Joseph Teller - Overkill

But intervention did indeed intervene.

As suddenly as they’d gone out at midnight, the lights came back on, the air-conditioning kicked in, and a humming noise started up. Almost immediately, the elevator began descending. As blinded by the brightness as he had been by the earlier darkness, Jaywalker began groping around for his clothes, grabbing his pants, his shirt and what he thought was a pair of black socks.

“That’s mine,” Darcy snapped.

“Is not.”

“Is, too,” she said. “Unless you wear a 34B.”

He handed it over.

By the time the elevator settled to a stop at the first floor, the two of them were more or less dressed. And although they stood side by side, facing the door as nonchalantly as they possibly could, as though simply waiting for it to open so they could be on their separate ways, they wouldn’t have fooled anyone with eyes to see. Hell, they wouldn’t have fooled Stevie Wonder.

But it wasn’t Stevie Wonder who was standing there when the door opened. Knowing that much was the easy part. For Jaywalker, the hard part was trying to place the familiar-looking man staring back at him, key in hand. At least he thought it was a man, though the women’s sunglasses and the platform heels gave him pause.

And then it dawned on him.

“Judge Sternbridge,” said Jaywalker, out of sheer amazement. Because it was in fact Miles Sternbridge, the head of the disciplinary committee. Miles Sternbridge, who’d meted out Jaywalker’s three-year suspension and had just last week dropped by Harold Wexler’s courtroom to make sure Jaywalker had been behaving himself . Miles Sternbridge, in platform heels.

And yet, if Jaywalker wasn’t mistaken, here was Sternbridge screaming at him.

“This is a private elevator! For judges only! What are you doing on it? And you’re with another of your hookers, I see!”

Jaywalker could feel Darcy about to say something, or perhaps explode, alongside him. He put a hand on her arm, first to quiet her, then to steer her past Sternbridge and toward the door that led out to the lobby. Only then did he turn back to address the judge.

“Nice shoes, your honor.”

The read-back went even worse than Jaywalker had anticipated. He’d arrived in court uncharacteristically late, though still early by normal standards. Several court officers went out of their way to comment that he looked rested and seemed in unusually good spirits, at least for him.

Following the elevatorus interruptus episode and the standoff with Judge Sternbridge, Katherine Darcy and Jaywalker had bade each other good-night and headed to their respective homes. Famished, Jaywalker had stopped off at an all-night pizza joint and inhaled three slices. It was times like that when even he had to admit that living in the big city had its advantages. Once back at his apartment, he’d undressed, pausing only momentarily to wonder where his socks had gone, fallen onto his sofa and slept like a baby for the first time in weeks, if only for a few hours.

As for Katherine Darcy, she, too, looked just fine and seemed in good spirits, but there was nothing new there. And each time she made eye contact with Jaywalker she quickly looked away, obviously afraid she’d burst out laughing.

But none of that made the read-back any easier to listen to. Even in the rapid-fire monotone of the court reporter, the testimony of Magdalena Lopez, Wallace Porter and Teresa Morales was nothing short of devastating. Each of them had recounted how Jeremy, gun in hand, had chased Victor down and delivered the final shot at point-blank range. Lopez had described how the two of them had moved to “a different spot” just before that had happened. Porter recalled how Jeremy had chased Victor and then “shot him like three more times.” And when Victor had fallen to the ground, Jeremy had “picked him up by the collar and he shot one or two more times at him.” But it was Teresa’s version that stung the most.

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.

And since the read-back ended right there, the silence that followed it was absolutely deafening. Finally Judge Wexler turned to the jurors. “You may retire to continue your deliberations,” he told them, and they filed out of the courtroom. Then he told the lawyers to approach the bench.

“Still want to offer him the manslaughter plea?” he asked Darcy.

She seemed to think for a moment. She had to know how close she was to a guilty verdict. She could hang tough now if she wanted to, holding out for a conviction on the murder count. But after a moment she said, “Sure, why not?”

“Talk to your client,” Wexler told Jaywalker. “Man One, fifteen years. Right now, before it’s too late.”

Jaywalker glanced up at the clock, saw it was 10:22 a.m.

He walked back to the defense table, sat down and began explaining things to Jeremy. Not only were they still offering him the manslaughter count in the face of a near-certain conviction, he said, but Wexler himself had softened and come down to fifteen years, by far the best offer yet.

“How much would I have to do?” Jeremy asked.

“Twelve,” Jaywalker estimated.

Jeremy smiled his sheepish smile. “If it’s okay with you,” he said, “I’d rather take my chances with the jury.”

Jaywalker tried his best to convince Jeremy that from all indications, the jurors had turned against him. Even if they’d begun their deliberations looking for some way to acquit him-and the intent-to-kill note had suggested just that-by now they’d moved on and had come to view the final shot the same way the prosecution did, as pure overkill.

Jeremy shrugged, smiled again and said, “Still…”

Jaywalker got Wexler’s permission for a court visit. The court officers obligingly cleared the front row of spectators, moved Jeremy’s chair to the solid wooden railing, placed another chair on the audience side of it, and allowed first Carmen and then Julie to speak with Jeremy for a few minutes. The idea was for them to talk him into doing what Jaywalker had been unable to do.

They couldn’t.

Jaywalker tried once more, before catching the judge’s eye and shaking his head back and forth. Wexler stood up and left the courtroom without comment. Jaywalker looked at the clock-10:51 a.m. He guessed he’d be home by one, two at the latest.

He was wrong.

The buzzer sounded at 11:33 a.m. One buzzer, not two. Though in the two seconds it took to determine that there wouldn’t be a second one, Jaywalker felt his heart go into serious fibrillation. Or maybe a lost butterfly had strayed up and into his chest to flap its wings in panic. He turned to Jeremy and said, “Relax,” and they shared a laugh at the absurdity of the notion.

We, the jury, would like to know if there is any way we can send the defendant a message that what he did was absolutely wrong, and criminal according to the law. At the same time, some of us strongly suspect that the defendant’s actions were out of character and feel it highly unlikely that he will repeat them, or similar criminal acts, in the future. How can we send that message without violating our oaths as jurors?

William Craig

Jury Foreman

“You can’t,” Harold Wexler told them once they were back in the jury box. “You’re not here to send the defendant or anyone else a message. Your job, and your only job, is to make a determination as to whether the defendant’s guilt on each count of the indictment has been proven to your satisfaction or not. Period. As for punishment, that is a matter that is solely within the province of the court. Or to put that into plain English, that’s my job.