Guilty As Sin

1

Alonzo Barnett died last week.

There wasn’t any obituary announcement that ran in the Times, or even the Daily News or the Post. It seems the Alonzo Barnetts of the world don’t 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 Barnett’s death.

Not that the death was a particularly tragic one, as deaths go. Barnett was seventy-six, after all, and even though he’d 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, he’d 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, he’d 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 wasn’t 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. He’d failed his client, he realized, not only by losing but by pushing him to go to trial in the first place. He’d been a “cowboy,” a “gunslinger,” an unpardonable sin in Jaywalker’s 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 Barnett’s 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 Jaywalker’s life, his name has become the answer to a trivia question of sorts. A question Jaywalker’s been asked hundreds of times by now, perhaps even thousands. Though to Jaywalker, there’s nothing the least bit trivial about it. It goes like this:

“How can you possibly represent somebody you know is guilty?”

He’s 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, he’s come to learn, are never going to get it. Like the earnest young man who appeared to listen intently before smiling and saying, “That’s 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 he’ll suggest that the two of them sit down. And once they’ve done so, he’ll look the person hard in the eye. “Do you really, really want to know the answer to that question?” he’ll ask. And if he happens to get a “Yes,” he’ll 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 he’s completed the journey in his mind, he’ll open his eyes again. And if the other chair isn’t empty by that time-as it actually was once-Jaywalker will draw in a deep breath.

“Let me tell you a story,” he’ll 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.”