Joseph Teller - Overkill

“We watch as he dresses for the warm weather. Jeans, a shirt, sneakers. There are no two or three pairs of sweat socks, no ankle holster tucked into them. To this day, Jeremy honestly can’t tell us if he put on a single pair of socks or not that morning. And why would he remember?

“We follow him downstairs and out onto the avenue as he walks to meet Miranda and the girls. We imagine them greeting each other, smiling, holding hands. We enjoy the rides, the games, the music, the food, the aromas. And we, too, dare to think that maybe, just maybe, things will be all right today.

“We’re wrong, of course. Things will not be all right this day. By nightfall, Victor Quinones will be dead, and Jeremy Estrada will be transformed from a seventeen-year-old boy to a haunted young man fleeing retaliation and facing life in prison. But like Jeremy, we don’t know any of that yet.”

Jaywalker paused for just a moment. Barely ten minutes into his summation, he knew already that he had them, just as he’d known the same thing during his opening statement. The case was his to win or lose, he told himself. If he did it right, if he did it absolutely perfectly, he could walk Jeremy out of the courtroom. Never mind the fact that extreme emotional disturbance was a defense to murder but not to manslaughter. Never mind that justification ended when the threat to one’s life no longer existed. Never mind Katherine Darcy’s ability to show just how far Jeremy had chased Victor before taking final aim at him, or just how close he’d held the gun to him before squeezing the trigger. And never mind Harold Wexler and his guarantee of not only a conviction, but a maximum sentence. No, this wasn’t Darcy’s case, wasn’t Wexler’s case. It never had been. This wasn’t even Jeremy’s case anymore.

Right now, this was Jaywalker’s case.

“Suddenly,” he told them, “we see Victor. And worse yet, Victor has seen us. There’s no place to hide, and it’s too late to run. Victor approaches, his girlfriend Teresa in tow. There’s a confrontation, a conversation and a challenge. Although Jeremy’s no fighter, the thought of a fistfight somehow strikes him as acceptable. Win or lose, it holds out the promise of bringing to an end a summer’s worth of torture. So he says okay, he accepts the challenge.”

Jaywalker turned from the jury box, walked over to the defense table and placed his hands on Jeremy’s shoulders. “This poor kid is so naive, and so stupid, that he really thinks it’s going to be a fair fight. What does it cost him?” Jaywalker asked. “A sucker punch, hard enough to put him on the pavement. Right after Victor had pretended to be a gentleman and refused to fight with the girls present.

“Does Jeremy stay down? After all, he’s spent the entire summer staying down. What difference could one more humiliation possibly make? But something in Jeremy says no, not this time. Something in Jeremy causes him to get back up off the pavement and give chase.”

Jaywalker spent a few minutes describing how Jeremy had run after Victor, fast enough to catch up with him. He pointed out how difficult that would have been if he’d had a gun in his waistband or his socks. And if he’d had a gun, what better time would there ever be to use it than right now? “But that doesn’t happen, does it? It doesn’t happen for one simple reason. It doesn’t happen because Jeremy doesn’t have a gun.”

He described the fight, dwelling on the time-out Victor called to pull his sweatshirt over his head. Again a perfect opportunity for Jeremy to have pulled a gun and shot him. “Only Jeremy doesn’t have a gun,” Jaywalker repeated. “Instead he waits, waits like an idiot for the fight to resume. And he wins the fight, Jeremy does. Victor raises his hands and surrenders. And Jeremy, still playing by the rules, stops fighting.

“Who wants to get even after a fight?” Jaywalker asked the jurors. He waited just long enough to see several understanding nods and even hear one “The loser” from the second row.

“That’s right-it’s the loser who wants to get even. Jeremy’s won. He’s thinking his torment may finally be over. He’s shown Victor and Teresa and the rest of the Raiders that he’s willing and able to take a punch and fight back. He’s not a pussy after all, not a cunt-face, not a maricon . Finally, in his moment of triumph, his humiliation may be over.

“So who’s humiliated?” Jaywalker asked, and it seemed as though sixteen mouths in front of him formed the name Victor. “Who’s issued a challenge, fought dirty and still lost?” Sixteen more silent Victor s.

“Forget what Teresa Morales told you. She’s one of them. She was Victor’s girlfriend, for God’s sake. Forget Magdalena Lopez and her ability to hear bullets whiz by her head and then turn in time to see them hit buildings. And forget Wallace Porter and his lies about not drinking beer, having heard an argument about money, having seen a gun pulled from two or three pairs of sweat socks, and everything else he said in an attempt to lower his own sentence. Forget them and use your own, everyday common sense. You win a fight, you’re on top of the world. You lose, and you’re humiliated. Jeremy and humiliation were no strangers. Hell, he’d spent an entire summer being humiliated. But Victor? Victor had just been beaten up in a fair fight by the pussy, the cunt-face, the maricon. How was he ever going to live that down?

“The answer is, he wasn’t. So he pulled his gun.

“Jeremy reacts instinctively. Too close to turn and run, he lunges at Victor and grabs for the gun. When it goes off, the sound of the explosion and the burning sensation to his abdomen convince him he’s been shot in the gut. Still, he manages to wrestle the gun away from Victor and turn it on him.

“Does Jeremy shoot Victor at that point? You bet he does, and he’s never once denied it. He shoots him, and he keeps shooting him until Victor’s motionless, until the nightmare’s over. And he tells you that.”

Now came the hard part, Jaywalker knew, the part about the forty-five feet and the no more than four or five inches. Up till now, everything had been easy. Right now was when he would win the case-or lose it.

“Much has been said about Jeremy’s having chased Victor down after the first shot, and having fired the final shot at a point when Victor was defenseless. Maybe those things happened. Witnesses have said they did, or must have. Ms. Darcy will tell you that if they’re right, it was an execution. Here’s what I tell you-it doesn’t matter.

“Not one bit.

“And here’s why. In order for you to decide this case, to truly decide it, you have to stop being William Craig and Lucille Hendricks and Gladys Leach and George Gonsalves and Miriam Goldring and Sanford Washington. You have to forget you’re Lillian Koppelman and Vincent Tartaglia and Consuela Marrero and Desiree Smith-Hammond and Walter van der Kaamp and Jennifer Wang. And instead, you have to become Jeremy Estrada. Because in a very real sense, that’s precisely what the law requires you to do in this case.

“Here’s what you may not do. You may not ask yourselves what a reasonable person would have done standing in Jeremy’s shoes. Nor may you ask yourselves what you yourselves would have done. Because you didn’t fall in love with Miranda. You didn’t spend your seventeenth summer wetting your bed and defecating in your pants. You weren’t reduced to the status of a prisoner in your own apartment because you were too afraid of a gang of thugs to go outside. You didn’t live with that kind of pain and panic and paranoia.

“Jeremy did.”

Jaywalker turned again, this time to face his client directly. “But you know? You were mistaken about something, Jeremy. You used the wrong word when you said you felt paranoid. When you’re really being followed, when you’re actually being chased, we don’t call that paranoid . We call it terrorized .”