Guilty As Sin

21

Up yours, Mac!

It wasn’t as if Jaywalker was a complete stranger to convictions. Even if he’d accumulated less than his fair share of them, he’d had enough to know they were a fact of life for every defense lawyer this side of Hollywood. And now he was looking at two in a row. A losing streak, in sports parlance. Back-to-back defeats.

Worse yet, he’d never had one quite like this.

He’d never had a jury convict without even showing the courtesy to go back to the jury room. He knew that jurors discussed cases long before the evidence was completed and they were told they could begin their deliberations. But to arrive at an actual verdict without retiring to the jury room? If nothing else, they could have sat around and eaten the sandwiches brought in for them at the taxpayers’ expense. And even if none of them wanted to wrestle with concepts like entrapment and inducement and encouragement, common decency still dictated that they kill an hour before marching back into the courtroom to convict the defendant. They could have thought of his lawyer, if nothing else.

No, this was a new low.

This was embarrassing.

This was fucking humiliating, is what it was.

“Excuse me?” The judge was staring at the foreman, a small bald man who’d given his name as Runyon and had described himself as an accountant, although not a CPA.

“I said it won’t be necessary for us to retire and deliberate,” he repeated in a voice that to Jaywalker sounded somewhere between indifferent and downright cruel. “We’ve reached our verdict.”

“Not another word, sir,” cautioned the judge. “Remember that I told you to communicate with the court only through a written note?”

“Here you are,” said Runyon-and extended a folded piece of paper that apparently had been in his hand the whole time. Hell, thought Jaywalker, it might have been there for days, perhaps a week. Why in God’s name had he ever let an accountant onto the jury? A guy who did nothing but sit around all day crunching numbers, and was either too dumb or too lazy to even get certified?

I deserved this, Jaywalker decided. I really did.

But Alonzo Barnett didn’t.

“Objection!” Jaywalker shouted, jumping to his feet. The sudden intensity of his own voice surprised even him. “The jury has to deliberate.” Even as the judge banged her gavel in an attempt to silence him, he continued to stand, at the same time frantically thumbing through his dog-eared copy of the Criminal Procedure Law. “Here it is!” he shouted triumphantly. “Section three-ten point ten, subdivision one. ‘The jury must retire to deliberate upon its verdict in a place outside the courtroom. It must be provided with suitable accommoda-’”

“Sit down, Mr. Jaywalker, and please shut up.”

The judge’s last two words, even with the “please” that prefaced them, accomplished what the banging of her gavel hadn’t been able to. Jaywalker sat down, and he shut up. But even as he did, he held the book aloft for Levine to see the words. As if she’d be able to make out the microscopic print from twenty-five feet away.

With Jaywalker’s ranting finally cut off, the courtroom gradually grew quiet, except for a bit of residual snickering coming from the direction of the jury box. Great, he thought, looking down at his shoes, the black one and the brown one. Not only have they gone and convicted my client without so much as deliberating, now they’re laughing at me. Well, fuck them. He lifted his gaze and turned to stare at them. He wanted to see if collectively they had an ounce of shame left.

Apparently they didn’t. They were staring right back at him, every last one of them. Even the alternates. A couple of them were even gesturing derisively now. One was raising and lowering both hands, palms down, as though trying to calm down an unruly child. Another was rudely shushing him with a finger pressed to her lips. Yet another, a guy in the second row, had made a fist and was pointing his thumb upwards, as if to say, “Up yours, Mac!”

Off to one side, Jaywalker could feel a tugging on his sleeve. He tried to pull away from it, but it only grew more insistent. He turned in annoyance. Looking directly at Alonzo Barnett, he snapped, “Back off, will you? Getting railroaded like this might be okay with you, but it’s not okay with me.”

Barnett’s only response was to smile gently.

Fucking lunatic, was all Jaywalker could think. Here he’s going off to die in prison, and he’s all serene and Zen-like about it, while I’m the one who’s totally bat-shit. “It’s not okay,” he told Barnett again. “It’s not okay at all.”

“I think maybe it actually might be,” said Barnett, pointing toward the jury box. “I think they might be trying to tell us something.”