The Ledger

Tragedy on Rye

In this episode (13.4), a young woman is found murdered in her apartment by a delivery man. She was an unemployed actress, but she had over $50,000 in stereo equipment in her apartment. Briscoe and Green investigate, trying to establish why someone would want to kill her. They visit the comedy club on Staten Island where she worked nights, go through her locker there, and find some traffic tickets that reveal there is traffic camera right by her building. During a visit to the DMV to inspect the camera's records at the time of the shooting, they find a shot of a couple of tourists filming the victim's building directly. They track the tourists down via the plate on their rental car, and eventually get hold of the video tape (which the couple had sold to a local tv station). On the tape, they see three men loading some of the woman's stereo equipment into an SUV. Via a sticker on the SUV, the track two of the three men to a racetrack and arrest them. They profess their innocence until their high-powered, high-cost lawyer shows up. The lawyer is known for defending wealthy drug dealers, which these suspects aren't. Green dresses up like a drug dealer and visits the lawyer's firm, where he tricks the receptionist into revealing the name of the man ("Danny Odem") who is paying for the lawyer. Somehow, this is enough for them to get a search warrant, which they execute with guns drawn. When Odem shows up unexpectedly and startles the detectives, Briscoe shouts "Police! Don't move!" but Odem reaches for his waist anyway. Green flies at him and beats the crap out of him as he brings him to the ground. It turns out, though, that the man was merely reaching for his cellphone.

What follows is a game of legal one-upsmanship, as Odem's attorney threatens a federal civil rights lawsuit against the department and Briscoe and Green, and DA Arthur Branch retaliates by holding a press conference and expressing full confidence that (a) the suspects are guilty, (b) Green did the right thing, and (c) the death penalty is called for.

To make the civil rights lawsuit go away, Southerlyn visits the only witness to the detectives' search of Odem's apartment, a neighbor who doesn't want to get involved but eventually admits that he heard the detectives announce themselves as police officers. Southerlyn and McCoy expect Branch to take the death penalty of the table at this point, but refuses. McCoy says he doesn't like getting "sandbagged by anyone," meaning he thinks Branch mislead him about how seriously he wanted to pursue the death penalty. Southerlyn has even deeper misgivings, and you half expect her to drop out of the case.

Despite their almost non-existent evidence, McCoy and Southerlyn bring the first degree murder case to trial. The defense tries to show that the victim was a drug dealer herself, and they bring in a forensic accountant who uses her cell phone records and financial profile to suggest that she dealt drugs. I'm not sure what bearing that has on whether she was murdered in the first degree or not, but whatever.

Regardless, McCoy gets his conviction, and it sure looks like all three defendants will be executed. In preparing for sentencing, McCoy reviews the evidence, particularly the phone logs, and discovers one person who called very frequently, and then stopped calling immediately after the murder, indicating he knew she was dead. This, too, seems enough for the search warrant, which Briscoe and Green execute, and find this new suspect (apparently a drug dealer) along with the murder weapon. Off camera, he seeks a plea bargain, and it is then apparent to everyone that the original three defendants are not guilty. This prompts a bit of soul searching on the part of McCoy and Branch, and Southerlyn is disgusted by the whole thing, a point she makes by refusing to go eat steak with the men.

This is episode is an example of a disturbing trend in the series in the last few years: much time is spent with the characters turning against each other as they debate the various viewpoints of whatever themes the episode deals with, and the plot twists seem designed to make a dramatic point instead of merely making for good story telling. Couldn't we see that these men would turn out to be innocent? In the older episodes, the episode simply wouldn't have developed the way this one would have. Once it became apparent that the men might not be guilty, some new suspect would have been identified -- 35 or 40 minutes in, not in the last 3 minutes of the episode. One of the joys of the older episodes is watching the thorough investigative process at work. This episode featured no such investigation: the men were located, and this seemed to be the extent of the effort to connect them to the case. It feels weak to the viewer before the case ever reaches the courtroom, and this fact makes it less dramatically engaging. To reiterate, the episode steers towards making a point about how guilt in death penalty cases is not always assured, even when you get a conviction, but didn't we already know that? Disappointing.

Little bit of backstory: when the civil rights lawsuit gets raised, Green mentions again that he has a "history" of unwarranted violence, a fact we've known since his first appearance. Also, when McCoy questions Branch's credentials as a New Yorker, he retorts, "Twenty years and still a carpetbagger," meaning that he's lived in the city for 20 years but is considered an outsider.

The episode is based on the so-called "Carnegie Deli Murders" which occurred in NYC a few years ago. Some small-time drug dealers and their acquiantances (including the friend of a friend of mine) were murdered by some other small-time drug dealers above the famous Carnegie Deli. As in the episode, one of the victims was an actress who was in a movie "with all the dancing kids," i.e., Dirty Dancing. In real life, the killers were sentenced to life sentences, not death.

Posted by adm at February 27, 2004 09:59 PM

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