Free Guilty as Sin by Joseph Teller Page A

point out that the listener’s problem wasn’t really with the defendant’s right to a trial, however doomed. “If he insisted on exercising that right, you wouldn’t criticize me for sitting next to him and going through the motions, would you? After all, somebody’s got to do it. So to fault me for being the one to sit there growing hair like some kind of Chia Pet would be the equivalent of blaming the Washington Generals just for showing up to be the designated losers to the Harlem Globetrotters, something they do night in and night out.
    â€œYou see,” Jaywalker would explain, “it’s only when I stop simply going through the motions and start to take my job seriously that you begin to have a problem. It’s not until I really try my hardest to win that you begin asking me how can I possibly represent someone I know is guilty. And my answer to you is simple.
    â€œHow can I not?”
    What he wouldn’t say, and what he wouldn’t even admit to himself at the time, was that in fighting his hardest to win Alonzo Barnett’s case, Jaywalker was hopingto beat back some personal demons. The sting of that recent conviction still smarted, still kept him up at night. Suppose he could follow up losing a case he should have won—or better yet, should never have tried in the first place—by winning a dead-bang loser? Wouldn’t pulling off something like that go a long way toward evening the score? Wouldn’t it at least buy him some small measure of redemption?
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    All that said, without an entrapment defense, Alonzo Barnett was pretty much left with no defense at all. Jaywalker would have to settle for attacking the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses and combing their reports—once he finally got them from Pulaski—for inconsistencies. He’d have a sample of the drugs tested by an independent chemist to make sure it was really heroin. He’d even try to line up character witnesses for Barnett, although putting them on the stand would open them up to all sorts of damaging cross-examinations.
    â€œTell me. Is your opinion of the defendant’s reputation affected in any way by the fact that he’s been selling heroin for the past twenty years? Or that he has five felony convictions?”
    Okay, maybe no character witnesses.
    But how about Barnett’s boss, the restaurant owner he’d been working for at the time of his arrest? But Pulaski would no doubt use Barnett’s employment to show he hadn’t needed to deal in drugs but had made a conscious choice born out of greed. Maybe there was some way to put the defendant’s two daughters on the stand, to show what a loving father he was?
    â€œI see,” Pulaski would say. “And perhaps you can tellus, young lady, just why it was that your sister and you were removed from your home and placed in foster care, even before your father’s latest arrest?”
    It seemed that every idea Jaywalker came up with had a downside to it, a downside that far outweighed its upside. Well, he decided, there was still Clarence Hightower. Put on the witness stand by the defense, he might be able to show the jury how reluctant Barnett had been to get back into the business of dealing. While that might have no true legal significance, it was at least something. Yet Jaywalker had already struck out trying to find Hightower. And since it turned out that the man hadn’t been working as a CI, it meant law enforcement wasn’t responsible for knowing his whereabouts or duty-bound to make him available to the defense.
    Although Jaywalker prided himself on doing his own investigative work, he also recognized that there were limitations to the practice. The first was when he needed to call an investigator to the stand as a witness. The second was when he needed someone who could go to a neighborhood and blend in better than he himself could.
    Jaywalker was white. Alonzo Barnett