The Ledger

5.7 Precious

In this dead baby episode (5.7), a couple is apparently responsible for the death of their infant, who they initially claim was kidnapped. Then it seems they may have killed two earlier babies, too. Briscoe, Logan, McCoy, and Kincaid investigate.

The episode begins with two cops in a park discussing a trip to the Grand Canyon, when a man approaches them and says he dozed off in the park for 5 minutes and someone stole his baby. Initally, Briscoe and Logan focus their investigation on a bald man seen with a camera in the park earlier that day. But they check him out and he's not responsible -- he was just interested in picking up nannies. This leads the detectives to focus their attention on the father. His super says the dad has a bad back, but the detectives know he had supposedly walked 30 blocks with the baby on his back earlier in the day. They become suspicious, and bring him in for questioning, giving him the old good cop/bad cop routine. Logan shouts at him, then Briscoe tries to appear sympathetic, appealing to their shared backgrounds as fathers. After quite a lot of this, the father admits he buried the kid over by the Hudson River.

They dig him up, but the ME can't establish whether the baby was suffocated or just died of accidental crib death. They check out the baby's doctor, who reveals that the parents had two other kids who had died of apparent crib death. Whoa! Now it turns into a real murder investigation, because they want to prove that the couple are essentially serial killers, except their own children are their victims.

Evidence is hard to come by, however. They talk to the sister of the father, who blames the mother and says she was always looking for sympathy. They also talk to an expert on crib death who says the deaths seem to her to be homicidal, and they talk to a psychiatrist who explains that the mother appears to suffer from Munchausen Syndrome, aka Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome, in which a parent sickens their child to gain sympathy. (I think this condition is well-known now, but lesser known, at least in the mainstream, when they filmed this episode.)

During all this investigation, the detectives and DAs try to get the parents to talk, but they are pretty creepy. The mom comes off as a deranged woman trying to appear normal, and the husband is obsessively defensive of his wife. McCoy approaches him at his work place and lays out photos of the man's 3 dead babies, but to no avail. (By the way, I think this might be the first ever L&O use of this now-common technique of getting the suspect to break by showing him photos of the victims. Vincent uses it all the time on Criminal Intent.)

Against Schiff's advice ("Don't expect it to be a walk in the summer rain"), the case goes to trial without much evidence, and the judge bars McCoy from bringing up the deaths of the two previous babies. The mother accidentally mentions her "experience" as a mother, opening the door to such a discussion, but the judge prohibits McCoy from mentioning the other babies' deaths. Oh well. The jury, therefore, is hung. McCoy wants to retry her, but Schiff says no way, make a deal. McCoy then says he'll make a plea deal on the condition that the mother get sterilized. Kincaid and he have a heated discussion about the morality of this, and McCoy actually proposes it to the judge, who of course refuses it.

However, the necessary plot twist comes along, and all is saved: the woman is pregnant again already. The husband is upset and rolls on his wife, telling McCoy et al. how she killed the baby. McCoy accepts a plea on Man I.

The episode is notable, I guess, because of its treatment of Munchausen-by-proxy, a syndrome that began showing up in a lot of tv shows around this time. Schiff is reluctant to raise the issue at a jury trial: "Munchausen, Shumchausen!" he sniffs brilliantly, rejecting the idea before even really considering it. What a line.

Posted by adm at March 26, 2004 08:04 PM

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