Guilty as Sin by Joseph Teller Read Free Book Online Page B

then along comes his past to catch up with him. He says no half a dozen times, only to be told he has a debt to repay, a favor owed. So he does it. And as a result, his whole world comes crashing down.
    Jaywalker could recite the various defenses to crimes laid out in the Penal Law, as well as others mandated by the Constitution, remembered from law school, or grounded in case law or common law. He knew which were complete defenses and which were partial ones, which were primary defenses and which were affirmative ones.
    There was alibi. There was justification, coercion and duress. There was entrapment and agency. There was infancy, along with insanity, incompetence, incapacity and impossibility. There were abandonment, renunciation and attenuation, lack of intent and lack of scienter. There were misidentification and mistake, whether of fact or law. Diplomatic immunity, transactional immunity and use immunity, the statute of limitations and the statutory right to a speedy trial. You had voluntary intoxication and involuntary intoxication, ex post facto and post-traumaticstress. Then you had extreme emotional disturbance, malicious prosecution, vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution. Also lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, double jeopardy and double punishment.
    But nowhere, absolutely nowhere, was there a defense called “doing somebody a favor.”

5
    Grasping at straws
    T he average lawyer would have stopped right there, Jaywalker knew. Here was a client who was flat-out admitting his guilt to every single one of the charges against him. No ifs, ands or buts. The only explanation he could come up with for his actions—that he’d been doing somebody a favor—was no defense at all. Try killing someone and then telling the police it was just a favor you did for a friend, and see how far that gets you.
    Yet, as Jaywalker and Barnett had continued to talk, Barnett had made it quite clear that he had no intention of pleading guilty. “Look,” he’d said, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison—and it looks like I am—the last thing I want to do is put myself there. I may not have much of a chance at trial, but if I lose, at least I’ll be able to say I went down swinging.”
    Much of a chance at trial?
    Try no chance at all, Jaywalker had told him, though not quite in those words. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. Alonzo Barnett was stone-cold guilty. The prosecution could prove it, and in spades. Without even a theoretical defense, Jaywalker had absolutely nowhere to go attrial. Yet a trial was exactly what Barnett was insisting on having.
    Not that any of those things, or all of them added up, would have fazed most lawyers. Especially those working on the clock. To most of them, a trial simply meant a bigger payday. Not that you got rich back then on assigned counsel rates. But even at forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court, a two-week trial could generate a nice four-figure check. And since there was no chance of winning, there was also no pressure on the lawyer to knock himself out. If the defendant wanted to take the stand, fine. If he didn’t, also fine. Either way, it was going to be his funeral.
    The problem was, of course, that Jaywalker wasn’t your average lawyer. Never had been, never would be. If Alonzo Barnett wanted a trial, then a trial he would get. But that didn’t mean that Jaywalker was going to relax, sit back and listen to the meter click. Doing any of those things would have been constitutionally impossible for him, the functional equivalent of his donning a tuxedo, renting a stretch limo and going out dancing.
    The problem was, where to begin?
    A lawyer who comes into a case late finds himself at a serious disadvantage. Prior to his arrival, his adversary has been at work lining up witnesses, cementing and reconciling their stories, boning up on the law if necessary, and