Bronx Justice (17 page)

As Pope succeeded in chipping away at her testimony, Charlene's frustration grew visibly. Tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. When Pope drew from her a concession that her conclusion about Darren's never carrying a knife was based purely upon the fact that she'd never
seen
him carrying one, she sobbed openly. At that point, Darren rose from his seat to move toward her, and Jaywalker had to just about tackle him to hold him back. Moments later, evidently fearful that continuing might turn the jury against him, Pope announced that he had no further questions.

Jaywalker's redirect examination was brief.

Looking back at the exchange, Jaywalker would find fault with his preparation of Charlene Kingston. Had he been able to put words in her mouth, he would have had her answer his final question differently. “I don't honestly know,” would have been more effective, quickly followed up by, “All I can say is I'm telling you the truth.” Or, “If I thought for a moment that my husband was the one who raped those women, not only wouldn't I lie for him, I'd be the first one in line to testify against him.”

Hindsight again. But hindsight that would become foresight as Jaywalker would hone his trial skills over the years to come. For the moment, though, all he could do was thank Charlene for her testimony. By that time, she had to be helped from the witness stand by other members of Darren's family. Justice Davidoff called a recess for lunch.

 

During his cross-examination of Delroid and Inez, Pope had established that Darren had an uncle living on Olmstead Avenue, just a few blocks from the Castle Hill Houses. Afraid that the jury might buy what was sure to be Pope's argument—that Darren had somehow used that location as a “base of operations” for the Castle Hill attacks—Jaywalker wanted to do what he could to dispel the notion. A phone call brought Samuel Kingston, whom
Jaywalker now interviewed during the recess, down to court, along with Yvette Monroe.

Jaywalker was having little trouble sticking to his no-breakfast, no-lunch diet.

He put Samuel Kingston on the stand as the first witness of the afternoon session. Samuel identified himself as Darren's uncle and gave his address as 435 Olmstead Avenue, acknowledging that it was no more than three or four blocks from the buildings where Eleanor Cerami and Joanne Kenarden lived.

There was one other subject Jaywalker wanted to address with Darren's uncle.

Pope asked no questions.

 

Jaywalker called Yvette Monroe next. In contrast to the rest of Darren's family, Yvette was white. She was also young and pretty. At the time of the trial, she'd been in the country only four years, and her testimony bore a noticeable French accent.

Yvette identified herself to the jury as being the wife of another of Darren's uncles, making the defendant her nephew by marriage. Jaywalker needed to establish that she'd spent enough time around Darren that the mistaken identity incident would be meaningful to the jurors.

Yvette explained that she'd just come from the Kingston house, where Darren had been. Logically, therefore, she knew this couldn't be him. Yet the resemblance had been so strong that she'd still thought it was, at least at first.

Realizing the significance of what had happened, Yvette had immediately phoned Inez, only to find her line busy. Next she'd tried to reach her own husband, with the same result. She stayed in Nathan's for fifteen to twenty minutes, dialing both numbers while staring at the man and the girl. Finally she'd gone to the Kingston house and told them she'd seen a man who looked just like Darren.

Pope, on cross-examination, first established that Yvette was fond of Darren and had known he was in trouble at the time of the look-alike incident. Then he set out to reduce it to an everyday occurrence.

Pope was scoring effectively. He drew from Yvette an admission that it had been a matter of only three or four seconds before she'd realized the man wasn't Darren. He asked her if she'd made an attempt to call a police officer. She said she hadn't. Had she attempted to find out who the man was? No. Had she waited around and then attempted to follow the man? She hadn't. Had she mentioned the problem to anyone else in the restaurant? No, she hadn't.

To Jaywalker's way of thinking, the answers to all Pope's questions were self-evident. Wouldn't following a suspected knife-wielding rapist be the last thing in the world a young woman would want to do? Would a police officer really have arrested a man because someone claimed he looked like a defendant on a case? Would innocent bystanders have grabbed him and held him?

But as he looked at the jurors, he saw only blank faces. Weren't they capable of seeing through Pope's cross-examination? Were
any
of the defense witnesses getting through to them? Or had the case ended for them when the victims had pointed to Darren as their rapist? Were they simply too overwhelmed, too frightened by the prospect of a black man on the loose, attacking women like themselves, their wives and their daughters in their own neighborhood, where they lived and worked and tried to cling to a way of life that was vanishing before their eyes?

Finally, Pope showed Yvette a photograph taken of Darren at the time of his arrest on September 12th. Although she was able to identify her nephew, she seemed uncertain. She thought the eyes looked strange, and the body shorter and heavier than Darren's.

At last Yvette Monroe was allowed to step down from
the witness stand. Pope, through an effective piece of cross-examination, had seriously undercut her testimony, and whenever a prosecutor succeeds in doing that, he causes the jury to look with suspicion upon the entire defense. Witnesses are expected to help the side that calls them, and when a witness fails to do that—or inadvertently helps the other side—the damage can be incalculable.

And once again, Jaywalker held only himself to blame. Yvette had come into court armed with nothing but the truth, and sometimes that's not enough. By failing to anticipate where Pope might go with his cross-examination, Jaywalker had left her vulnerable to attack. And in so doing, he'd not only let her down, but he'd also let his client down. And the fact that he would learn how to do things better and never make the same mistake again was of little consolation at the moment.

He nodded a thank-you to Yvette as she walked past him to take a seat in the audience. Then he rose to his feet and announced that he was calling Darren Kingston to the stand.

U
ntil the actual rendering of the jury's verdict, the moment when a defendant rises to take the stand is second to none in terms of the drama it infuses into a trial. Often, the moment doesn't happen at all. Many defendants never testify. Even when they do, typically the jurors have been forewarned and have spent days—sometimes many of them—anticipating their appearances. This jury, on the other hand, had never been told, one way or the other, whether Darren would testify. Now their eyes turned as one upon this young man who'd sat almost in their midst for more than a week now, had stretched his legs in the same corridor as they had during court recesses, and had even ridden up and down the same elevator as they had, standing inches from their shoulders. And in all that time, they'd yet to hear him utter a single word.

Now, as that young man slowly made his way from the defense table to the witness stand, Jaywalker sat down. This was Darren's moment, after all, and he wanted the jury to focus on him, and him alone.

By this time, Jaywalker had spent hours with Darren—days, if you added up the time, or even weeks—first as an investigator, then as an examiner, finally as a mock interrogator, and throughout as a friend. Most of the sessions had taken place months ago, back at a time when Jaywalker had harbored serious doubts about Darren's claims of innocence and had been more interested in breaking his story then he'd been in presenting it. By the time the moment finally came to call him to the witness stand, Jaywalker had been fully converted. So convinced was he of Darren's innocence now that he literally would have bet everything he owned on it. Not that that would have amounted to all that much: a heavily mortgaged house, furnished largely in early '50s Salvation Army; a rusting Volkswagen, complete with loan payment book; a pair of skis, badly dinged; a bunch of law books, out of date; and a stack of bills, overdue.

But you get the point.

So convinced was Jaywalker, in fact, that once the trial had gotten under way, he'd spent very little time with Darren in terms of actual witness preparation. Was he about to repeat the error he'd just made with Yvette Monroe? The thought certainly occurred to him now. But even as it did, he rejected it. He felt certain that Darren's innocence would cloak him with more protection against whatever Pope might throw his way than all the coaching Jaywalker could ever give him. To be sure, he'd told Darren in broad terms the areas he expected to go into with him, the types of responses he wanted, and the things he could expect from Pope on cross. But he'd stopped short of asking him the actual questions he intended to put to him once the moment finally came. This wouldn't be a
reprise of the lie detector test, where the aim had been to get Darren to sweat over questions he'd known were coming his way. This would be about a young man, falsely accused of being nothing less than a monster, finally getting a chance to tell the jury who he really was.

The courtroom grew absolutely silent. Every eye riveted on Darren as he dutifully placed his left hand on the Bible, raised his right arm and faced the court clerk. Today, in a new century of religious tolerance and political correctness, we've grown accustomed to modified oaths. The deity is often omitted, so as to avoid offending those who doubt his existence, and witnesses are even permitted to “affirm” rather than swear. But this was 1980, when every courtroom sprouted an American flag, the words
I
N
G
OD
W
E
T
RUST
were as much a part of the décor as a wooden gavel, and an oath was an oath. So, repeating after the clerk, Darren swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.

The moment was here.

Jaywalker began gently, asking Darren about simple things. His age, his address, his family. Even as Darren answered these preliminary, nonthreatening questions, his stutter was noticeable. Jaywalker suppressed a smile each time he heard it, just as he knew Pope must have been struggling to hide a grimace.

He asked Darren about his past record, figuring that it was better to bring it out than wait for Pope to do it. Today, refinements in the law allow for a pretrial conference to determine what matters a prosecutor may go into when cross-examining a defendant, and Darren's prior arrest would no doubt be ruled off-limits. But back then it was considered fair game. Darren described the arrest and his
limited involvement in the incident. He explained that all the charges against him had ultimately been dismissed. Other than that matter and the present case, he'd never been arrested. And he'd never before been charged with a sex crime.

Jaywalker questioned Darren about the extent of his education, and about his employment. Darren talked about his current position at the post office, the specific location where he worked, and how long he'd worked there. Asked about his weight, Darren placed it at 151 or 152 pounds. The last time he weighed himself, he stated, the scale had registered 154, but he'd been fully clothed. When and where had that been? Last night, he said, at his lawyer's house. Jaywalker sneaked a sideways glance at the jurors. He hoped it wouldn't be lost on them that the door of his home was open to this young man. But if it had made any impression on them, they weren't showing it.

Jaywalker removed an item from a paper bag and had Darren identify it. It was a baseball glove, so ancient that
the leather was dry and cracked. It was a Phil Rizzuto model, but made to wear on the right hand, freeing the player to throw with his left. It was the only one of its kind that Jaywalker had ever seen, or ever would. He had it received into evidence.

He asked Darren if he drank. Darren replied that he did, occasionally. When he did, he drank Seagram's V.O., a brand of blended whiskey. Never wine.

He asked about any scars or deformities Darren had. Darren pointed to an old scar that ran clear through one eyebrow, where no hair grew. Then he described a front tooth that was noticeably chipped. At that point Jaywalker had him step to the front of the jury box to show the jurors. Jaywalker wanted him close to them.
Look at him,
he wanted to tell them.
Lean forward. He won't hurt you.
He tried willing them to feel free to reach out to Darren, to touch him, to know he was every bit as harmless as they were. But if they were feeling that way, they weren't doing anything to show it.

Jaywalker asked Darren if he owned a car or knew how to drive. He answered no to both questions. How long would it take him to travel from his apartment to Castle Hill, or from the post office to Castle Hill? Either trip, he answered, would involve subway and bus combinations that he estimated would take over an hour, one way. Asked about his uncle Samuel's house on Olmstead Avenue, he said he'd last been there at a family dinner in 1975 or 1976, and that he'd never had a key to the house.

Jaywalker asked about sneakers. Darren said he owned one pair. Jaywalker produced another item from the paper bag and had Darren identify his sneakers, which were received into evidence. They were white and high-cut,
with canvas that fully covered the ankles. And although they were worn, they could hardly be called gray.

Jaywalker asked Darren about his stutter. Darren stated that he'd been stuttering for as long as he could remember. He described speech classes he'd been forced to attend at school. He produced a draft card, which was received into evidence. It bore a notation that Jaywalker read aloud: “Other obvious physical characteristics: speech defect.”

Jaywalker moved on to September 17th, the day Darren had returned to the post office following his release on bail. He described going there with his cousin Delroid, and seeing Andrew Emmons, George Riley and P. G. Hamilton. He identified his signature on the form he'd had to fill out that morning. He related how he'd left, met up with Delroid again in the lobby, and how the two of them had traveled back home, where they'd stayed the rest of the afternoon.

Jaywalker sat down, turning Darren over to Pope for cross-examination. Pope began with the left-handed issue, drawing from Darren an admission that he could in fact do certain things with his right hand, including unscrewing a lightbulb. Where Jaywalker had made a point of calling Darren by his first name, Pope now carefully avoided the trap. Over and over again, he inserted “Mr. Kingston” into his questions whenever he could, his attempt to depersonalize Darren in the eyes of the jury. Fair was fair, after all.

Next, despite the fact that Jaywalker had already gone into the matter pretty exhaustively on direct examination, Pope asked Darren about his prior arrest.

Jaywalker jumped to his feet and objected. At the bench, he explained to Justice Davidoff that he'd represented Darren on the case and had interviewed the complainant, who'd never alleged that Darren had had a knife.

Jaywalker had no recourse, but he knew for a certainty that the judge was wrong there. Pope was deliberately hiding behind the general acting-in-concert language of the complaint he'd dug up from the old case. Had he looked into the facts at all, he would have quickly realized that he lacked a good-faith basis to suggest that Darren had possessed a knife in connection with the incident. But this case involved knifepoint rapes, and evidently Pope saw mileage to be gained by putting blinders on and implying that the defendant was no stranger to knives.

At the very least, Justice Davidoff should have called a recess and asked for the court papers and the D.A.'s file from the earlier case. It had happened right there in the Bronx, after all, less than two years ago. It couldn't have taken more than half an hour to find out what the complainant had really said. Instead, the judge allowed the question, and Pope took full advantage. Over and over he asked Darren if he hadn't held a knife in the case, changing a phrase here or a word there. Worse yet, each time he posed the question, he made it look as though he were
reading from an official paper of some sort. All Darren could do was deny the fact each time he was asked, as emphatically as he could.

But there was a certain genius to Pope's handling of the issue. In his persistence, and particularly in his pretense that he had documentary proof backing up his point, he was able to pit his own credibility against that of the defendant. And with whom could the jurors be rationally expected to side? An assistant district attorney, trusted to try major felonies in Supreme Court? Or an accused rapist with a prior robbery arrest?

Finally Pope zeroed in on the day of the two rapes.

Jaywalker's heart stopped beating. And Pope must have thought for sure he'd struck paydirt.