The Ledger

Bad Girl

Very entertaining episode (8.21), in which an extremely angry young woman kills a female police officer in Central Park, and the issue of whether to seek the death penalty against her becomes a political issue in Schiff's re-election campaign.

The episode begins with a sanitation worker hearing gun shots and rushing to the scene, where he find the dead officer and another badly injured man. At first, Curtis and Briscoe focus on the injured man, who was shot, as their chief suspect. The investigation is hindered by the fact that he is unconscious and in the hospital during much of this time. But they manage to track down witnesses who saw him follow the officer from a city bus to the park. Eventually, they track down an additional witness, a young woman, who they (improbably) locate via a mix tape a bus passenger had a conversation with her about. They talk to the DJ who made the tape, and he says they can find her at a certain club most nights. They do. When they talk to her, she gives her name as Monica Summers and says she saw the man follow the woman into the park, and then she went shopping at a nearby shoe store.

Meanwhile, a detective from Brooklyn calls Briscoe and tells him that his daughter has been picked up on charges. (Spoiler: This is the episode that initiates the story arc involving the eventual death of Briscoe's daughter.) Briscoe goes to talk to his daughter in jail in Brooklyn. It's clear they haven't spoken in a long time. She says she's in trouble. Briscoe says he'll talk to the DA in Brooklyn, but he later learns that the DA is interested in making a name for himself with drug prosecutions, and he's not interested in making any deals -- unless she goes undercover so she can testify against her boyfriend, who is also a drug dealer. She is very resistant to this idea, but Briscoe reluctantly encourages her to do it.

Back on the murder case, discover some inconsistencies in Summers' statemement and realize that their initial suspect is not only innocent, but he also apparently ran into the park to save the woman from her attacker. They also suspect Summers as the killer. They attempt to track her down, but don't have much luck. They meet two of her ex-boyfriends, one of whom has stitches from being cut up by her. This kid's mother reveals the whereabouts of Summers -- a flophouse occupied by indigent squatters, and Briscoe and Curtis attempt to find her there. When they walk in, they catch her attacking another woman with a knife. As Briscoe attempts to restrain her, she slashes him in the hand, and injury requiring 18 stitches.

When they arrest her and bring her to the interrogation room, she has a very aggressive and bad attitude, and refuses to talk to the detectives. Van Buren attempts to reach her "woman to woman" and get her to drop the tough girl act, but she is contemptuous and practically spits in Van Buren's face as she repeatedly calls her "bitch." That pisses Van Buren off, and with acid in her eyes and voice, she tells the girl that if she's going to be like that, she better "be packing a lot more than a potty mouth."

Away from the murder investigation, McCoy tells Briscoe he can't help him with his daughter's situation, despite his quid-pro-quo offer to the Brooklyn DA. Meanwhile, Carl Anderton, a wealthy and powerful New Yorker (played by Robert Vaugnn) whom we've seen in a few other episodes, endorses Judge Gary Feldman in the campaign for the office of District Attorney. He promised Schiff in an earlier episode that he would bring him down, so this appears to be his method for doing so. Schiff later admits to Anderton that he's having trouble raising money for his campaign, and he attributes this to Anderton's efforts.

Back on the murder case, Cheekbones learns more about Monica Summers through her social services and welfare case files. She discovers that she was frequently abused by her father, and had a very troubled childhood with many foster homes, etc. Cheekbones goes to visit the father at his dingy apartment, and she reluctantly enters it. The father asks if there is a reward for providing evidence against his daughter. When he learns there is, he goes in a back room, slaps around his girlfriend a little, and emerges with a crucifix that belonged to the victim. He says he bought it from his daughter for $20. Briscoe and Curtis had been looking for this crucifix since the beginning of the investigation, and it is considered a crucial piece of evidence. (I should point out that when Briscoe and Curtis first met Monica, she was wearing a crucifix, although not this one.)

After this break in the case, Briscoe visits his daughter again, and encourages her to do what she has to do to avoid jail time. He says the DA might be more willing to cut her a deal if she weren't his daughter, because the DA doesn't want to appear like he's giving favorable treatment to an officer. The daughter responds, "Being your kid just doesn't have an upside." Ouch.

When McCoy puts Summers on trial, she does something unusual for the show: she confesses mid-way through her testimony. Despite her lawyer's objections, she refuses to provide for her own defense, gets convicted, and is sentenced to death. She then refuses to appeal her death sentence. McCoy is continually suspicious that she's doing this to appear insane, but even the appeals court allows her to make her own decision on the matter, and rejects an appeal co-filed on her behalf by an ACLU-like organization and a Christian organization. (The woman has since claimed that she found Jesus in prison after six months, and considers herself born again.) When McCoy interviews her, she is a changed woman: calm and enlightened with the holy spirit, apparently. McCoy remains suspicious, but nothing is to be done, and the march towards her execution is afoot. It's obvious McCoy is troubled by this turn of events: he is in favor of the death penalty, but seems to have envisioned himself applying it to more conventional killers. Cheekbones says she has no such self-doubt, because she opposes the death penalty in all cases. Regardless of everyone's personal feelings, just after McCoy and Schiff watch a tv interview with Summers, we learn that she had been executed days before.

The episode is mainly notable for the extraordinary performance of the actress playing Monica Summers. Although it's a little over the top, she still must show wide range as she goes from a seemingly innocent bystander to an enraged killer to a born-again Christian. It so happens the actress is Isabel Gillies, who went on to play Stabler on Law & Order: SVU. Since this episode was filmed one year before she started on SVU, it would appear that this role impressed the producers of SVU quite a bit.

Posted by adm at March 4, 2004 10:01 PM

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