Joseph Teller - Overkill

He told the jurors that although the shooting of Victor Quinones had played out in slow motion during the testimony, to Jeremy it had taken place in real time, and taken only seconds. All of the witnesses had described it as having happened very fast, so fast that they disagreed on something as basic as the number of shots fired. “To Jeremy,” he told them, “it must have been nothing but a blur. So when he’s confronted twenty months later in the sterile confines of a courtroom and asked about the forty-five feet and the precise geometry of the fatal shot, all he’s able to say is that he honestly doesn’t remember it happening that way. That’s his truth. And that’s the only truth that matters.

“You want to know how to decide this case the right way?” he asked the jurors. “Here’s how you do it. You listen to Jeremy’s own words. Here they are.” Picking up the transcript, he found the page he’d marked with a paper clip, and read to them.

JAYWALKER: Jeremy, you say you killed Victor Quinones.

JEREMY: Yes, I did.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us why you killed him?

JEREMY: I can only tell you what was in my mind at the time.

JAYWALKER: And what was that?

JEREMY: In my mind, I was trying to save my life.

“In my mind,” Jaywalker repeated, “ I was trying to save my life. Unless you can say you not only disbelieve those words, but disbelieve them beyond all reasonable doubt -something you cannot possibly do if you put yourselves in Jeremy’s shoes-this case ends right there. Because that, jurors, is the absolute, undistilled essence of what justification is all about. In my mind, I was trying to save my life. ”

Jaywalker would have loved to stop right there, on an emotional high, but he knew he couldn’t afford to. There was simply too much other stuff he had to talk about. Like whether or not Jeremy had been telling the truth or lying about Sandro, Shorty, Diego, Mousey and the rest of the gang, and the fact that they called themselves the Raiders and wore black jackets with pirate motifs. He couldn’t come right out and comment on the arrival of the Raiders in court that very morning; that event wasn’t in evidence. But just as some things said from the witness stand were “in the ear” even when stricken from the record, so too were some things “in the eye” even when they couldn’t be mentioned. Like intent to kill, which was one of the elements, or essential ingredients, to murder. And how if Jeremy had honestly been trying to save his life, however unreasonably he may have perceived things in the moment, then intent to kill was nowhere to be found in the case. And burden of proof, which was the prosecution’s, not the defense’s, even on the presence or absence of justification. Especially on the presence or absence of justification. And despite anything that Judge Wexler might tell them to the contrary, how utterly absurd it would be for them to sit in the relaxed atmosphere of an eleventh-floor courtroom twenty months after the fact and try to draw a bright line where justification ended. And extreme emotional disturbance, which in this case presented nothing but a trap for the jurors, a convenient out by which they could find Jeremy guilty of manslaughter instead of doing the hard work of deciding whether to convict him of murder or acquit him altogether.

“Don’t you dare do that,” he told them. “Neither Katherine Darcy nor I spent four full days rejecting dozens of other prospective jurors before picking you just to have you come to the only real issue in this case and have you duck it. If you think she’s proved that Jeremy wasn’t justified in what he did, and proved it beyond all reasonable doubt, then tell us, tell us to our faces by convicting him of murder. But if you’re left with even the slightest reasonable doubt on that issue of justification, then tell us that .

“How do you that? Well, it’s been said that the prosecutor has the last word at trial, because she gets to sum up last. It’s not like during the testimony, where there was an opportunity for redirect examination and recross. No, when it comes to summations, there’s no such thing as rebuttal. Once I sit down, as I’m about to do, I’m done. Even if Ms. Darcy makes an argument to you that I have the perfect answer to, the rules simply don’t allow me to make it.

“But you know something? In spite of that huge advantage, the prosecution doesn’t really have the last word at all. Not even the judge does. You know who does? You do. And you get to speak that last word, each of you, shortly after Mr. Craig here, as your foreman, rises from his seat to tell us that you’ve found Jeremy Estrada not guilty on each and every last count of the indictment. At that point the court clerk will address each of you individually, by name. She’ll ask you if that is your verdict. And you’ll get to look us squarely in the eye and wipe the tears from your face, and surely Jeremy’s face, and probably my face, too. And at that point you get the last word. Because that’s the moment you get to say as loudly and as proudly as you possibly can the words that will echo in your memory for the rest of your life.

“Yes, that is my verdict.”

And then it’s over.

No “Thank you.” No “I appreciate your attention.” No “You’ve been a great jury.” As he always did, Jaywalker left the pleasantries to others. Instead he simply turned from the jury box, returned to the defense table and took his seat next to Jeremy. By that time he’d been on his feet for an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes. He’d put everything he had-every ounce of sweat and every drop of blood-into that hour and a half. It wouldn’t have been an under-statement to say that he’d been working on it for a year. Though never as hard as he had at three o’clock that morning, when, finally more or less satisfied with what he wanted to say- more or less being as good as it ever got when you were Jaywalker-he’d downed yet another pot of black coffee and forced himself to memorize the first and last names of all twelve jurors. In order.

And yet as good as he felt about what he’d said and how he’d said it, and as buoyed as he was by what he took to be the jurors’ uniformly positive reactions, Jaywalker sat down not just in relief and exhaustion, but in dread. Dread that all he’d said and done might not be enough to save the young man seated beside him.

Katherine Darcy stood up to speak after a fifteen-minute recess. Until then, Jaywalker had barely been aware of her presence in the courtroom, so focused had he been on his own summation. True, she’d congratulated him as soon as the jurors had filed out of the courtroom, and he’d thanked her. But it wasn’t until they’d reconvened and she’d stood up to deliver her own summation that he really noticed her.

And being Jaywalker, naturally the first thing he noticed was how good she looked. If Jaywalker’s rumpled hair, gray complexion and the dark circles around his eyes were testimony to how little he’d slept and eaten over the past two weeks, Darcy looked as though the trial had barely fazed her, and that summing up was something she did every day of the week.

She was wearing all black, and Jaywalker had to wonder for a moment if she was trying to send the jurors a subliminal message that, like Cesar Quinones and his wife, she was in symbolic mourning for Victor. No, he decided, a moment later. She just happened to look good in black and must have known it, to her credit. Even if it did mean wearing a long, narrow skirt in the middle of May. Then again, the courtroom was air-conditioned to a fault, so why not?

When he was exhausted, Jaywalker tended go off on absurd mental tangents like that. And at the moment he was way beyond exhausted. So he bit the inside of his cheek, dug a bent paper clip under his thumbnail and forced himself to concentrate not on Darcy’s outfit but her words.