February 21, 2004
4.20 Nurture
In this episode (4.20), a ten-year-old girl is reported missing by a friend from school. Her irresponsible foster mother didn't report her, even though she was missing for two nights. A visit to her alcoholic natural mother yields little information, but after going through some of the girl's things and talking to her principal, Logan and Briscoe begin to get the idea that a volunteer teacher at her school may be somehow involved. The woman appears a bit deceptive when they talk to her, so they get a limited search warrant to look for the girl, but to no avail. Eventually, as the evidence mounts that the teacher is involved, the get a more extensive search warrant and find that the woman has constructed a concealed room in the basement. Logan looks in a closet and discovers a hatch leading to it, and finds the girl hidden there.The girl has not been harmed in any way. The teacher claims she kidnapped the girl to protect her from her foster mother and the foster mother's abusive boyfriend. Stone begins to think that the woman is not entirely sane and he doesn't want to prosecute her. For some reason, instead of just dropping the charges, Stone pushes for a psych exam to determine the woman's competency. Olivet talks to her and determines that the woman seems to have delusions that the girl she kidnapped is actually her own biological daughter. The woman at one point actually had a daughter, but she died when she was 9 months old. Despite Olivet's findings, the woman is deemed competent to stand trial. Given the kidnap victim's circumstances, and the victim's own efforts to offer favorable testimony of the defendant's behalf, the defendant is an extremely sympathetic figure in the minds of the jurors.
Nothing particularly notable about this episode. It has some good twists, and the performances (particularly that of the young girl) are fairly decent. According to TV Tome, this episode is very loosely based on the Katie Beers case, a young girl who was kidnapped by a neighborhood man, and who later went on to be adopted by a wealthy family. The main difference is that Beers was kidnapped by an evil and abusive man, not a well-intentioned woman.
Posted by adm at February 21, 2004 11:00 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)