The Ledger

5.3 Blue Bamboo

Somewhat boring episode (5.3) in which a Japanese man is shot dead in a New York hotel, and it looks like an American woman is responsible. Briscoe and Logan investigate.

The episode begins with the Japanese man staggering down the stairs of the hotel's lobby and collapsing. At first they think he had a heart attack, but one of the detectives notice he has a small bullet hole under his arm. They trace his business contacts and reasons for being in New York, and eventually learn that he was a night club owner in Japan who hired blonde American women to sing and, eventually, serve as prostitutes. Briscoe and Logan track down some of these women, and find one who claims that the victim was abusive to her while she was over there. She becomes their main suspect, but when they arrest her, her feminist attorney adopts "battered woman syndrome" as her affirmative defense, claiming that the victim kept the defendant in such a state of fear that she had to kill him.

The defense begins to fall apart when she testifies and on cross-examination, Kincaid has her read excerpts from books about battered women that mirror her testimony word-for-word, indicating that she memorized and rehearsed these passages. McCoy is worried that the jury will acquit her based on their anti-Japanese sentiment. (Remember the old days when we were culturally biased against the Japanese! Boy, we sure were worried they owned everything.) Japanese bias is a major theme of the episode, and it seems like a really alien concept as you watch the episode now. Anyway, the judge issues avery strongly worded instructions to the jury about setting their biases aside, but it doesn't do any good: the woman is acquitted.

Casting note: Aida Turturto, John Turturro's sister, and Janice on The Sopranos, is a barmaid in the episode. Also, Laura Linney playes the defendant. And finally, Ron Orbach plays the recurring defense attorney Max Hellman.

Posted by adm at March 18, 2004 11:36 PM

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