Joseph Teller - Overkill

In other words, less could actually be more. A proposition that sounded so alien and counterintuitive to most lawyers that they rejected it out of hand.

JAYWALKER: Do you remember who threw the first punch, Victor or Jeremy?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: But after a while it became apparent that Jeremy was winning the fight. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: And at some point Victor stopped to take off his sweatshirt. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: In order to do that, did he have to pull it up over his head?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Did Jeremy attack him while Victor was busy doing that, while-

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: — he was blind and defenseless?

TERESA: No, not that I remember.

JAYWALKER: And then they resumed fighting?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Victor was now wearing just a T-shirt, a long T-shirt. Right?

This was actually an important point. According to Jeremy, the first he’d seen of the gun had been when Victor had pulled it from his waistband. That meant it must still have been hidden by something after Victor had removed his sweatshirt.

TERESA: I don’t remember.

JAYWALKER: Well, he wasn’t bare-chested, was he?

TERESA: I don’t remember.

Jaywalker decided that was good enough. Jeremy would testify that Victor still had on a shirt of some sort. Teresa claimed she couldn’t remember, and neither of the other eyewitnesses, Magdalena Lopez and Wallace Porter, had ever described Victor as being shirtless at any point. In his summation, Jaywalker would argue that had that been so, surely at least one of them would have recalled it and mentioned it, if only to differentiate between the two young men who’d been nameless strangers to them.

JAYWALKER: How about Jeremy? He had a shirt on the whole time, too. Didn’t he?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever notice what Jeremy had on his feet?

TERESA: No, not really.

JAYWALKER: Do you have any recollection that he had two or three pairs of sweat socks on?

That, of course, had been Wallace Porter’s version, along with his claim that he’d seen Jeremy pull the gun from his socks.

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: No recollection whatsoever. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: So who finally won the fight?

TERESA: Him, I guess [pointing].

JAYWALKER: Jeremy?

TERESA: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Victor kind of gave up?

TERESA: Kind of.

JAYWALKER: And that’s when you say you saw Jeremy pull the gun. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: From his waist.

TERESA: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Not his socks?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever see him do something like this with the gun [gesturing], pulling something back on the top of it with his other hand?

TERESA: No.

Teresa couldn’t say how many shots she’d heard, but Jaywalker got her to agree that everything had occurred “very fast” at that point, with Jeremy “just shooting like crazy.”

Which, Jaywalker decided, was as good a place as any to quit. Whoever had first pulled the gun, it was agreed that Jeremy had ended up with it and done the shooting. And the image of things happening very quickly, with Jeremy momentarily out of control, dovetailed nicely with Jaywalker’s theory of the case. As for Victor’s getting up, running, stumbling and being shot again as he lay defenseless on the pavement, there was no way Jaywalker was going to get Teresa to retreat from those assertions. So the less said about them, the better.

“I have no further questions of the witness,” he said.

Trials are something like trains, to the extent that neither of them tend to run too closely on schedule. One of the jurors had developed a toothache overnight and had that morning asked Judge Wexler’s permission to visit her dentist that afternoon, explaining that the dentist could squeeze her in as an emergency at four-thirty. Now Wexler announced that her request would be granted, and that the trial would be in recess until the following morning. Then, as soon as the jurors had filed out of the courtroom, he summoned the lawyers up to the bench. “You know what they call a lawyer who asks about everything but the crime?” he asked.

Jaywalker was willing to take a stab at it. “A genius?”

It drew a muffled laugh from Katherine Darcy but seemed to do nothing for Wexler’s disposition. “Not in my book,” he said. “How about a loser? ”

Jaywalker figured that particular question was a rhetorical one, and except for a shrug, he let it go unanswered. Wexler turned his attention to Darcy. “Are you still willing to consider offering the manslaughter plea?” he asked her. “With twenty years?”

“I suppose so,” she answered. “I’d have to talk to my bureau chief.”

“I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you talk to your client, Jaywalker. If the jury convicts him of murder, you can tell him I’m going to give him twenty-five to life. You may think you’re going to be able to fool them into returning a manslaughter verdict, but I don’t. And I’ll promise you this much-there’s no way you’re walking out of here with an acquittal, not once I’ve finished charging them on when the right to use deadly force ends. To me, Jaywalker, your client’s nothing but a two-bit punk who killed another punk, and if our legislature had any balls, he’d get the same sentence the victim got. So why don’t you do us all a favor and stop trying to be a hero for once in your life, and start kicking some sense into this kid, will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Jaywalker.

And then, in spite of the fact that he’d planned on going into the pens and spending a few minutes with Jeremy, he made it a point of turning around, picking up his things as quickly as possible and walking not into the pens at all, but out the front doors. And for good measure, muttering “Fuck you” under his breath.

Okay, not exactly under his breath.

As pissed off as Jaywalker had been at the time by Judge Wexler’s appraisal of the case, he’d calmed down by that evening. Food and the simple passage of time had a way of doing that. Not that a few hits from a joint hadn’t helped.

And the truth was, he had to admit, Wexler did have a point. Here Jaywalker had thought he’d had a pretty good day with Teresa Morales. Even on direct examination, she’d described the barbershop incident pretty much the way Jeremy would in turn, complete with taunting, name-calling, simulating guns and threatening to get him next time. On cross, she’d admitted there’d been earlier encounters, though she’d been vague on the numbers. And if he hadn’t quite gotten her to concede that the group called themselves the Raiders and favored Oakland Raiders leather jackets, her “Not that I’m aware of” demurrer had come off as pretty lame. As far as the fight was concerned, she’d not only agreed that Jeremy had been winning it, but portrayed him as too gentlemanly to go after his opponent while Victor had been taking off his sweatshirt and had been momentarily defenseless.

On the issue of where Jeremy had supposedly pulled the gun from, Teresa’s recollection that it had been from his waist contradicted Wallace Porter’s version that it had been from his socks. But Jaywalker wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. Porter had obviously lied as to several other points. First there’d been his insistence that he and his friends hadn’t been drinking beer, only seconds after he himself had slipped and mentioned that they had been. Then there’d been his statement to the detectives that he’d heard the two young men arguing over money just before they began fighting. Porter had been forced to admit that while that statement had had no truth to it, he’d never attempted to correct it. In fact, he now said he didn’t even know why he’d said it in the first place.