The Ledger

14.21 Vendetta

Giancarlo Esposito guest-stars in this well-written and richly plotted episode (14.21) in which a baseball fan who accidentally caused a local baseball team to lose a chance to get to the World Series is beaten to death in a bar by a man wielding a whiskey bottle. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Southerlyn find that proving guilt is more complicated than they initially suspect.

Plot Summary

The episode begins with a discussion amongst a group of friends in a bar that is interrupted by a fight in another area of the bar. They rush over, and find the victim, dead and bloody. His killer has fled the scene. Briscoe and Green show up, and all the witnesses describe the assailant as normal, average, etc. A few say that the victim looks familiar, though -- they just can't place his face. They check his wallet and learn his name: Brendan Donner. Briscoe and Green immediately recognize his name: he's a fan that caught a baseball that was still in play, causing the (unnamed) team to miss its chance at the Series. They recall that everyone in NY was enraged with this fan.

The dets visit his wife, who reveals just how deep that hatred ran and how it affected her husband. They recently separated because he didn't want to involve her in his ordeal any longer. They search his new apartment and find an FBI agent's business card. They visit agent Jeffrey Bauerman and learn that Donner received numerous death threats, boxes of hate mail, and a letter containing a white powdery substance. (Hence the involvement of the FBI.) As a favor to Donner, the FBI agent tapped his phone so they record any incoming threats. (The agent reveals that he wagered against the hometown team, so to him Donner was a hero.) The dets go through the phone taps and listen to a call in which someone threatens to beat him to death. They visit this person, who turns out to be innocent, and learn of a website devoted to making Donner's life hell: GetDonner.com. They check out the site. (The show's staff exerted a bit of effort to make a convincing site -- they show a message board and everything.) They learn that the site had a section that kept track of Donner spottings around the city.

None of this matters, however, because forensics was able to lift a print from the murder weapon (the bottle) after painstakingly reconstructing the bottle (by buying a bottle of the same brand, filling it with plaster, breaking it, and then placing the shards from the murder weapon around it). The prints on the bottle match Walter Grimes, a convict released from prison three months earlier. He left prison because he was exonerated of the crime he was initially convicted of: the stabbing death of a girl named Testa. The DNA on the knife supposedly used in the murder did not match Testa, so he was freed. They further learn that the lawyer who helped exonerate Testa is Rodney Fallon (perfectly played by Esposito), who leads the New York Exoneration Project, which, as the name implies, seeks to use DNA evidence to prove certain convicts are innocent. (This seems related to the Barry Scheck/Northwestern University Innocence Project.) The detectives visit Fallon who is uncooperative, even though they have a warrant for Grimes' arrest. Eventually, Fallon gives the dets Grimes' home address. They arrive with the superintendent, and Briscoe pretends he hears a "plaintive cry for help" and commands the super to let them in. They enter, but do not find Grimes. In a bit of ridiculousness, Briscoe goes to a giant copy of the Yellow Pages and says an old private detective's trick is to drop the phone book spine-first on a table, and whatever page it opens to is the page the owner last looked at. He does this, it opens up to a page full of hotels. Based on this, they apparently spend the next 6 hours visiting all the hotels on that page, and end up at a motel where the clerk recognizes Grimes from the picture. He says he checked out, saying he was headed for Providence.

They confront Fallon, who they believe knew where Grimes was and purposely misled them. He makes a deal with Van Buren to find Grimes and bring him in peacefully. Rather than wait for that to happen, they trail Fallon and wait for him to exit with Grimes. After 45 minutes and no word from Fallon, they enter the motel room, and find Fallon, tied up in the closet. Grimes has fled. Thankfully, what happens next is not as improbable as the phone book incident and is staged much more satisfyingly: The dets head down to the bus terminal, where they spot Grimes boarding a bus. Briscoe motions to Green to approach from behind, and he walks towards Grimes with a few uniformed cops behind him. Grimes sees him coming, and turns to walk away. Briscoe shouts at him to stop, but Grimes grabs a female passer-by and puts her in a sort of headlock, indicating he'll break her neck if they come any closer. Thankfully, their tactical method works, and Green (whom we see sneaking up from behind) steps up at exactly the right moment and puts his gun to Grimes head. Grimes releases the woman and surrenders (24 mins) saying, "I'm not going back. I can't go back there."

McCoy and Southerlyn meet with Grimes and Fallon, who for some reason is still his attorney, even though he was tied up by him earlier. Can you see the defense strategy coming? Yeah, me too: Fallon says that prison changed his client so that he no longer has a sense of right and wrong and cannot form criminal intent. Southerlyn asks, "So prison made him do it?" Apparently.

Our old friend Elizabeth Olivet examines Grimes to see whether he really is as insane as Fallon suggests. (Olivet looks pretty old but good.) Olivet has a testy interview with Grimes, during which Grimes says he attacked Donner not because of the foul ball but because "he laid hands on me." Olivet determines that he is not insane, but she can foresee Fallon's experts testifying otherwise. Fallon represents his defense strategy to McCoy, who is a little worried.

He and Southerlyn set out to prove that Grimes was criminal-minded before he ever went to prison for the Testa killing. Since he was never convicted of any other crimes, they try to get his juvenile record opened, which a judge allows. They learn that when he was a teenager, Grimes was arrested for a liquor store robbery, but was turned loose by the arresting officer. They talk to the store owner who says he remembers the robber was Hispanic, not white like Grimes. They visit Officer Daniels, the arresting officer (who is now a detective with whom Green once worked). Daniels says Grimes did it, regardless of what the victim said.

Meanwhile, they learn that the blood on the knife didn't match the Testa girl, but it does match another young murder victim named Julie Sayer. They learn from the original lead detective on the Testa case that the location of the knife was discovered via an anonymous tip. When they searched the location, guess who found the knife all those years ago? That's right: Officer Daniels, who had arrested the Grimes previously for the robbery but turned him loose. Hmmm. This is where the episode gets pretty interesting, because it's difficult to figure out where everything is going. When Green visits Daniels to learn the truth about the whole situation, Daniels eventually admits that when he originally arrested Grimes, he beat him up to get a confession, and his lieutenant (now dead) ordered that Grimes be released. Daniels further confesses that he held on to the knife with Sayers' blood on it "for a rainy day" so he could later frame him when the opportunity came. Eventually, Testa was killed and her knife wounds were consistent with the Sayers knife and her blood was the same type (O+). Since DNA evidence didn't exist back then, no one would be the wiser. Daniels placed the knife somewhere, called in the location as anonymous tip, and recovered the knife during the "search." He says he did it because he knew Grimes had killed Sayers but gotten off because of the beating, so he wanted to "balance the scales."

McCoy, SS, and Fallon meet to discuss all this. Fallon says the knife, the confession, and everything else are "poisonous fruit," and inadmissible. McCoy says, Let's let a judge decide.

They revisit the original detective in the Sayers case who says that they searched every storm drain in the neighborhood where Sayers was found. This, improbably, allows McCoy to argue that the knife is subject to the "inevitable discovery" rule, meaning that the police would have discovered it even without the confession.

Fallon disputes this point to McCoy and a judge in what is one the greatest non-McCoy monologues in the history of the series. As he strides quickly down the hall with McCoy and the judge, he argues that the DA's office and police department have violated Grimes' Sixth, Fifth, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights (in that order). (Here is an MP3 of this dialogue. It is truly amazing -- it's as if it came from another Giancarlo Esposito project: The Usual Suspects.) Despite Fallon's eloquence, McCoy wins the point, and the knife is allowed into evidence. McCoy and Daniels have a great conversation about the nature of guilt, and we move into the trial. (48 mins.)

At trial (for the Sayers case), Fallon says that Daniels has a "vendetta" of Grimes (hence the name of the episode). After his testimony, Daniels confronts Green and tries to blame him for all his troubles. As if. Soon after, McCoy gets Grimes to say, in a rage, "I never killed anybody." But of course he did: he killed Donner, the baseball fan. Whoops! McCoy now forces him to confess to the Sayer murder (off screen), which finally establishes that he had a criminal mind before he ever went to prison. There goes his defense in the Donner murder, too! He allocutes to the Sayer murder, and says it was a simple matter where he pursued the girl, she said no, so he stabbed her. He is sentenced to 5 years (on top of the 20 or so he already served for the Testa murder) and also pleads to Man I on the Donner murder, and receives a consecutive sentence of 7.5 to 15 years.

After the trial, Green visits a teary Grimes in a bar, where Grimes reveals he has been "encouraged to take an early retirement." Grimes, though, is unrepentant, saying he did what he felt he had to do.

Analysis

This episode re-imagines the case of Steve Bartman, the Chicago Cubs fan who tried to catch a foul ball that was still in play, a move which interfered with a Cubs outfielder and cost the team an exceedingly rare chance to get to the World Series in 2003. He wasn't killed, but he certainly was reviled.

The episode is very well written, despite a couple of improbable plot devices, and it seems strange that so much hinges on proving Grimes was criminally minded before he ever went to prison. Still, the scene where Briscoe and Green confront Grimes at the bus station is one of the more satisfying we've seen in a while, and coupled with the extraordinary monologue from Esposito/Fallon, the episode stands above many other offerings from the series.

The episode meditates quite a bit on the nature of guilt. Briscoe discusses the issue with Fallon, arguing that many cons who are described as "innocent" have committed several other felonies for which they are not tried. Fallon rebuts his comments, saying it's not right to convict people of crimes they didn't commit. Later, McCoy tries to get Daniels to admit he feels guilty over framing Grimes, but he refuses (until he takes the stand). Furthermore, the Esposito monologue about the violations of his client's rights raises an interesting question: even if all these rights have been violated, isn't a person still, ultimately, guilty? The ep does a nice job of exploring these types of questions without trying to offer a simple answer.

Casting notes: as I mentioned, the brilliant Giancarlo Esposito plays a prominent role. This qualifies as what I call a "universe collision" because Esposito previously played a Detective Mike Giardello on Homicide: Life on the Street, and we know from the cross-over episodes that L&O and H:LOTS exist in the same world (and I should add that Esposito has appeared in two previous L&O episodes, too): therefore actors should not re-appear as different characters. Unfortunately, L&O violates this rule all the time, but I guess this time I am happy they did, because Esposito brings so much to the episode. I think this might be the best performance by a guest-starring actor playing an attorney since the terrific episode with Gregory Hines. (Of course, Peter Jacobson as the recent recurring character "Randy Dworkin" is also very good.) Finally, Carolyn McCormack's Elizabeth Olivet has a prominent role in this episode. She apparently is once again the favored police psychologist, now that JK Simmons (Emil Skoda) has left for another show on CBS.

ps. While this was taping, the NYC blog Gothamist was able to visit the set, and take some great pictures, included one of the reconstructed whiskey bottle/murder weapon.

Posted by adm at April 23, 2004 11:53 PM

Comments

Post a comment

validate