Bronx Justice. Joseph Teller

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СКАЧАТЬ a life for themselves. They got up and went to work or school, or sometimes both. They took care of their children. From modest salaries, they somehow saved enough to buy a home. They didn’t seem to drink, use drugs, gamble, curse, get angry or do any of the other things that used to get so many of Jaywalker’s Legal Aid clients into trouble so often. In many ways, the Kingstons epitomized that most overworked of all clichés, the American Dream. They lived honest, hardworking and productive lives, day in and day out. They didn’t look to others to take care of them; they took care of themselves, and of each other. Now something terrible had happened to one of their number. Some outside force, not fully comprehensible in its awfulness and randomness, had suddenly reared up and threatened to destroy everything. Their reaction was as simple as it was immediate. Even as they’d reached out to Jaywalker for outside help, they’d drawn together even more tightly. They’d mustered their collective strengths, pooled their resources and drawn on their faith. That faith was not so much in a higher power as it was in the system itself. They trusted that the system, which they’d always believed in and lived by, would now protect them.

      But the system, Jaywalker knew only too well, protected no one. The system was cold and impersonal. The system was all about budgets and payrolls, statistics and seniority, politics and patronage. When it came right down to it, in an adversarial contest that pitted a professional prosecutor against a designated defender, a person could be protected only by another person. And for better or for worse, because of the absurd accident that Inez Kingston happened to work in the same Welfare Department office as Jaywalker’s sister-in-law, he had become the person charged with the responsibility of protecting a young man and, with him, the rest of his family, born and unborn. It was a responsibility that Jaywalker both wanted and didn’t want, one that he relished even as he loathed it, and one that was already waking him up each morning and accompanying him to bed each night.

      In the short space of a month’s time, it had become a responsibility that scared the living shit out of him.

      4

      HEDGING BETS

      Jaywalker busied himself preparing motions.

      The days of the computer had not yet arrived, at least for a seat-of-the-pants solo practitioner like Jaywalker. That meant typing out a set of papers the old-fashioned way, on a trusty Remington, the kind that fit into a square black box and came without a cord, much less a battery. He moved for suppression of any statements that might be attributed to Darren as admissions or confessions, exclusion of any identifications of him that might have been tainted by suggestive police procedures, and a severance that would divide the case into four separate trials instead of one. He asked for court-ordered discovery of police reports, medical records, photographs, artists’ sketches and the like. He demanded particulars regarding the precise date, time and place of each of the crimes charged. He made copies, served and filed them, and waited for Pope’s written response.

      Next Jaywalker contacted a private investigator. He called John McCarthy, a former NYPD detective who would go on to do work for F. Lee Bailey, among others. McCarthy was bright, capable, and would make a good appearance on the witness stand, if his testimony were needed. Jaywalker had him come to the office to meet Darren, and the three of them went over the facts of the case in as much detail as they knew them. He instructed McCarthy to use his contacts in the department to gain access to whatever police and housing authority records he could. He told him there would come a time when he’d want him to see if the victims would talk with him. Finally, Jaywalker asked him to spend some time in the Castle Hill area of the Bronx, where the attacks had taken place, on the outside chance that he might be able to locate the real rapist, assuming it wasn’t Darren. At that suggestion, McCarthy looked up from his notepad and stared at Jaywalker as though he were on drugs.

      Jaywalker looked away.

      

      Things slowed down. And Jaywalker had no complaint about that. A speedy trial, which is a defendant’s constitutional right—and these days his statutory right, as well—is in fact a defendant’s worst enemy. Time is his ally. Time for his lawyer and his investigator to do their jobs; time for the victims to grow less vindictive and more forgetful; time even for another attack to occur while the defendant’s presence elsewhere could be documented. And with Darren out on bail, time also brought the opportunity for him to get back to work, family and normalcy—if there was such a thing as normalcy for a young man facing eighty years in prison.

      On a more practical note, time also allowed Jaywalker to attend to the rest of his practice, which he’d begun to neglect as he became immersed in Darren’s case. He tried a forgery case in federal court and came away with a lucky acquittal. A robbery defendant, whose victim had leaped out of a fourth-story window in order to escape his captors, pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year prison term. The victim had somehow survived a broken back and was now walking with a cane. Had he not, it would have become a murder case.

      And on the personal front, time also gave Jaywalker an opportunity to get reacquainted with his own family, who’d seen precious little of him over the past few weeks. He prided himself on being an active, if not quite equal, partner in the raising of his daughter. Lately, however, his wife had begun to comment that he seemed to be distracted and complained about his growing habit of being absent even when he was present. If their daughter noticed, she didn’t say anything. Of course, she was only four. But kids didn’t miss much, he knew.

      

      Jacob Pope’s response to Jaywalker’s motions arrived in the mail. First off, he supplied the locations and times of the crimes. As Jaywalker read the numbers and transposed them from military time to civilian, he could see that each of the attacks had taken place in the early afternoon hours. Even though he’d been expecting as much, seeing it in black and white came as a major blow. It meant Darren had no alibi. He hadn’t been at work during any of the incidents.

      Jaywalker reacted almost viscerally. During those early weeks and months, his belief in Darren’s innocence had swung back and forth like an unseen but ever-present pendulum. One day Darren would look him in the eye and swear he knew nothing of the rapes, and Jaywalker would believe him with all his heart. The next day would bring some new fact or development that would point directly and inexorably at Darren, and Jaywalker would be filled with doubt all over again. The realization that he wasn’t going to be able to call a single witness to account for Darren’s presence on any of three separate days was a perfect example. And with each such setback, Jaywalker had to contend once again with the distinct possibility—indeed, the overwhelming probability—that maybe they had the right guy after all.

      Pope’s response continued. He stated that he had no admission or confession of Darren’s to offer at the trial. He conceded that a pretrial identification hearing would be necessary, because a photographic lineup had been conducted, and a judge would have to decide if it had been fair or overly suggestive. He resisted supplying the defense with police reports the law didn’t require him to turn over yet. And he opposed the request for a severance, contending that all four attacks should be tried together, as one case.

      The severance issue was one that bothered Jaywalker. Did he really want one grand roll of the dice, a single trial including all of the victims, winner take all? Or would it truly be better if the case were split up into four, so that a jury trying one part of it wouldn’t even learn of the other three attacks? The advantage to such an approach was obvious: they would avoid the prejudice that would flow from the sheer number of incidents and wouldn’t have to contend with a jury’s falling into a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire mindset. But there was an equally obvious downside, too: severance would give Pope multiple opportunities to convict Darren. They were looking at as many as four separate trials—five, if the remaining victim surfaced. He could win three or even four times, only to lose the last one, and still have Darren end up with a fifteen-or twenty-five-year prison sentence.

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