Joseph Teller - Overkill

Jaywalker, needless to say, had no intention of ignoring them. To the extent that he had one, the sum of those encounters-including but by no means limited to the barbershop incident-was his defense.

As Teresa returned to day of the shooting, she described how things had begun casually enough. She and Victor had been on 110th Street, walking toward Third Avenue, when they’d almost bumped into Jeremy and his “lady.” There’d been two girls with them, one a good bit younger than the other.

DARCY: The person you described as his lady. Do you know her name?

TERESA: I heard her name was Miranda. But I don’t really know her.

DARCY: Do you know what she looks like?

TERESA: She’s got reddish hair. She’s slim.

DARCY: Tell us what happened.

TERESA: Victor told him, “Come on, tough guy. I heard you want to fight me.” And they were calling each other names. “Punk.” “Chicken.” Stuff like that.

She described how she and Victor had walked north to 113th Street, when she noticed that Jeremy and his lady had followed them.

DARCY: Then what happened?

TERESA: When I noticed he was behind us, I tried to get Victor to walk faster. But it happened so quickly. They just started fighting, hitting each other.

DARCY: Tell us what you saw.

TERESA: The guy, he punched Victor in the lip. Victor took off his sweatshirt, and they kept on fighting. After a minute or two they backed off, and the guy just pulled out a gun from his waist. I told Victor, “Run, run!” And when he ran, the guy shot him, and Victor like went down on the ground. Then he got up, and the guy shot again, and it hit the street. Then Victor ran again, inside the park, around a bench. But he tripped. And then the guy just walked over, grabbed him and killed him.

She recounted how, following the shooting, Jeremy and his lady had run from the scene, toward Third Avenue and out of sight.

DARCY: What did you do?

TERESA: I was screaming for help.

DARCY: What else?

TERESA: I was laying down, holding his neck.

DARCY: Why?

TERESA: I was putting my fingers on the hole at the back of his neck where he was bleeding from.

DARCY: What happened then?

TERESA: After a while, the cops came, and then an ambulance. We went to the hospital, to the emergency room, and they wheeled him away.

DARCY: Did you ever see Victor alive again?

TERESA: No.

Cross-examining a sympathetic witness could be tricky business, as Jaywalker well knew. Even if she’d gone and gotten married to another man not too long after the incident, Teresa Morales had seen her boyfriend gunned down in front of her, and he’d all but died in her arms. To top that off, in the eyes of the jury she’d come off as a pretty straightforward witness. Jeremy insisted that it had been Victor, not he, who’d first pulled the gun, and he continued to deny any recollection of firing the last shot as Victor lay helpless on the ground. Jaywalker’s own internal jury was still out on both those questions. But the jurors had now heard three accounts of the incident, and while they varied from version to version, all three put the gun in Jeremy’s hands first and pretty much agreed about the final shot.

The execution.

What was more, Teresa hadn’t even appeared to stretch things. Her account of the barbershop incident had been pretty much as Jeremy had described it. Her graphic demonstration of the way in which Victor and his friends had mimed shooting had, Jaywalker strongly suspected, taken Katherine Darcy by surprise. And it had been Darcy, rather than Teresa, who’d tried to gloss it over as nothing but an innocent pointing gesture. So Jaywalker knew he had to proceed cautiously, lest he run the risk of antagonizing the jurors. Still, he couldn’t tread all that carefully; Teresa had been too damaging a witness for him to leave alone.

He began gently, asking her about her relationship with Victor, trying to establish her loyalty to him and, consequently, her natural bias against the man who’d killed him. He asked her what Victor had done for a living, and when the best she could come up with was “odd jobs,” Jaywalker decided to let her off the hook. He figured there was little to be gained from attacking the victim’s reputation with not only his former girlfriend on the witness stand, but his grieving parents present, as well. Besides, Jaywalker had a surrogate to attack, another member of the gang who had no supporters in the courtroom.

JAYWALKER: Tell me about Alesandro.

TERESA: Who?

JAYWALKER: Maybe you knew him as Sandro?

TERESA: I knew him. Not well, though.

JAYWALKER: How long had you known him for?

TERESA: Not long. Three or four years.

JAYWALKER: What was his last name?

TERESA: I don’t know.

JAYWALKER: You knew him three or four years, yet you never learned his last name?

TERESA: Yeah. It’s like that on the street. You know people by their first names, or maybe their nicknames.

JAYWALKER: I see. What were some of the other first names or nicknames of the members of the gang?

DARCY: Objection to the term “gang.” There’s been absolutely no testimony-

THE COURT: Sustained. Rephrase the question.

JAYWALKER: Sure. Ms. Morales, it’s true that you used to hang out with Victor and Sandro and some other guys, right?

TERESA: Sort of.

JAYWALKER: And that’s what you were doing the day the guys were going like this [demonstrating] outside the barbershop? Not doing anything illegal, just hanging out like a gang of friends. Right?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Objection, again, to the word “gang.”

THE COURT: Well, the witness seems to have agreed with Mr. Jaywalker’s terminology. So your objection is overruled.

JAYWALKER: Was Victor there that day?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Sandro?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Who else?

TERESA: Shorty. Diego. Mousey. Maybe a couple of others. I don’t remember.

JAYWALKER: How many of them were wearing their Raiders jackets that day?

TERESA: Excuse me?

By sneaking the question in unexpectedly, Jaywalker had hoped to camouflage its importance from Teresa and get not only a number out of her, but an acknowledgment that the group referred to themselves as the Raiders. But she hadn’t bitten. He asked her a few innocuous questions before taking another stab at it.

JAYWALKER: Whose idea was it to call the group the Raiders?

Not “Did the group have a name?” or “Was the group called the Raiders?” or even “Wasn’t the group called the Raiders?” Put any of those ways, the question not only telegraphed its own significance but could be answered with a simple “no.” But by phrasing it in such a way as to assume that the group was called the Raiders, asking instead the completely irrelevant question of whose idea that had been, Jaywalker hoped to slide it by Teresa and get her to identify the person. In so doing, of course, she’d be agreeing with the assumption.

He also needed to slide it past Katherine Darcy. A question that contains an assumption not established by the evidence is improper. The oft-cited example is “When did you stop beating your wife?” But Jaywalker had burned Darcy a few minutes earlier over his inclusion of the word gang in several of his questions. Granted, her initial objection had been sustained, but a moment later he’d gotten Teresa to concede that she and her friends had been just that. Darcy had won the skirmish but lost the battle, and Jaywalker guessed that this time she’d be gun-shy and let the question be answered without objecting. And in fact, she did.

But Teresa didn’t.

TERESA: We didn’t call ourselves anything.

JAYWALKER: Well, weren’t you aware that other people called you the Raiders?