Guilty As Sin

20

Among the many things he is, Jaywalker is a jury watcher. He watches potential jurors as they first enter a courtroom at a point when they have no idea about the type of case they’re being screened for. He studies their reactions like a hawk as the judge reads off the charges or reveals something particularly distasteful about the facts. He looks for the jurors’ reactions to himself and to his adversary, trying to gauge which one of them is going to be their favorite. He checks to see whom they’ve chosen to sit next to in the audience, and whether they whisper to the man on their left or the woman on their right once they’ve been seated in the jury box. What are they wearing? What have they brought with them? Are they excited at the idea of being there, or do they see jury duty as an imposition? If a recess is called, are they willing to walk close by the defense table as they enter or leave the courtroom, or do they instinctively go out of their way to give the defendant a wide berth?

These things count, every one of them and a hundred more like them. And even early in his career, even as early as 1986, Jaywalker had learned to read jurors the same way a sailor learns to read clouds or a firefighter learns to read smoke.

And as he watched and tried to read the jurors’ faces that Tuesday morning as they sat and listened to Shirley Levine’s charge, he was almost immediately seized by panic.

They weren’t listening.

Oh, they were listening, but not really listening. Not perched on the edges of their seats as they should have been, leaning forward to make sure they didn’t miss a single word. Not listening the way they had during his summation or Pulaski’s.

And right then, he knew it was over.

Had the case been a whodunit, or a simple he-said/she-said, he could have lived with their inattentiveness. Other than reasonable doubt and burden of proof, there wouldn’t have been too much the judge could have told them that they didn’t already know from having heard the evidence.

But the case wasn’t a whodunit. It didn’t come down to a straightforward matter of deciding which version of the facts to believe and which to reject. Entrapment was pretty esoteric stuff. Crammed into the single paragraph of section 40.05 were more than half a dozen complex issues-burden of proof, inducement, encouragement, public servant or a person cooperating with one, substantial risk, previous disposition, active inducement or cooperation, and mere opportunity to commit an offense. This wasn’t the stuff jurors were born knowing about. Each of those phrases had a highly technical, legal meaning. And the outcome of this case depended on how the jurors decided to apply those meanings to the facts they’d heard.

Yet they were barely listening.

They’d already made up their minds.

They’d done exactly what Daniel Pulaski had told them to do. They’d heard Trevor St. James say he’d bought heroin from Alonzo Barnett twice and had been in the process of buying it a third time when Barnett had been arrested. They’d learned that Barnett had not only had an eighth of a kilogram of heroin when he’d been searched, but five hundred dollars of the prerecorded buy money.

That had been all they’d needed to know.

Everything else had gone right over their heads. All the business about the eighth-floor/twelfth-floor, all the nonsense about the weights and additives and percentages, all the suggestions that Clarence Hightower might have been working with the police. They couldn’t care less.

And who could blame them? The crack epidemic was taking the city by storm. Drugs were a scourge, and heroin was among the very worst of drugs. There was a war being waged, and men like Trevor St. James and Dino Pascarella were the soldiers in the front line, while scum like Alonzo Barnett and Clarence Hightower were the enemy. In the final analysis, there was no need for nuance, no room for clever defense lawyering. It all came down to a choice between the good guys and the bad guys. And that was no choice at all.

Even Barnett seemed to sense it. At one point he nudged Jaywalker and drew his attention to a juror in the second row, a woman who’d turned away from the judge and was staring out the window. Jaywalker nodded grimly, having already noticed her. Then he shrugged. What was he supposed to do? Point her out to the judge and get the woman admonished? All that would do would be to guarantee her vote for conviction.

Not that it mattered.

Not that any of it mattered anymore.

Shirley Levine’s charge took just under an hour. It helped that Jaywalker had dropped his agency argument from his summation. As a result, the judge barely felt compelled to instruct the jurors on it. But having said she would, she did. And she spent fifteen minutes on entrapment, but they struck Jaywalker as a bland, bloodless fifteen minutes, the highlight of which seemed to be that the defense bore the burden of proof on the issue.

By the time Levine reached the last of her instructions, that the jury’s verdict would have to be unanimous and that they were to communicate with her only through written notes from their foreman, Jaywalker found himself looking through his pocket calendar, wondering what might be a good day to come back to court to stand up on Alonzo Barnett’s sentencing.

It was that bad.

“Now,” the judge was telling them, “you may follow the court officer and retire to the jury room to begin your deliberations.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said the foreman.