The Ledger

14.11 Darwinian

In this episode (14.11), a homeless man dies after a woman hits him with her $250,000 car and drives home with him stuck halfway through the windshield. Sound familiar? Something like this happened in real life, and of course the fact that the suspect is wealthy and a publicist also connects the episode to the Lizzie Grubman incident in which she ran over people outside a club in the Hamptons.

Dylan Baker, the NYC character actor perhaps best known as the father in Todd Solondz's Happiness, guest stars as the publicist's defense attorney. He convinces a judge to allow an independent autopsy, and this move pays off: it is discovered that the victim died not because of the car accident, but because he was brutally assaulted in the hours before the attack.

So Briscoe and Green have to come up with another suspect, and eventually they arrest another homeless person. This new suspect's lawyer, from some kind of homeless legal aid group, argues that the murder is defensible because it was "necessary," since the rules of homeless culture dictate that you must do whatever it takes to survive, and if you don't, you will become a victim yourself. Hence, the name of the episode. McCoy rejects this argument, and the two sides have it out in court.

Early in the episode as Briscoe and Green explore a YMCA locker in which the victim kept his belongings, they find a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's great novel about racial injustice in the South. Since this novel features Atticus Finch, one of the most legendary lawyers in American literature, I knew the script would reference this novel later in the episode. I didn't have to wait long. As McCoy is discussing the suspect's moral baseness, a judge cautions him, "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes." These exact words are spoken by Atticus Finch to his daughter in Mockingbird. Like that novel, this episode is very much about class disparity. It's fitting that it begins with a suspect from the highest class going free and ends with a suspect of the lowest class (spoiler coming) going to jail. The suspect even delivers an outraged "You don't understand" speech to McCoy during his testimony, a bit of rhetoric reminiscent of Mayella Ewell's "you fine fancy gentlemen" speech during the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird.

All this Mockingbird parallelism allows me the chance to bring up something I was discussing with a friend just the other day: there is quite a lot of Atticus Finch in Jack McCoy. Atticus has a "justice above all" mentality that seems echoed in McCoy. However, McCoy is more willing than Atticus ever would be to cross certain ethical boundaries to achieve justice. It's hard to imagine Atticus even considering withholding evidence or skirting either the letter or spirit of the law. Still, his single-minded devotion to justice certainly seems to be an inspiration for McCoy.

Posted by adm at January 17, 2004 07:04 PM

Comments

Post a comment

validate