Joseph Teller - Guilty as Sin

The guiltiest man there ever was

A lonzo Barnett died last week.

There wasnt any obituary announcement that ran in the Times, or even the Daily News or the Post. It seems the Alonzo Barnetts of the world dont rate obituary announcements.

In fact, Jaywalker might never have found out, had he not gotten a phone call from a mutual acquaintance named Kenny Smith. Smith had originally met Barnett through Jaywalker, and had somehow gotten word on the street of Barnetts death.

Not that the death was a particularly tragic one, as deaths go. Barnett was seventy-six, after all, and even though hed spent a good portion of those years in state prison, seventy-six is still a pretty fair number, by any yardstick.

There was no funeral or memorial service held for Alonzo Barnett. Still, Jaywalker and Smith did get together to pay a brief condolence call. Though for Jaywalker, it felt like something much more than that. Because over the twenty-five years since their first meeting, hed come to regard Barnett not just as a former client and a good friend but as a defendant sent his way by something very close to Providence. Not that Jaywalker would ever admit believing in that kind of stuff, not even if his life depended on it.

Still, a year before the Barnett case, hed represented another defendant, also a likable African-American with a long record, who, like Barnett, had been charged with selling drugs. The guy had been considering taking a plea, but Jaywalker had talked him out of it, telling him the offer wasnt good enough and there was an excellent chance they could beat the case at trial. So when the jury inexplicably came back with a conviction, Jaywalker had gone into a deep depression. Hed failed his client, he realized, not only by losing but by pushing him to go to trial in the first place. Hed been a cowboy, a gunslinger, an unpardonable sin in Jaywalkers book. The resulting funk left him nearly suicidal. He stopped taking on new cases and could barely show up for his existing ones. He might have walked away from his practice altogether, had he not had a wife and daughter to support and tuition payments to meet.

So when Barnetts case came along, it meant more than just another client, more than just another payday. It represented something of a second chance for Jaywalker, an opportunity to atone for having failed so terribly the last time out. A chance, if you will, for redemption.

That had been then. But there was more to it. Over the twenty-five years that had passed since Alonzo Barnett first came into Jaywalkers life, his name has become the answer to a trivia question of sorts. A question Jaywalkers been asked hundreds of times by now, perhaps even thousands. Though to Jaywalker, theres nothing the least bit trivial about it. It goes like this:

How can you possibly represent somebody you know is guilty?

Hes heard it so many times, in fact, that he long ago developed a stock response to it, a little civics lecture he trots out and delivers on cue, punctuated with timeworn phrases like passionate belief in the process, foundation of the adversarial system of justice, and love of the underdog.

And his words seem to satisfy most folks, at least up to a point. Others, hes come to learn, are never going to get it. Like the earnest young man who appeared to listen intently before smiling and saying, Thats very nice. I hope you lose all your trials.

Every once in a while, though, the questioner presses Jaywalker further, and sounds as though he or she is really interested in getting beyond the catchphrases and truly understanding why it is that the guiltiest of defendants, particularly those who readily admit their guilt, nevertheless deserve a champion every bit as much as the wrongly accused. And at that point Jaywalker will look around the room, searching for a couple of empty chairs off in a quiet corner. Then hell suggest that the two of them sit down. And once theyve done so, hell look the person hard in the eye. Do you really, really want to know the answer to that question? hell ask. And if he happens to get a Yes, hell lean back and close his eyes for a long moment, the better to take himself back over the twenty-five years that have passed since the event. And then, once hes completed the journey in his mind, hell open his eyes again. And if the other chair isnt empty by that timeas it actually was onceJaywalker will draw in a deep breath.

Let me tell you a story, hell say to his listener. A story about the guiltiest man there ever was. A guy who was, as the old saying goes, guilty as sin.

The Tombs

A lthough his clients name may have been Alonzo Barnett, for as long as anyone could remember hed been known simply as AB. Which made the two of them a pretty good match, considering that years earlier, long before hed become Jaywalker the criminal defense lawyer, he himself had been born into the world as Harrison J. Walker.

Barnett came his way in the mid-1980s, which for many New Yorkers was a time of crime, cocaine and crack in epidemic proportions. For Jaywalker, it was also a time to hustle to pay the mortgage and his daughters tuition. And one of the ways he hustled was to accept court-appointed cases. The Legal Aid Society, where he himself had been broken in not too long ago, could handle only so many indigent defendants. The rest were doled out to private lawyers. Not the big-firm partners or the hotshots who were even then billing out their services for hundreds of dollars an hour. No, the ones who lined up to take the overflow were the young, the old and the journeymen who hung on but never got rich in the business. The Jaywalkers. Who else, after all, would be willing to work for forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court?

When a person gets arrested and is lucky enough to have money to hire a lawyeror when his family ishe gets to choose the lawyer. When he doesnt, the constitutions of both the United States and the State of New York guarantee him free representation. But the catch is, he no longer gets to choose the lawyer; the system chooses for him. Not that money necessarily insures quality representation. To this day, its Jaywalkers firm belief that overall, theres as much talent at Legal Aid and on the assigned counsel rolls as there is in the private bar. But when somebody else is doing the choosing, the defendant finds himself totally at the mercy of the luck of the draw.