reading], “Right before the shooting, I could hear the two of them arguing about money?” Were those your words to the detectives, just minutes after the incident?

PORTER: Yeah, I said that to the detectives. But it was a mistake.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us how it is that you made that mistake?

PORTER: I don’t know. It just came out.

JAYWALKER: You just said it, even though there was absolutely no truth to it?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever correct it?

PORTER: They never asked me again.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever take it upon yourself to say, “Hey, I made a mistake back there. I said I heard them arguing about money, but I didn’t. I just decided to make that part up”? Did you ever say anything like that?

PORTER: No.

Jaywalker had done a little amateur boxing back in his youth. Right now he felt like he was seriously behind in the last round and needed a knockout in order to win the fight. But all he seemed capable of doing was scoring a few points here and there on jabs. He knew it wasn’t going to get the job done.

He moved on to Porter’s criminal record. Katherine Darcy had done her best to preempt the subject by bringing it out herself. But that didn’t mean Jaywalker couldn’t take a shot at it.

JAYWALKER: How many times have you been locked up, Mr. Porter?

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: May we approach?

Up at the bench, Judge Wexler reminded Jaywalker that only convictions, not arrests, were relevant to the witness’s credibility.

“I know that,” said Jaywalker. “But Ms. Darcy asked about prior arrests. By doing so, she opened the door. I have a right to ask if there’ve been more arrests than the two the witness admitted to. If there are, he lied, and that goes to credibility, too.”

It wasn’t often that Harold Wexler was forced to reverse himself on a ruling, but when Darcy nodded meekly at Jaywalker’s account of her direct examination, Wexler did just that. But in order to make it look otherwise, he directed Jaywalker to rephrase the question, without using the objectionable words locked up.

JAYWALKER: How many times, in total, have you been arrested, Mr. Porter?

PORTER: No more than five or six.

JAYWALKER: I see. The 1999 Massachusetts larceny, right?

PORTER: Right.

JAYWALKER: What did you steal?

PORTER: Nothing.

JAYWALKER: What did they say you stole?

PORTER: A TV set.

JAYWALKER: The Brooklyn drug possession in 2005.

PORTER: Right.

JAYWALKER: What drug?

PORTER: Cocaine.

JAYWALKER: Powder?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: Crack?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: What else?

PORTER: A coupla loiterings, a disorderly conduct kinda thing. That’s all. Nothing big.

JAYWALKER: And the sale case you’re awaiting sentencing on.

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: What are you looking at on that?

PORTER: Two to six.

JAYWALKER: Years?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: The original charge carried eight and a third to twenty-five, right?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Do you expect to get two to six?

PORTER: I hope to get time served.

JAYWALKER: In other words, you might walk on it, do no more time at all?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: And why might that happen, do you think?

PORTER: In consideration of my testimony.

JAYWALKER: Your testimony where?

PORTER: Here.

JAYWALKER: In other words, if Ms. Darcy is pleased with your testimony in this trial, she’s going to go to bat for you and try to get you less time, or no additional time at all, on your case. Is that your understanding?

PORTER: Yeah, something like that.

JAYWALKER: Well, am I wrong, the way I just described your understanding?

PORTER: No, you ain’t wrong.

JAYWALKER: Tell me, Mr. Porter. Have you discussed this case with anyone?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: No one at all?

PORTER: No one at all.

JAYWALKER: How about your lawyer here? Haven’t you discussed it with him?

PORTER: My lawyer? Sure.

JAYWALKER: How about Ms. Darcy? Discussed it with her?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Discussed it with the detectives?

PORTER: Yeah.

There were two factual areas Jaywalker would have liked to question Porter about. The first was the business about the shooter’s having pulled the gun out from his socks, and the second was his having jacked the slide back before firing. He decided to let the first one go, fearing all he would accomplish was to reinforce Porter’s version. But he took a stab at the second.

JAYWALKER: Now you know a little something about guns, right?

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: You say you saw the shooter pull back the slide of the gun. Is that right?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: How many times do you claim you saw him do that?

PORTER: Just once.

Jaywalker did his best to hide his disappointment. He’d been hoping Porter would say “each time he fired.” That would have made no sense at all. The signature feature of a semiautomatic weapon was that each squeeze of the trigger not only fired off a round, but at the same time it caused the slide to move back and forth, first ejecting the spent shell, then chambering the next bullet in the magazine. Either Porter had been telling the truth when he’d said “just once,” or he knew enough about guns to spot Jaywalker’s trap and steer clear of it. Still, his “just once” left the obvious question, “When?”

Logically, the shooter would have had a good reason to jack the slide back before firing the first shot, if the chamber had been empty up to that point. To have jacked the slide at any other point would have accomplished nothing but ejecting one live bullet just to replace it with the next one. Jaywalker was toying with idea of trying to get Porter to say the “just once” had been right before the final shot. He was thinking if he loaded the question up enough-by using words like deadly, fatal or coup de grace -he might appeal to Porter’s ego and get him to bite. But would Porter even understand coup de grace? And as Jaywalker was searching his mind for a suitable street synonym, he noticed that Porter was looking directly into his eyes from the witness stand, a tiny but unmistakable smirk on his face.

I dare you, he was saying.

“No further questions,” said Jaywalker.

They broke for the day.

Though he was tired and hungry, having slept little the night before and eaten nothing all day, Jaywalker didn’t leave the courtroom by walking out the front door with just about everyone else. Instead he fell in behind Jeremy as a couple of uniformed court officers led them through a side door and into the pens, where a corrections officer locked lawyer and client into a holding cell.

It was one of the many things that endeared the courthouse staff to Jaywalker. It went beyond their identifying with him because of his law-enforcement background, or admiring him for being willing to piss off judges when he had a point to make, or feeling a kinship with him because in any given year he didn’t make any more money than they did. No, it was how he treated his clients. Here it was, already after five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and even if the stories were true and the guy didn’t have much of a life outside the courthouse, surely he could’ve found something better to do than spend the next hour behind bars with an accused murderer.

And though he’d never admit it out loud, Jaywalker delighted in their allegiance to him. On a practical level, it brought him a certain amount of perks, everything from little kindnesses extended to his clients to crucial tips about what was going on in the jury room during deliberations. But even beyond that, it was gratifying to know that the crew, the working stiffs, were on his side. In many ways he felt more at ease with them than with the judges, other defenders and prosecutors he spent time with. They were civil servants, these regular guys and gals. To Jaywalker, they represented the closest approximation to a practice jury in the building. If he could win them over, didn’t it follow that he could just as easily win over those dozen men and women sitting in the real jury box?