The Ledger

14.15 Veteran's Day

The episode begins with the discovery of the young man's body. He was strangled to death. Briscoe and Green seek witnesses, but don't find many. They do, however, catch a break when the medical examiner discovers a shirt button in the boy's stomach, a piece of evidence which becomes crucial later on. They also talk to the boy's girlfriend, who says they were soul mates and gives them insight into the boy's seemingly contradictory personality: he was a peace activist, yet he was prone to confrontation. She tells them that he was active in a demonstration against a Halliburton-like company that was capitalizing on the war in Iraq. They also track down a mailman, Kenny Silva, who says he had gotten into an argument with the kid earlier that day, and they find a police man who had arrested the kid after the argument, but let him go because he didn't want to deal with the hassle of pressing charges. The cop who drove the kid back to his car, however, seems like a suspect when he eventually admits that he yelled at the kid and scared him. The cop even told his partner he vandalized the kid's SUV, but it turns out someone else was responsible for that. That "someone else" is another war veteran who admits the vandalism, but says he was working underground at the time of the murder. (For some reason, the cops never check his alibi, which makes no sense.)

Eventually, we learn that the victim had several prior run-ins with Silva, including one at which he argued against naming a street after Silva's son, who had been killed in Iraq. By coincidence, the kid ran into Silva at a bar, and Silva eventually admits following him out of the bar and killing him, in the presence of the other veteran, who supposedly was underground at the time. However, he offers the defense that his extreme emotional disturbance -- resulting from his grief and anger -- led him to kill the boy. At the rather boring trial, McCoy establishes that Silva knew what he was doing. He asks the judge to throw out the EED defense, but it doesn't work. The jury goes on to find Silva not guilty of Murder 2, and they jury gets hung on the manslaughter 1 charge. Unable to get the jury to come to a conclusion, the judge declares a mistrial, so Silva goes free. Doesn't seem likely, but again, this is the sort of logical silliness I've come to expect from recent seasons of the show.

Casting note: Kenny Silva is played by Paul Calderon, an under-rated, under-used character actor who has been in a million things, including several other episodes. I mainly remember him as Jesus in the Spike Lee film Clockers.

Posted by adm at March 16, 2004 01:53 AM

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