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I HAVEN’T PLANNED TO begin this way. But now that Katherine Welsh has taken her shot at me, I decide to go with it.

Maybe it’s the cocktail of Red Bull and adrenaline and being further hot-wired with nerves that pushes me even further. I give her table a quick pat with my hand as I walk past her.

“Of course he did it,” I say to the jury. Then I follow it up with this:

“Because the guy did it before, right? Stands to reason.”

My tone is conversational as I begin to walk back and forth in front of them, making eye contact with as many of the men and women staring back at me as I can manage, as if this is the start of story time.

Which it is.

“Come on,” I say. “You know what you’re all thinking, even if the only way you’d admit it is if I gave you truth serum.

He killed that other family and got away with it, and now it turns out he’d already done the exact same thing with another father and mother and daughter who’d only committed the capital crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ”

I lean on the banister now, right in front of the woman who is Juror No. 7, a high school teacher from Williston Park.

“C’mon, you can tell me,” I say, lowering my voice and trying to sound conspiratorial. “I promise to keep it between the two of us.”

She smiles at me. In that moment, I have her on my side, whether she’d ever admit that without truth serum or not.

I turn and walk back to the middle of the room. I always like to stay in motion as a way of holding their attention.

And I’m certain that I have their attention now.

“My esteemed opponent wants you all to believe that my client’s guilt is a foregone conclusion,” I say.

“She expects you to simply follow her wherever she wants to lead you. Some people would say she wants you to follow her like sheep, except that sheep are highly intelligent animals, despite the popular misconception about them. Somewhat like the misconception about my client’s guilt in this case. ”

I briefly turn to Katherine Welsh now and give her the same dead-eye look she’d just given me. Only I hold mine a beat longer.

I know she thinks she’s tough.

I’m tougher.

“But if they do follow you down a dead end, that will be the real crying shame, won’t it, Ms. Welsh?” I say, speaking directly to her.

You’re not supposed to call out the other side in an opening statement.

But she started it.

I walk back toward the jury.

“The real and lasting shame of convicting Rob Jacobson for crimes he did not commit is that it will do nothing to bring justice to these three victims,” I say. “Because convicting an innocent man never does that.”

Just like that, I feel as if I’m rolling with material which by now I know by heart.

I tell them that by the time I’m back in front of them for my summation—“Trust me,” I say, “you’re definitely going to want to stick around for that”—they will have done everything with the DA’s alleged DNA evidence except fold it into a paper airplane.

There’s no such thing, by the way, as “alleged” DNA evidence. It either is or it isn’t, but they don’t need to know that.

“Rob Jacobson wasn’t anywhere near the Carson home the night three people were tragically murdered,” I continue.

“We’ll prove that, too, when we show why that photograph of him leaving that home on the night in question is as fake as the most fake thing you’ll find on social media today.

” I grin. “Unless you still believe that Bitcoin is safer for you than real money.”

I turn back to my new buddy, Juror No. 7.

“Please tell me you don’t believe that,” I tell her.

She doesn’t just smile back at me, she shakes her head vigorously, no no no, and laughs.

“You know what hype really is, ladies and gentlemen?” I say.

“It’s short for hyperbole. It’s an exaggeration whose intent is to persuade you, usually of something that’s not true.

And what is not true today and won’t be true over all the days to follow inside this room and will never be true, is that Rob Jacobson is guilty. ”

There is more I’ve planned to say. I know I haven’t gone as long as Katherine Welsh did. But I feel my legs starting to go, and it’s not as if I can call a time-out and wait to get them back.

I’m back in the middle of the room now, my back to Judge Horton, squarely facing the jury for the last time this morning, trying not to let them see that I’m running out of gas.

“I’m not about to tell you my client is a Boy Scout,” I say.

“If he ever even read the Scout Oath, which I sincerely doubt, he likely skipped the last part about being morally straight. Because he’s not.

Never has been, never will be, that’s not in his DNA.

When it comes to women both young and old, he’s acted like a pig so many times in his life even he’s lost count. ”

I give him a quick look over my shoulder and see him trying to glare me all the way back to law school before I once again turn back to the jurors.

“He has been a sonofabitch with women for most of his life,” I tell them.

“But what he doesn’t do to women is kill them, or a husband and father, even though someone has gone to great lengths to make it look as if that’s exactly what he’s done.

You know what we’re really talking about here?

A well-planned and brilliantly staged setup, including that gun Ms. Welsh talked about.

” I pause. “ Especially that gun, which so conveniently turned up at my client’s town house in a place where it’s amazing the housekeeper didn’t find it. ”

One more pause.

Finish strong.

“When something’s too good to be true, ladies and gentlemen, it usually is,” I say.

“ That is the authentic truth of this case. And whether opposing counsel likes it or not, and whether all of you particularly like my client or not, the truth in the end is going to set my sonofabitch of a client free.”

I sit down then before I fall down.