The Ledger

8.24 Monster: Jamie Ross's Last Episode

A lot goes on in this episode (8.24), the finale of season 8: McCoy prepares to face the disciplinary committee, to answer charges brought against him by the judge running against Schiff for the office of District Attorney, Briscoe considers doing something unethical that might lead to the murder of his daughter's killer, Cheekbones (aka Jamie Ross) announces her resignation, and Van Buren confronts department brass about apparent racism and their desire to see her quit.

The episode begins with the discovery of a 10-year-old comatose black girl in the basement of a housing project. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, retracing the girl's steps and eventually coming up with enough information to release a sketch of the suspect. The detectives ask Van Buren to get more officers working on the case, but she is unable to. She eventually visits her boss, who refuses to assign her more help. In a heated conversation, she accuses the department of racism, and then suggests she can't get the resources she needs because her superiors are upset with her over the lawsuit she filed. (The lawsuit charges that she was passed over for a promotion in favor of a white woman with less seniority.) Her boss tells her that the dept. brass wants her to quit. She leaves without the promise of help she came looking for.

The community takes matters into their own hands however, and a the detectives are called to a scene where a mob assaulted a man names Stokes who they believe attacked the little girl. He is badly beaten, but instead of taking him to the hospital, Briscoe and Curtis bring him down to the precinct and interrogate him, even though they say he is not under arrest. They question him, but can't get enough to make any charges stick. They send him to the hospital with a police officer, and in the meantime find a witness (a small-time drug dealer) who shakily identifies the man in a photo aray. As he makes the ID, it's clear he's picking up on the influence of Briscoe and Curtis who are right next to him. The detectives go back to the hospital and arrest Stokes.

With the election looming, Schiff tells McCoy to tell the police to get a confession from Stokes no matter what it takes. Briscoe and Curtis get Stokes in the interrogation room, and "doubletalk" him into signing away his Miranda rights, even though he comes very close to asking for a lawyer. ("What happened to that lawyer I asked about this morning?" he says.) After telling him he's going to get thrown in with the general population in "the Tombs," the temporary holding cells at Police Plaza, the detectives wrangle a confession out of their suspect, but it's clear he's under severe distress.

McCoy and Cheekbones are fearful that they will lose a motion to get this statement suppressed, and McCoy tells Cheekbones to pick up a copy of People v. Davis, a case that is frequently referred to on the show. At the suppression hearing, a sympathetic judge rules in favor of McCoy.

Schiff tells McCoy to make sure the case is in order, because he doesn't want "another October Surprise." McCoy explains to Cheekbones that the first October Surprise is that Schiff's opponent, Judge Feldman, is charging that Schiff no longer has control of his office, and that he has brought McCoy up on charges that he'll have to face before the disciplinary committee. The charges involve the time that McCoy advised an airline to send a stewardess who was a witness in a case to another country where she would be beyond the reach of defense attorneys who might find her testimony valuable. (This incident occurred in an episode involving a drunk driver -- see Under the Influence.

Regardless, everyone continues with their investigation, and Cheekbones learns that Stokes is on the drug Depo-provera, which is supposed to suppress the urge to commit sexual acts. She also thinks there is a problem with the statement of the security guard who found the girl: his timeline doesn't make sense. As Briscoe and Curtis question the repairman who supposedly was with the security guard at the time of the assault, they learn that the two weren't actually together. Further investigation reveals that the security guard had access to the same kind of roach spray that was found sprayed in the victim's mouth. So, now they have a news suspect, but not much evidence pinning him to the crime.

As McCoy goes to court to dismiss the charges against Stokes, he faces Judge Feldman, the same judge who is accusimg him of ethics violations and who is running against Schiff. Feldman takes the unusual step of calling for the new suspect to be arraigned in front of him, and tells the clerk he wants to try to the case himself. (Usually cases are assigned to judges randomly.) McCoy objects, but Feldman insists, and tells McCoy to watch his step. McCoy angrily confronts the judge in the hallway later, but Feldman is resolute.

Around the same time, Cheekbones informs McCoy that she has been called to testify before the disciplinary committee about McCoy, and McCoy visits the attorney who will represent him. McCoy seems fearful of the consequences, and his lawyer tells him he can always quit to protect Schiff. Shortly thereafter, Cheekbones tells McCoy that she's resigning, and then McCoy tells Schiff that he wants to quit, too. Schiff tells McCoy, "Don't get all weepy on me," and says he'll refuse to accept his resignation. and that McCoy should get back to concentrating on the case at hand.

McCoy checks in on the victim at the hospital. She is still in a coma, and her doctor says she is unlikely to come out of it. McCoy then tells Cheekbones he wants to talk to the doctor alone: he tells the doctor that when the defense attorney calls, he wants him to tell the attorney that the girl will soon revive. The doctor objects, but McCoy seems to believe that he'll do what he's asked. McCoy then tells Cheekbones that he's adding the girl to the witness list in an effort to pressure the suspect to accept a plea deal. The gambit works, and the suspect pleads, telling McCoy enough about the case to indicate that he is indeed guilty. At first, Judge Feldman refuses to accept the plea arrangement, but McCoy convinces him the judge will take the heat if the case goes to trial and falls apart.

At this point, the episode ties up all its loose ends. McCoy wishes Schiff good luck in the vote, and Schiff goes out for a drink, where he runs into Carl Anderton (played by Robert Vaughn), a supremely wealthy and powerful man who got so angry with Schiff in a previous episode he swore he'd ruin Schiff. It's apparent that Carl is the primary backer of Feldman, but he seems to realize that Schiff's success with this case made it less likely that he would lose. Next, we cut to Briscoe's daughter's funeral. On her tombstone, her date of death is listed as 3/4/1998. As the service ends, Briscoe meets with a detective who he thinks might be able to help get a case dismissed against a burglar. This burglar told Briscoe earlier in the episode that if Brsicoe helped him out by making some evidence disappear, then the burglar could arrange the death of Danny Jones, the drug dealer apparently responsible for his daughter's funeral. Finally, we follow McCoy to the disciplinary hearing. Through the latter half of the episode, he kept telling people he was "covered," which indicated he thought he had a solution to avoid being reprimanded. As Cheekbones exits the hearing, we learn from McCoy's reaction that this is what he was counting on. But as Cheekbones approaches him, we learn from her stony, pained expression and silence that she must have told the committee all about McCoy's ethically questionable tactics. McCoy understands this too, and looks shocked and worried. The episode ends with Cheekbones marching off and exiting through some tall doors, and McCoy entering the hearing.

The episode is notable for all of the backstory it provides about Van Buren, Schiff, McCoy and Briscoe. It is also another strong example of McCoy's justice-at-all-costs credo, as he engages in ethically questionable behavior even as he's under invesigation for previous misconduct.

6.4 Jeopardy

In this episode (6.4), McCoy and Kincaid think they have a strong case against a man accused of a triple murder, but things take an unexpected turn when a judge keeps ruling against them without apparent reason.

The episode begins at the scene of a triple homicide at a computer magazine's editorial offices. Briscoe and Curtis at first focus their investigation on disgruntled former employees, and then turn their attention to a computer programmer whose game was savagely, but prematurely, reviewed in the pages of the magazine. The programmer had a pending lawsuit against the magazine, and although the magazine had few assets, the programmer's attorney discovered that the magazine's editor, who is also one of the murder victim's, was a member of a wealthy family that owns a major food distribution company. The lawyer uncovered what he thought was a shell company that was used to fund the magazine from the coffers of the food company. When Briscoe and Curtis investigate, however, they learn that the shell company was actually set up to pay $10,000 a month to the love of the editor's brother, Peter. The theory of the crime is that Peter was angry with his brother for getting him involved in the litigation, and was so enraged over this and several other issues, that he went to the magazine's offices and killed him and two other employees who witnessed the initial murder.

Briscoe and Green arrest Peter (who is in a tux at the time), and he quickly hires the powerful and talented defense attorney, Norman Rothenberg, who has appeared in several other episodes. Rothenberg takes the case to trial, and manages to get both a crucial forensics report and the testimony of the girlfriend ruled inadmissible. McCoy is shocked at these developments, but not as shocked as when the judge throws out all charges against the defendant.

Schiff is surprised, too, and concerned. He meets the judge for drinks at one of those wood-paneled lounges he always meets other power brokers in, and tells the judge (who he's known for many years) that he disagrees with his handling of the case. The judge doesn't budge, but mentions it passing that he's gotten divorced recently and had to sell his boat. Schiff does some research of his own, and finds a case (People vs. Carruthers) that Benjamin Stone (McCoy's predecessor) prosecuted in which the judge made the opposite ruling that he made in this case, even though the circumstances were similar. This alarms Schiff who comes to suspect that the judge is corrupt, and the asks McCoy to look into it.

McCoy does, and he discovers that the judge and Peter's father went to Yale together back in the 1950s. He also learns that the defendant's mother helped the judge get a large, low-interest loan from her bank. They bring the judge in for questioning, and place him in the interrogation room. And guess who shows up to interrogate him! That's right: Adam Schiff himself! Schiff dismisses all the cops from the room, and even gets the judge's lawyer to leave. He quickly shrugs off the judge's denials and gets him to own up to what he's done, namely, accepting a bribe to make the murder case go away. He also rolls on the defendant's mother. McCoy uses this statement to build a case for bribery against the mom, and he wants to leverage that case to co-erce a plea from the son. Before he can do so, however, he has to show the defendant that the laws of double jeopardy do not protect him from being prosecuted again.

McCoy and Rothenberg head off to argue the merits of their respective cases to Judge Rivera (one of my favorite judges) who accepts McCoy's argument that double-jeopardy does not attach when the first trial is rigged. With this ruling on his side, McCoy gets Peter to accept a plea deal, on the condition that McCoy drop the charges against the mother.

The episode ends with Schiff marveling at McCoy on getting around double jeopardy (a task he likens to climbing Mt. Everest in your shorts on a cold day), and finally receiving a phone call informing him that the corrupt judge killed himself.

The episode is notable mainly for the involvement of the corrupt judge, the mention of Ben Stone, and Schiff's trip to the interrogation room, which as far as I know, is unprecedented.

Shadow

In this episode (8.8), McCoy and Cheekbones use unusual legal tactics to uncover a corruption scheme in the court system that led to a the murder of a bailbondsman who discovered the scheme and wanted a cut of the action.

The episode begins with two women discovering the body of the bailbondsman in his office. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and learn that one of his clients had skipped bail, and his mother risked losing the restaurant she put up for collateral as a result. To track down this suspect, they use an elaborate ruse involving a payphone and his girlfriend, in which Curtis calls her and pretends he's a doctor. These leads to the location where the fugitive is staying. They break down the door, and as they're taking the suspect into custody, Briscoe opens up a gym bag that belongs to the suspect and discovers a wad of cash and a gun.

By interrogating the suspect and his girlfriend, Briscoe and Green learn that the man's lawyer, Arvin Baker, is corrupt, and accepts bribes to fix cases, an arrangement that obviously suggests other participants within the legal system. Cheekbones gets on board and begins investigating the lawyer's cases over the last several years. She is unable to come up with a common thread, and McCoy and Schiff are both mortified to learn of the corruption. Cheekbones proposes an elaborate sting to prove that Baker is corrupt. She suggests that they stage a phony prosecution against their original murder suspect, and then record him taking a bribe solicitation from Baker. They can then follow the money through the system and find out who else is corrupt. Schiff isn't wild about it, but he permits it to go forward, so long as they can find a judge to approve. McCoy makes his case to a judge, who permits the phony prosecution to go forward. She also appoints a "shadow counsel" to represent the suspect's interests during the proceedings, since his original counsel is likely tainted and is of course the subject of the investigation.

The ploy works, but as Cheekbones assembles the phony prosecution, she must work with another ADA who was responsible for the original prosecution of the defendant on the drug charges he ran out on. This ADA, Harmon, isn't used to murder prosecutions, and when he prepares Briscoe for his testimony at a suppression hearing about the gun, he seems to be encouraging him to testify in such a way that would aid the defense, not the prosecution. Cheekbones watches this happen, and it is apparent that she is suspicious that this ADA, who is also a friend of hers, is somehow involved in the corruption.

At the suppression hearing, Harmon seems ham-handed in his efforts to keep the gun from getting suppressed, and Baker asks Briscoe very specific questions that seem to indicate he had talked to Harmon about Briscoe's answers during the prep session. Reaction shots of Cheekbones reveal her suspicions. It appears that Harmon is going to lose the hearing without much a fight at all, but at the last second, he recalls Briscoe, and asks leading questions that give Briscoe a chance to justify the search of the gym bag. Unfortunately for Harmon, the questions are so leading that they reveal an insider's knowledge of the crime scene from the bailbondsman's murder: he has information that only the killer could know, since it wasn't included in the police report. In asking the questions, he inadvertently fingers himself as the murderer, a fact which is not lost on a shocked Cheekbones.

But it's not over yet. When the trial judge learns of the phony prosecution against the original suspect, he throws out all the evidence that came from it, and severely chastises McCoy in the courtroom and in chambers for his actions. McCoy tells him the case "isn't a civics lesson" and that he was just doing his job, and he doesn't appreciate being threatened. Nonetheless, they must get additional evidence against Harmon. In reviewing the evidence of the case, Briscoe finds a business card for a Harlem travel agency. Cheekbones visits the agency and learns that Harmon's wife occassionally ran errands there, errands that were involved in the transfer of the proceeds from the corruption scheme to offshore accounts. Cheekbones confronts her and the wife admits her involvement. There's the corroboration. Predictably, McCoy and Cheekbones confront Harmon with this information, and after a bunch of "How could you?" invectives aimed at Cheekbones, he reluctantly accepts a plea bargain.

Casting note: Dominic Chianese, who went on to play Uncle Junior on The Sopranos, plays the judge who suppresses the evidence from the phony prosecution. Also, Arvin Baker is played by Bruce MacVittie, a character actor who tends to play neurotic, nervous people, such as the one who threw Vincent D'Onofrio into the path of a subway train in a somewhat famous episode of Homicide: Life on the Street.

This episode's title refers to the shadow defense attorney assigned to the original suspect, but I think more strongly refers to the "shadow" in Harmon's character which darkened his conscience and the office he held.

Tragedy on Rye

In this episode (13.4), a young woman is found murdered in her apartment by a delivery man. She was an unemployed actress, but she had over $50,000 in stereo equipment in her apartment. Briscoe and Green investigate, trying to establish why someone would want to kill her. They visit the comedy club on Staten Island where she worked nights, go through her locker there, and find some traffic tickets that reveal there is traffic camera right by her building. During a visit to the DMV to inspect the camera's records at the time of the shooting, they find a shot of a couple of tourists filming the victim's building directly. They track the tourists down via the plate on their rental car, and eventually get hold of the video tape (which the couple had sold to a local tv station). On the tape, they see three men loading some of the woman's stereo equipment into an SUV. Via a sticker on the SUV, the track two of the three men to a racetrack and arrest them. They profess their innocence until their high-powered, high-cost lawyer shows up. The lawyer is known for defending wealthy drug dealers, which these suspects aren't. Green dresses up like a drug dealer and visits the lawyer's firm, where he tricks the receptionist into revealing the name of the man ("Danny Odem") who is paying for the lawyer. Somehow, this is enough for them to get a search warrant, which they execute with guns drawn. When Odem shows up unexpectedly and startles the detectives, Briscoe shouts "Police! Don't move!" but Odem reaches for his waist anyway. Green flies at him and beats the crap out of him as he brings him to the ground. It turns out, though, that the man was merely reaching for his cellphone.

What follows is a game of legal one-upsmanship, as Odem's attorney threatens a federal civil rights lawsuit against the department and Briscoe and Green, and DA Arthur Branch retaliates by holding a press conference and expressing full confidence that (a) the suspects are guilty, (b) Green did the right thing, and (c) the death penalty is called for.

To make the civil rights lawsuit go away, Southerlyn visits the only witness to the detectives' search of Odem's apartment, a neighbor who doesn't want to get involved but eventually admits that he heard the detectives announce themselves as police officers. Southerlyn and McCoy expect Branch to take the death penalty of the table at this point, but refuses. McCoy says he doesn't like getting "sandbagged by anyone," meaning he thinks Branch mislead him about how seriously he wanted to pursue the death penalty. Southerlyn has even deeper misgivings, and you half expect her to drop out of the case.

Despite their almost non-existent evidence, McCoy and Southerlyn bring the first degree murder case to trial. The defense tries to show that the victim was a drug dealer herself, and they bring in a forensic accountant who uses her cell phone records and financial profile to suggest that she dealt drugs. I'm not sure what bearing that has on whether she was murdered in the first degree or not, but whatever.

Regardless, McCoy gets his conviction, and it sure looks like all three defendants will be executed. In preparing for sentencing, McCoy reviews the evidence, particularly the phone logs, and discovers one person who called very frequently, and then stopped calling immediately after the murder, indicating he knew she was dead. This, too, seems enough for the search warrant, which Briscoe and Green execute, and find this new suspect (apparently a drug dealer) along with the murder weapon. Off camera, he seeks a plea bargain, and it is then apparent to everyone that the original three defendants are not guilty. This prompts a bit of soul searching on the part of McCoy and Branch, and Southerlyn is disgusted by the whole thing, a point she makes by refusing to go eat steak with the men.

This is episode is an example of a disturbing trend in the series in the last few years: much time is spent with the characters turning against each other as they debate the various viewpoints of whatever themes the episode deals with, and the plot twists seem designed to make a dramatic point instead of merely making for good story telling. Couldn't we see that these men would turn out to be innocent? In the older episodes, the episode simply wouldn't have developed the way this one would have. Once it became apparent that the men might not be guilty, some new suspect would have been identified -- 35 or 40 minutes in, not in the last 3 minutes of the episode. One of the joys of the older episodes is watching the thorough investigative process at work. This episode featured no such investigation: the men were located, and this seemed to be the extent of the effort to connect them to the case. It feels weak to the viewer before the case ever reaches the courtroom, and this fact makes it less dramatically engaging. To reiterate, the episode steers towards making a point about how guilt in death penalty cases is not always assured, even when you get a conviction, but didn't we already know that? Disappointing.

Little bit of backstory: when the civil rights lawsuit gets raised, Green mentions again that he has a "history" of unwarranted violence, a fact we've known since his first appearance. Also, when McCoy questions Branch's credentials as a New Yorker, he retorts, "Twenty years and still a carpetbagger," meaning that he's lived in the city for 20 years but is considered an outsider.

The episode is based on the so-called "Carnegie Deli Murders" which occurred in NYC a few years ago. Some small-time drug dealers and their acquiantances (including the friend of a friend of mine) were murdered by some other small-time drug dealers above the famous Carnegie Deli. As in the episode, one of the victims was an actress who was in a movie "with all the dancing kids," i.e., Dirty Dancing. In real life, the killers were sentenced to life sentences, not death.

S. Epatha Merkerson to Star in HBO Movie

This article says S. Epatha Merkerson, aka Lt. Anita Van Buren, will star in Lackawanna Blues, a film about eccentric characters in a rooming house.

In Memory Of

In this episode (2.7), Cerreta and Logan attempt to solve the 31-year-old murder of an 8-year-old boy found behind a brick wall in an apartment building undergoing renovation. After contacting one of the detectives who originally worked on the case, and who has a sharp recollection of the details, they focus their investigation on a gay couple who lived in the building where the boy was found. One of the men is still living, however, and when the detectives track him down in a convalescent home, he tells them to "go to hell," and is admanant that he had nothing to do with the death and that he is only a suspect because he is gay.

Using power and telephone company billing information, they track down other people who lived in the building, including an elderly couple whose (now adult) daughter was a playmate of the victim. When the detectives find the daughter and tell her they found the boy's body, she acts in an erratic fashion and promptly faints. When she wakes up, she tells Cerreta and Logan some things that makes them think she knows more than she is revealing. She says she remembers the colors red and blue, but doesn't know why. Shortly thereafter they visit her again at the flower shop where she works, but she is reluctant to talk.

Logan asks staff psychiatrist Elizabeth Olivet to contact her, but she refuses, saying it would inappropriate. At just that moment, however, the woman turns up at the police station, apparently motivated by guilt, and Logan introduces her to Olivet. The two speak at length (off camera) and Olivet is convinced she has additional information, but the woman refuses to meet again with Olivet. A visit to the woman's parents produces no more information, and neither does the detectives' request that the parents ask her to speak with Olivet again. Nonetheless, the woman eventually agrees to talk to Olivet again, and the two of them and the detectives take a walk around the neighborhood where the crime occurred, ultimately arriving back in the apartment where the woman was the day of the murder. As she steps into where the bathroom used to be, she is overwhelmed by the sudden memory of something she saw: her father washing blood out of his sweater.

So now the woman's father becomes the suspect, but neither the detectives not Stone and Robinette have any physical evidence tying the father to the crime. All they have is the daughter's memory. The research the man's background, and eventually learn that he was fired from his job as a VP at an insurance company because he drank too much. They contact one of his old drinking buddies, who tells Robinette that the suspect was once charged with assaulting a teenage boy in Stamford, CT, while on a business trip. The records are sealed, but they track down the boy, who tells them what happened. This establishes a pattern, but Schiff is convinced the information will never be admissible. They are still left with just the daughter's testimony.

Meanwhile, the suspect himself is outraged and keeps threatening lawsuits against the city because he feels wrongfully accused. This particular plot thread is a bit too heavily overplayed, but it serves to establish the man's state of mind. The daughter's state of mind is also at issue, however, as it turns out she has had a rocky life filled with divorce, bad decisions, and psychiatric incidents, including a stay at a psych hospital.

Despite all this, and the efforts of her father to convince her not to testify, she shows up to testify at the trial, and manages to get through her testimony, recalling the time she saw her father wash the blood off his hands. The defense attorney verbally attacks her, but she withstands his attack, and gets a look of acknowledgement from Stone as she leaves the stand. Stone then meets with the defense attorney in his office, and offer a plea to Man I. The defense accepts, and the next day, the defendant pleads guilty and allocutes to the crime, saying he hit the boy with a lug wrench, cracking his skull.

It's not entirely believable, since it seems unlikely that the jury would have had no reasonable doubt about the man's guilt, or that he wouldn't offer any alternative explanation for the blood that was on his sweater. Nonetheless, the episode is emotionally compelling, and even a bit anxiety-inducing because of the edgy performance of the daughter.

The episode's title refers both to the detectives efforts to find justice for the boy, and to the cloudy "memory" of the daughter who must send her own father to prison.

Stalker

Very good episode (8.18) in which a young woman is heard being thrown down the stairs in her apartment building. Although she is severely injured, she survives. As Briscoe and Curtis investigate, they learn that she was being stalked by a ex-con who calls himself "Giovanni" and who seemed to have exceedingly detailed information about her life, including what kind of products she owned. They find several emails from Giovanni in her apartment, and, after talking to another detective who worked the stalking case, eventually come up with a suspect.

They bring him in, but have very little evidence to go on. They are able to hold him a bit longer by getting one of his neighbors to file a harassment claim against him, but they realize his connection to their case is tenuous at best. Meanwhile, the victim regains consciousness in the hospital. When the detectives visit her with a mugshot of Giovanni, she is unable to identify him and says she's never seen him before. This is strange because Giovanni claims they met in a bar and he gave him her number. She also gives the detectives an additional suspect, Russell Lowery, who used to follow her around when she lived in the same building.

The detectives investigate Lowery, but can't make anything stick. He has a habit of photographing women using a telephoto lens without their knowledge, but he also has an unusually deep knowledge of criminal law, and refuses to co-operate with the detectives. They manage to get a search warrant, and find photographs of the victim (and several other women) in his apartment, but they can't connect him to the attack either.

As they continue to investigate the victim's story, they come across some inconsistencies in her story, and conclude that she made up the attack as a bid to get attention and get something done about the stalker. The scene in which they confront the woman with this theory is nerve-wracking, because you can't tell if she's lying, and you fear that Briscoe and Curtis are making a terrible mistake. The woman insists that the stalker exists and that he will kill her.

Sure enough, the detectives soon get a call, and visit the woman's apartment, where they find her brutally murdered. As her killer was entering her apartment, she called 911 frantically and said that it was "the man in the picture" who was coming to kill her. By this she apparently meant the man in the mug shot Curtis and Briscoe showed her at the hospital: Giovanni. Since Lowery is still in jail at Rikers, they rule him out and go pick up Giovanni, and get a search warrant from a sympathetic judge. They don't find much in his apartment, except dozens of recordings of the opera Don Giovanni. They can't find any hard evidence linking him to the crime.

McCoy's case against Giovanni takes a turn for the worse when the defense manages to get the 911 tape suppressed, on the grounds that since the woman apparently lied about the initial attack, her assertions on the 911 tape are not credible. When Briscoe finds out, he approaches McCoy and tells him he changed his mind: he now believes the victim was actually thrown down the stairs by Giovanni, and that she didn't make up the story. It's difficult to tell whether Briscoe really believes this or is just saying it to help McCoy convict Giovanni. McCoy tells Briscoe the defense will rake Briscoe over the coals, but Briscoe says he's ready for it. At a new hearing to determine the admissibility of the tape, Briscoe stands his ground despite a grilling from the defense, and the judge re-admits the tape. Then McCoy and Cheekbones learn that Curtis doesn't share Briscoe's opinion about the case. There is a tense scene between Briscoe and Curtis, as Van Buren angrily confronts Briscoe and accuses him of perjury, and Curtis chastises Briscoe for putting him in a situation where he feels manipulated into lying. The prosecutors regroup with Schiff, who tells them to make a deal. McCoy says he already tried, but the defense attorney rejected it. Schiff says, "Do something else." McCoy concludes that he has "only one move left: Hang Rey Curtis out to dry."

McCoy does exactly that at trial. Curtis, called by the defense, says his opinion that the victim made up the original story has not changed, but McCoy gets him to admit that he spoke to the victim's employer after the alleged initial attack and asked them not to sue her, since she was indeed in imminent danger from Giovanni. McCoy destroys Curtis's credibility on the stand, and in so doing, bolsters Briscoe's. This is a bit ironic, because it seems as though Briscoe is the one who is actually stretching the truth.

Apparently, Curtis's testimony was discounted by the jury, and when they come back from deliberating, they deliver a verdict of guilty. Out on the courthouse steps, McCoy tells Curtis, "No hard feelings," and Curtis says he feels ok about telling the truth, but he hopes that Briscoe can live with himself. Briscoe shrugs and walks off.

This episode once again highlights the "justice at all costs" mentality that defines McCoy and shows that he has some spiritual kinship with Briscoe, who is also willing to bend the rules a little bit when he knows someone is guilty. It's also clear that those who work with them -- whether it's Cheekbones, Curtis, or Van Buren -- resist this way of doing things, but often seem helpless to stop it.

Damaged: Briscoe's Daughter Gets Killed

This episode (8.22), contains an event that will be referred to in countless future episodes: Det. Briscoe's daughter is killed, apparently by the drug dealers she testifies against earlier in the episode. The main storyline of the episode deals with a semi-retarded girl (with an IQ of 65) who is raped by three young men at her high school, but she denies that the incident happened against her will.

The episode begins with a shooting at the high school in which a two teachers are shot at, and one of them is severely injured. Briscoe and Green cross-check students at the school with those whose parents had gun licenses, and they wind up talking to a young girl whose father own a gun similar to the one used in the shooting. When they see the gun, they smell the gunpowder and conclude it is the weapon used in the shooting. When they interrogate the girl, she eventually reveals her motive: she wasn't shooting at the teachers, she was shooting at three boys who she says raped her older, metally-disabled sister.

Meanwhile, we learn three things about our usual investigators: Curtis applied for a transfer to a desk job, but that transfer has been put on hold; Cheekbones's boyfriend proposed to her the previous evening; and Briscoe talks to a Brooklyn detective about hius daughter's preparing to testify about a drug dealer she was criminally, and romantically, involved with. The Curtis and Cheekbone subplots are dealt with in about two lines of dialogue each, but the Briscoe/daughter story takes up a pretty good chunk of the episode.

Shortly after Briscoe talks to the detective about his daughter's impending testimony, he resumes investigating the case of the rape victim, but then goes to watch his daughter testify. She describes how she went undercover for the police, and made a drug deal. She admits using her job as a nurse to steal drugs for her boyfriend, and that she had a methamphetamine problem. Somewhat improbably, the defense attorney brings up the fact that her father is an NYPD detective who has been investigate for various things over the years. Her lawyer objects, and the judge sustains several times, but the defense attorney keeps talking. He then orders the jury to disregard this long speech by the defense. That didn't really make sense. Anyway, after her testimony, Briscoe meets her outside the courthouse and she says she feels like her life is over, that she'll forever be known as the nurse who stole drugs. Briscoe asks her to come stay with him until she gets back on her feet, but she insists her life is over, and leaves.

Back on the main case, McCoy and Cheekbones have to prove that the boys knew the girl they had sex with was retarded and therefore incapabable of consent. They eventually find a witness who says she told one of the boys this, and that boy told the others, but the defense objects to her testifying because she was an accomplice in the crime, and her testimony can't be corroborated. Nonetheless, McCoy gets his conviction of all three boys, but then something somewhat shocking happens: the judge asks the defense if they have a motion. A bit confused but then figuring it out, the defense moves that the judge set aside the verdict. He does so immediately, which he had intended to do all along. McCoy goes ballistic. He appeals, and soon after gets a chance to prove to the judge that the boys did know. He accuses the boys for creating the "hazardous environment" which led to the original shooting, and indicts them for attempted murder. This was Cheekbones's idea. They use it as a threatening device to get one boy to admit he told the others he knew the girl's mental condition. It works. But then, at the next stage of the trial, the victim takes the stand, and keeps talking after McCoy is done questioning her. The judge asks her some questions, and he then dismisses the charges against the boys! McCoy really goes crazy and shouts at the judge. When McCoy meets with the girl and her father to discuss his appeal, the father decides he doesn't want to put his daughter through all that again and wants her to retain "her dignity." McCoy and Cheekbones are both visibly upset, but that's the way the dad wants it. I'm not sure how realistic this is.

As the episode ends, we see Curtis and Briscoe pull up to what appears to be a crime scene, and a tech tells Briscoe the circumstances of the crime. We soon learn what Briscoe's manner already suggests: the victim at the crime scene they are reporting to is Briscoe's daughter. He rushes up to her, and in what is probably his most emotional scene in the history of the show, laments that she is all he had and he accuses the ADA, who is present, saying it's his fault for not getting a conviction of the man she testified against. As he stands up from the body, he says to Curtis, "What am I going to do now, Ray?" Curtis tells him, "Come stay with me." The words echo Briscoe's request to his daughter earlier in the episode, and show that Briscoe and Curtis are indeed like family to each other.

A major theme of the episode is a father's inability to protect his daughters, and both are handled evocatively by the show's somewhat intricate script. Although the plot twists strain credibility at times, the emotional wallop of episode's closing moments make up for it, and explain how Briscoe is so profoundly affected by his daughter's death.

The episode's title refers both to the damage done to the girl by her rapists as well as her insistence that she was normal, the way Briscoe's daughter felt about herself, and the effect his daughter's murder had on Briscoe.

Trade This

In this episode (10.16), a gunman storms into a brokerage firm and opens fire, injuring a secretary and killing a young broker. Briscoe and Green try to figure out who would want the broker dead. At first they think it's someone who sent him a harassing email about his nearly-naked appearance in a "Boys of Brown" calendar put out as a "college prank," or one of his clients who lost a money during the dot-com bust. When they investigate, they learn that a disgruntled client has been missing since the shooting. They put out a notice on his car's license plate, and it gets reported at JFK's long-term parking. The man is found dead inside, shot by his own hand.

From here, the detectives, McCoy, and Carmichael dig deeper, and learn that although the shooter was apparently lost some money, there were others who had motive to see him killed. The victim had recently settled a sexual harassment suit against his employer for $2 million. At first it appears that this was related to the calendar email, but McCoy and a forensic technician learn that the email was inserted into the system, and its data was altered to make it appear that it arrived earlier than it actually did. This leads McCoy to believe that the settlement pay-off was actually a way of bribing the victim because he knew something. Further investigation shows that the victim knew of the firm's habit of "pumping and dumping" certain stocks as a way of making a quick profit.

They bring in the firm's founder, who says that he was forced to take this aggressive, and illegal, action because of his firm's involvement with....the mob. But it turns out another partner at the firm had been bilking the mob out of $4 million, and the senior members of the mob family involved had just learned of this. This partner arranged for the death of the victim, but was himself in great danger for the mob.

This plot twist puts the DA's office in the unusual position of having to portray the mob as a victim of a crime, instead of the perpretor. The prosecution's witnesses, therefore, have a lot of credibility issues (which the defense is quick to point out), but McCoy believes he can make the case based on additional evidence that does not directly concern the mob.

Although the episode's plot doesn't quite hold up under close investigation, it's an entertaining and fairly well-written sotry that holds your interest throughout.

Couple of quick casting notes: Michael Gross, the dad on Family Ties, shows up here as the founder of the brokerage firm, and the guy who plays the head of the New York family on The Sopranos plays the head of the family here.

4.20 Nurture

In this episode (4.20), a ten-year-old girl is reported missing by a friend from school. Her irresponsible foster mother didn't report her, even though she was missing for two nights. A visit to her alcoholic natural mother yields little information, but after going through some of the girl's things and talking to her principal, Logan and Briscoe begin to get the idea that a volunteer teacher at her school may be somehow involved. The woman appears a bit deceptive when they talk to her, so they get a limited search warrant to look for the girl, but to no avail. Eventually, as the evidence mounts that the teacher is involved, the get a more extensive search warrant and find that the woman has constructed a concealed room in the basement. Logan looks in a closet and discovers a hatch leading to it, and finds the girl hidden there.

The girl has not been harmed in any way. The teacher claims she kidnapped the girl to protect her from her foster mother and the foster mother's abusive boyfriend. Stone begins to think that the woman is not entirely sane and he doesn't want to prosecute her. For some reason, instead of just dropping the charges, Stone pushes for a psych exam to determine the woman's competency. Olivet talks to her and determines that the woman seems to have delusions that the girl she kidnapped is actually her own biological daughter. The woman at one point actually had a daughter, but she died when she was 9 months old. Despite Olivet's findings, the woman is deemed competent to stand trial. Given the kidnap victim's circumstances, and the victim's own efforts to offer favorable testimony of the defendant's behalf, the defendant is an extremely sympathetic figure in the minds of the jurors.

Nothing particularly notable about this episode. It has some good twists, and the performances (particularly that of the young girl) are fairly decent. According to TV Tome, this episode is very loosely based on the Katie Beers case, a young girl who was kidnapped by a neighborhood man, and who later went on to be adopted by a wealthy family. The main difference is that Beers was kidnapped by an evil and abusive man, not a well-intentioned woman.

Carrier

Very well-written and well-acted episode (8.17) in which a young man with HIV knowingly infects as many young women as possible. McCoy and Cheekbones dedicate themselves to prosecuting him so they can keep him off the streets, but they encounter many legal obstacles along the way.

The episode begins with a well-to-do couple returning to their park-side apartment after a short vacation. When they get upstairs, they find numerous teenagers in various stages of consciousness and undress strewn about their apartment. When they go to their daughter's bedroom, they find her dead from a gun shot wound, and the weapon on the floor beside her.

Briscoe and Curtis arrive and question the young guests. They learn that the victim was quiet and usually kept to herself, but one witness heard her yelling in the room at 11 the previous night, and heard a gunshot, but thought it came from the street. The detectives get prints off the gun, and trace it to a petty criminal who admits he was at the party but says another good took the gun away from him and was showing it around. Eventually, the detectives learn the girl had a boyfriend. They track him down, and he says he was at the party, and was with the victim. He says she had a letter that said she had tested HIV-positive. She started screaming and then grabbed the gun and shot herself dead. They learn from another girl that the person who gave her HIV was going around bragging about how many people he was infecting.

The kid's story checks out, and they apparently drop charges against him. While discussing this with Cheekbones, Curtis says he thinks they should continue looking into the guy who is infecting people. Cheekbones agrees, and Curtis and Briscoe look into it. Soon enough, they track down the kid, who goes by the name "Twist," and arrest him. When they find him, he's about to have sex with yet another young woman, and the cops overhear him say he doesn't use condoms. When the prosecutors get enough evidence to proceed, McCoy checks in with Schiff, who is adamantly opposed to going to trial, because of the precedent it sets and because of the drubbing he'll take in the papers. There is an incredible reaction shot of Schiff when Cheekbones quotes the kid as saying, "Bareback is better." When Schiff figures out what she means, he says, in his inimitable way, "Brother..."

Despite his boss's reluctance, McCoy proceeds, but the boy's new defense attorney moves for dismissal. The judge (who Schiff later says is "what they used to call 'a confirmed bachelor'") says the charges can stand, as long as McCoy can prove intent. To do that, they need to prove Twist knew he had HIV. The medical records are sealed, and they can't get his parents or current girlfriend to talk. The judge soon dismisses the charges, but issues a stay, so that McCoy has 48 hours to appeal the decision to an appellate court. McCoy waits til Friday afternoon at 4 pm and then visits the appellate judge. He gets him to prolong the stay until the following Monday. Over the weekend, McCoy and Cheekbones get the current girlfriend to admit that Twist told her he was "sick" and that she should use a condom for "her protection." At the hearing on Monday before the appellate court, McCoy uses this statement to prove intent, and his extremely well-written argument convinces the panel of judges to side with McCoy and allow the trial to go on.

The defense attorney comes to McCoy looking for a deal, but it doesn't really matter: Twist has come down with pneumonia, and is very ill. As the episode ends, he only has a short time to live.

As I mentioned above, this episode is well-written and very acted, both by the regular cast members and the guest stars. There are several memorable scenes, including one in which an attorney for the department of health argues to a judge that Cheekbone's motion to open medical records should be denied. In another good scene, a gay rights advocate angrily confronts Schiff about the precedent the case will set. The advocate over-acts a little, but Schiff's calm manner balances it out. The advocate tells Schiff he always worked hard on his campaigns, but if he allows the case to continue, he'll "bury" him. Schiff's response: "Start digging."

The episode is also illustrative of the relationship between McCoy and Schiff. As I've said before, this relationship is characterized by Schiff's resisting, but ultimately giving in to, McCoy's justice-at-all-costs "missions." Even when he tells him to quit, Schiff seems to know McCoy will keep at it. "I want it to stop," he tells McCoy. "After we talk to the parents," he says. Schiff: "After we talk to the parents." It's a very unusual relationship for a tv show, and it contrasts with the mentor relationship Schiff had with Stone. This episode highlights it well.

One casting note: Michael Pitt, who is currently appearing in the new Bertolucci film The Dreamers, has a brief appearance as a friend of the victim. The episode was filmed in 1998.

The episode's title refers to the disease-carrying young man known as Twist.

Judge Dread

This episode (11.23) starts off with promise, but then descends into a bottomless pit of boring and simple narrative.

The episode begins by showing us the crime as it is being committed: a man sits outside the courthouse, reading the paper. When a livery car drives up, he stands up and approaches it. A woman exits the vehicle with a guard of some sort, and the woman is talking about what is happening in court today. It is apparent she is a judge. The man gets within about 20 feet of her, and then aims his gun and prepares to fire. The woman's guard responds, draws, and fires at the same time as the assailant. The guard is hit, but he kills his assailant.

When Briscoe and Green show up, we learn that the guard is a police detective assigned to protect the judge. He recriminates himself for not being careful enough, but they tell him not to worry about it, that he saved the judge's life. The judge, meanwhile, is unfazed by the incident and has gone about her business with the court. She is brusque with the detectives, and doesn't seem interested in giving them any information. They quickly get the impression that she is a hard-ass, on and off the bench. They try to figure out which of the people she recently sent to jail would want to kill her, but there are so many candidates, they don't have much lucking finding anyone. They also try to determine if anyone in her personal life had a motive, but that doesn't lead anywhere either.

Eventually, by cross-checking some prison visitation logs, they come up with a suspect: a CPA convicted of fraud who got a heavy sentence from the judge, and who was otherwise treated harshly by her. Soon after, the detectives theorize that this accountant hired a hitman to kill the judge. They determine the identity of the person who acted as a middle-man, and he confesses his role in exchange for a lighter sentence for an arson he was involved with.

The accountant goes on trial, and here is where the episode takes a turn for the boring. The trial goes on and on and on, and there are no substantive plot twists or even developments. I felt like I was just watching people testify, at length, about stuff everybody already knew. I fell asleep twice while watching the trial scenes.

In the end --- spoiler coming --- McCoy cuts a deal with the accountant, because he and Lewin feel the man was essentially exploited by other criminals in prison, who pretty much forced him into going through with the contract hit. Lewin is her usual mealy-mouthed self, even in a scene where the judge (who was nearly killed) confronts her about the generous plea deal. She doesn't get much sympathy from either McCoy or Lewin who feel she brought this on herself by being such a hard-ass. Much of the trial is very much about "blaming the victim," and it seems preposterous to me that a person who tried to get a judge killed would be treated so sympathetically by any prosecutor, especially the District Attorney of New York.

The episode was written by Richard Sweren, who, as I've said many times before on this blog, is often responsible for weak episodes that are poorly written and far-fetched.

The episode is listed on TV Tome as being part 1 of 2, so I imagine that part 2, "Deep Vote," somehow picks up on the plot of this episode, but I haven't seen it yet.

Swept Away: A Very Special Episode

Slightly unusual episode (11.15) in which a participant of a "Real World"-type reality television show is found murdered in the house he shares, on camera, with the show's other participants. It doesn't take long for Briscoe and Green to settle on a suspect: one of the other housemates. The two had a history of conflict, and it appears that things just got out of control one night, and the victim was pitched off the roof.

Briscoe and Green get stone-walled for a while by the show's producers, who appear to be very protective of their "kids," the show's participants. But it's also clear that they also act out of self-interest, and do not want to get caught up in the investigation. Nonetheless, Briscoe and Green are able to get the information they need from some of the show's crew members, including a camera man who actually video-taped the murder. (Although the tape goes missing for a while, it eventually turns up, and shows exactly what you'd expect: one boy through another one off the roof of their building.)

When McCoy and Carmichael learn that the producers had encouraged the participants to create conflicts with one another, they attempt to go after the producers for manslaughter. Soon enough, however, the producers say that the vice-president for programming at their network was the one responsible for encouraging the conflicts, and that he had written internal memos describing his desire for conlflict during "sweeps," the months when advertising rates are set and networks tend to show their most controversial or attention-getting material. So McCoy sets his aim on the VP, and Briscoe and Green arrest him while he's in the middle of a meeting. He thinks they are just pretending to be cops at first.

McCoy digs up some additional evidence that the VP knew there was a potential for violence on the show and only encouraged it. After the damning testimony of a media consultant and the producers, it doesn't look good for him.

The episode is notable because it begins with a POV shot from the reality show's camera. So the footage looks more like video-tape than what you usually see on L&O. Also interesting is that the crime is captured on tape, and this tape becomes an important plot point.

The title of the episode refers to "sweeps," and I think the "very special episode" moniker is meant to be an ironic commentary on the kinds of episodes that always end up airing during sweeps. Also, I think the title may be a reference to the 1975 Italian film Swept Away, which had to do with some people stranded on an island, much like the "cast members" of this reality show.

Mayhem

Fast-paced and unusually structured episode (4.17) in which Briscoe and Logan attempt to solve FIVE consecutive murders which take place all over the city.

Murder #1: The episode begins with two horseback officers discovering the body of a young man in a car in Battery Park. He'd been shot to death by a high-caliber weapon. Shortly after the discovery of this body, Briscoe and Logan get a call that a topless woman was found several blocks uptown screaming. It turns out that she was in the car when he was shot, and she ran away mid-encounter. She is able to offer a description of the shooter, a heavyset man with thick black plastic glasses (think Roger Ebert). Briscoe wants to wrap up the case quickly because he has court-side seats at a Knicks game at 7.30 pm, a fact he makes repeated references to throughout the episode.

Murder #2: Just as they start making some progress on this case, the detectives encounter a man screaming out his apartment window. They reluctantly run upstairs to investigate, and find that the man's wife has forcibly castrated the man because of his adulterous ways. As Logan enters the apartment, the man's wife whacks Logan with a frying pan. He subdues her while the husband is screaming, and a bunch of cops show up to find his missing body part, which they eventually do. Good thing it was cold outside! It doesn't matter in the end, though: he dies on the way to the hospital. Later in the episode, the woman pleads guilty at her arraignment, over the objections of her attorney.

Murder #3: The owner of a small grocery is killed by an assailant. The wife of the victim remembers that the shooter cashed a government check at the store a few days earlier. They get the man's name, and head over to a crack house he's known to frequent. From some of the crackheads, they get his address.

Murder #4. When they get to his apartment, they find the killer dead on his bead, shot to death. Seconds later, they hear a woman screaming, and run down the hall, where they find a disheveled man yelling about something. He's got something in his hand, although I couldn't quite tell what. Logan thinks it's food. In a classic line, Logan shouts at the man, "Put the burrito down, Senor."

After they take Burrito Man into custody, they get back to work on the original murder, and come up with a prime suspect, a guy everyone calls Scotty, who fits the description of the shooter, and who was the prime suspect in a similar killing in Queens a few months earlier. They track Scotty down at the garden shop he works at, and take him in for questioning. But they don't really have much evidence, and the witnesses they bring in for the line-up can't identify him. Meanwhile, Burrito Man starts shouting that he's hungry (I guess because he never finished that burrito) and causes a real ruckus in the holding cell they stuck him in. He starts attacking his cell mate, and Logan enters the cage to break them up, but Burrito Man escapes and starts attacking people in the office area, shouting the whole while about how he wants something to eat. After about 10 seconds, Logan grabs hold of him and smashes his face into a bowl of chips or something and says, "Eat this!" as chips go flying everywhere. It's a great Logan moment.

Back on the Scotty case, the detectives still can't come up with any hard evidence...just a string of circumstances that seems to connect him to the crime. They conclude that, in Van Buren's words, he's just "the unluckiest guy in the world." They have him in holding at a central facility, and when they go to get him released, they stumble across Murder #5: Scotty was stabbed by a fellow inmate wielding a sharpened toothbrush. He's dead.

By the time they deal with all the red tape related to that, they're ready to leave, but Briscoe has missed his Knicks game.

The episode is notable because of its extremely unusual structure: Briscoe and Logan spend all their time responding to and trying to solve all these murders, and the prosecutors have only a limited role. The plot moves from case to case to case, and back again, which is very irregular for this series. The only other episode I know like this is Couples, an episode I've seen but haven't written about yet. That episode also follows several cases simultaneously. Couples was written by new executive producer Lorenzo Carcaterra, who is perhaps best known for his book Sleepers. (More about him some other time.)

The episode is also unusual because the famous black-and-white interstital title screens that establish location and time before most scenes have two added features this time: the seconds are shown ticking by while the titles are on the screen, and they are accompanied by a clock-ticking sound. This serves to emphasize the fast-paced nature of the episode, and the unusual format of the script.

One casting note: the woman who castrates her husband is played by Katherine Narducci, best known as Charmaine Bucco on The Sopranos. She also appears in the L&O episode Faccia a Faccia, in which she seeks justice for a man who killed her father.

This episode is enjoyable, amusing, engaging, and it give you a rare chance to spend practically an entire episode following Logan and Briscoe around.

Episode Title Unknown

In this episode (), a passed-out woman is discovered bleeding and ill in an emergency room waiting room. Doctors determine she recently gave birth to a baby, but the baby can't be found. Logan and Briscoe are called in to help. They learn that the woman arrived at the hospital via a taxi, and they initially suspect her cab driver with abducting the child. Soon, however, they trace her journey back to a hotel, where she apparently gave birth to the child with her boyfriend. After much running around, they track down the boyfriend, who indeed has the baby. They then begin trying to puzzle out what happened.

They learn that the woman had offered the baby to various couples for private adoption, but as they dig deeper, they learn that she defrauded at least one couple, and took a lot of money from them without intending to actually give them the baby. In the meantime, the baby disappears from the hospital where it was being tended to. It turns out another woman, who felt she had the legal right to the baby, abducted it, because she had also arranged an adoption with the woman.

Eventually, the detectives and prosecutors determine that she had offered the baby to several couples, and had accepted many thousands of dollars from them in exchange for the baby. Stone and Kincaid determine that this is fraudulent behavior, and charge her with larceny. But then they learn that the woman threatened to abort her baby if she didn't get the money she asked for. Stone argues that this amounts to extortion, since it involves the threatening of another "person." Of course, he has to establish that the baby legally qualifies as a person.

Before they can prove that her extortion scheme was intentional, they need witnesses, but the new adoptive father of the baby refuses to testify, because he is afraid the woman will attempt to get her baby back in retaliation. Finally, Stone convinces him to tell the truth, and he gets the womans devoted (and handsome, by the way) boyfriend to roll on her and confess to his involvement in the whole scheme, implicating her in the process. Even with this evidence, however, the prosecutors have an uphill battle with the jury.

What I've Learned So Far

Having watched and summarized 100 episodes of Law & Order since December 23, I have learned the following things:

1. Hudson University is a very dangerous place.
2. There's no such thing as a happily-married rich couple.
3. You could be saying anything when you unexpectedly discover a dead body in the alley/park/garage, but you'll probably be complaining about your wife or your boyfriend.
4. Sulky kids kill people, but nobody suspects them until everyone else in their family has been falsely accused.
5. There's no mystery on the street, no arch-criminal behind it all. If you got a dead guy and you think his brother did it, you're going to find out you're right. Usually.
6. Having a big family meeting in the DA's conference room always leads to emotional, but tidy, confessions.
7. The perfect musical accompaniment for such confessions is synthesized string music.
8. There are two Asian people on the island of Manhattan, and they both appear in an episode named after a Japanese movie.
9. When Jack McCoy offers you a plea bargain, take it.
10. I still can't decide which Asst. District Attorney I love most, but I know I like Olivet more than Skoda.
11. "My son would never do something like that."
12. DA Schiff (the old guy) has an uncontrollable cheek-sucking tic that gets exacerbated by seemingly hopeless cases.
13. Lawyers become paralytic deaf mutes when their clients start confessing, but only when it's during the last 5 minutes of the episode.
14. Angie Harmon's eye makeup gets darker as the episode continues.
15. It's okay to talk with your mouth full, especially when the food involves chopsticks.
16. Lots of apparently unrelated people in the world of Law & Order look identical to each other, but no one seems to notice.
17. "Fruit of the poisonous tree" is the best defense there is.
18. When a suspect runs, you only have to chase him for 5 seconds before catching him, especially if you are Det. Ed Green and have patented the Ed Green Five-Second Foot Chase™.
19. McCoy and Claire Kincaid were definitely having an affair.
20. I like the old ones better.

TNT L&O Marathon Today

Don't forget that TNT is running 11 straight episodes beginning at 10 AM this morning. The marathon will be followed by the premiere of Bad Apple a made-for-TV movie starring Chris Noth, aka Det. Mike Logan, aka Mr. Big.

14.2 Bounty

In this episode (14.2), L&O offers a take on the Jayson Blair scandal: a young black reporter gets in over his head when he starts manufacturing stories for his newspaper. But in the L&O version, the story ends in murder. In fact, this episode takes two recent real-life stories and smashes them together, namely the Blair scandal and the story of Duane Mad Dog Chapman, the bounty hunter who chased down a wealthy fugitive rapist in Mexico.

The episode begins with a young couple discovering a murdered bounty hunter in a low-rent hotel. It takes a while to Briscoe and Green to figure it out, but eventually they learn he's a bounty hunter from Philadelphia. Briscoe's humorous insistence that they check out "the manicure angle," since the man had a manicure. A woman at the nail salon remembers him as "Bob" and says he talked about Philadelphia. Once they identify the victim, they begin to construct a motive, and work backwards. They determine that he was on the trail of the fugitive rapist named Mitchell Moss, heir to a bookstore chain. Soon after, the detectives learn that a newspaper reporter had printed an interview with the fugitive. They talk to him, and they say it was just a phone conversation, but they then begin to expect the reporter actually met with the fugitive. Therefore, they are able to charge him for aiding a fugitive, and find out what he learns. But then, McCoy and Southerlyn determine that he didn't actually meet the fugitive: he just made up a story about him. The new theory of the crime goes that the bounty hunter learned of the reporter's fake stories, and went to NYC to blackmail him. The reporter grew angry, and murdered him. They find the reporter's prints in the hotel room, and that's enough to arrest him.

His defense attorney is the quirky, seemingly incompetent, but effective lawyer Randy Dworkin (brilliantly played by Peter Jacobson), who has appeared in a couple of other episodes. Dworkin's irreverent style alienates the judge, but wins over the jury, and he begins to drive McCoy crazy when he introduces an affirmative defense for his client: the reporter felt driven to succeed at any cost because of his race. McCoy objects, but the judge allows it, and Dworkin figures he needs only one juror to identify with his client, and he'll get an acquittal.

ps. This is the 100th episode summary about the original series I've written for this site. Only 220 more to go!

Violence of Summer

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson both guest star in the early episode (1.14) in which a woman is gang raped, but Stone and Robinette have trouble building a case against the defendants.

The episode begins untraditionally, with Paul talking to an attorney about a deal to "sever" one defendant's trial from the other two. At the severance hearing, the two older defendants berate the younger one, who wants the severance. Things get out of hand, and one of the older defendants takes the gun from a security guard and nearly shoots the younger one.

Later, the younger defendant rebuts the confessions of the other two, and says he was only tangentially involved in the incident, but both Stone and Robinette feel he is holding back important information. The question is, What is that information? One clue comes in the form of a setback for their case: the semen found in the victim does not match any of the defendants, which suggests either a fourth rapist or that the woman had a boyfriend she was with before the attack. As Stone realizes his case is falling apart, he goes to the victim, a TV reporter named Monica DeVries, and tells her she will probably have to testify. He is reluctant to ask her to do this, both because he wants to spare her the pain and also because he doesn't thing she'll be a good witness: she doesn't remember the details of the attack clearly, and there are rumors that she is a drug user, who actually was in the area of the attack seeking drugs. She admits to Stone she was seeking drugs, but "for a story." Stone feels he can't go forward with the prosecution, and he has an extended strategy session with Schiff and Robinette. Knowing that if he goes to trial and loses, he will never get another chance, he allows the charges to be dismissed, so they can be re-instated if new evidence is found.

That new evidence comes when Greevey and Logan recanvas the neighborhood and find someone who remembers more than three attackers. He previously concealed this information, and apologizes for it. From here, Greevey and Logan seek to hypnotize the victim, so they can get more clues. Stone okays the unusual move, and during hypnosis she reveals that indeed there were four attackers, and the fourth was older and named "Tim." She describes his features. The detectives return to the scene of the crime, and discover some glass, which she had told police was used in the attack on her. The fingerprints match to a dealer named "Tim." The detectives pick him up, but statements he made during arrest are inadmissible because in the confusion surrounding his arrest, he had not been properly Mirandized. Yet another setback occurs when the forensics department loses all the material related to the case. Now they don't have a semen match either.

But Greevey saves the day with his plan to get two of the original suspects to confess. He and Logan approach the suspects on the street, and tell them that Tim has implicated them, and only them, in the rape. He then makes it clear that they are not under arrest, but he would like them to come to the station to make a statement. He leads them to the car, puts them inside, and leaves both passenger side doors open while he and Logan approach a pay phone. He says to Logan, "You think they have a reasonable expectation of privacy?" It turns out he tape-recorded their conversation, during which they discussed the case and implicated themselves and Tim. Way to go, Greevey!

After this development, the defense attorney doesn't have much wiggle room, and -- we learn in a textual epilogue -- they are found guilty of rape.

Obviously, there are two important casting notes here: a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman plays one of the older defendants [pic], and has a great onscreen temper tantrum during the opening scene, and much later in the episode, Samuel L. Jackson turns up as their defense attorney [pic]. One last casting note: Megan Gallagher plays the victim. She is best known as Larry Sanders' wife on The Larry Sanders Show and as Frank's wife on Millennium.

Privacy is an important theme in this episode, as Stone attempts to preserve the privacy of the victim, and even strongly scolds robinette for seeking a toxicological analysis of her hairbrush without consent. Later, as I mentioned, privacy becomes an issue for the defendants when their conversation is recorded.

Faccia a Faccia

In this mob-themed episode (8.15), a badly beaten body turns up in the lagoon in Central Park. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and trace his steps: based on his stomach contents, they visit nearby peanut stands, then an Italian restaurant he mentioned to the peanut vendor. Because his face was so mutilitated and had previously undergone extensive plastic surgery, the detectives rely on a sculptor to reconstruct what he originally looked like. As soon as they see the bust, they realize that their victim is a former mob hitman who testified against his cohorts and then entered the witness protection program. Unfortunately for him, he made the rather unwise decision to return to New York to talk to a writer about ghost-writing his story.

The man who killed him, a low-level mob operator named Johnny DeMayo, was stalking him outside the Italian restaurant, so the maitre d' became suspicious and made a note of the eventual killer's license plate, which he turns over to Briscoe and Curtis. The detectives confront their suspect, who denies involvement, but soon enough, they uncover additional evidence which confirms he is the killer of the hitman. They drive out to his house with some heavily armed officers, and as they prepare to enter his room, guns drawn, Curtis hesitates to go through the door. Briscoe notices this, and marches in himself. They find their suspect critically injured, shot twice, and barely clinging to life.

At the hospital, he regains consciousness and denies involvement in the death of the hitman, but when McCoy threatens to turn him loose, he admits it, and offers to testify against the prominent boss of a crime family, who he says personally ordered the hit on the hitman. You might see this coming: federal investigators then get involved and say they have been building a case against this mob boss for years, and don't want to see it messed up by the NY DA's office. Schiff stands strong, though, and asserts his jurisdiction. Briscoe and Curtis are then dispatched to arrest the mob boss, who they find dottering around dressed in a bathrobe and shawl. He appears to be deeply senile.

Sound familiar? Pretending to be crazy to avoid prosecution was the preferred tactic of Vincent "Chin" Gigante, a New York crime boss who wandered around Greenwich Village in pajamas and a bathrobe. His tactic worked well, although it eventually failed him. So, once his attorney asserts he is incompetent to stand trial, the judge mandates a "730 exam" to determine his competence. You know what that means: send in Skoda to get to the bottom of things. Skoda deliberately provokes a confrontation with the mob boss's son to see how the supposedly crazy boss will react, and he reacts as a normal, sane person would: he moves to protect himself. Good job, Skodie! The judge rules he is competent, and the case proceeds.

But it's not over yet: as McCoy is preparing DeMayo for his testimony he suspects that DeMayo is not telling the whole truth, and perhaps did not even commit the killing himself. Cheekbones investigates and realizes plenty of people had a motive to kill the victim, including one woman whose father was killed by the victim many years ago. This woman happened to be the girlfriend of DeMayo. They talk to her and -- spoiler coming -- she admits to the murder, and says she came up with it herself, not at the behest of the senile mob boss. The defense moves to drop the charges against the mob boss, but McCoy argues that a "conspiracy" to kill the victim existed: DeMayo involved his girlfriend in the murder, and told the mob boss he was going to go through with it. The trial continues and --- more spoilers -- he is found guilty. Before the sentencing hearing, the defense approaches McCoy and asks for leniency. In exchange, he agrees to testify about the "five families" of the NY mafia, and Chinese and Russian mob operations. The episode ends with Schiff approaching a gallery of reporters, preparing to tell them about this arrangement.

Couple of casting notes: Not surprisingly, several of the cast members later turned up on The Sopranos. The girlfriend who actually committed the murder is played by Katherine Narducci, best known for her role as Charmaine Bucco on The Sopranos, and Johnny DeMayo is played by Michael Rispole, who went on to play Jackie Aprile in the first couple seasons of the series.

The title of the episode is Italian for "face to face," and it comes from a line of dialogue in which Narducci describes her position relative to her victim as she prepared to kill him.

14.7 Floater

In this episode (14.7), the body of a long-missing woman turns up floating in the Hudson River. After some brief investigation, Briscoe and Green identify the woman, and focus their investigation on her ex-husband. But when Serena Southerlyn begins digging into her marital troubles, she has a strange encounter with her high-powered divorce attorney that makes her suspicious that he is involved in something illegal. Soon enough, she and McCoy begin gathering evidence that the divorce attorney had an arrangement with a court clerk and a judge that was allowing him to win his cases and receive large awards for his clients. Branch reluctantly asks McCoy to pursue the matter, because the judge involved was, he says, the smartest student he ever had when he was a professor, and he told her she could become the first female governor of NY. So much for that. Based on the evidence, the new theory of the crime is that the dead woman, who was employed by the courts, discovered the scheme and threatened the lawyer that she would go public with it, and the lawyer killed her in retaliation. But further investigation convinces Southerlyn and McCoy that the judge herself was involved in the murder, and eventually --- spoiler coming --- McCoy gets her to confess in the closing moments of the show.

The episode is wittily written, even if some of the humor is a bit too straight-forward, especially in the first half of the show. Although the plot is complicated, it's never really confusing, and it's an entertaining episode.

Blood Is Thicker...

In this episode (2.14), the the wife of a wealthy New Yorker is found murdered, apparently by a serial mugger whose weapon of choice is a baseball bat. When Cerreta and Logan visit the woman's husband, he appears to be in shock and can barely respond to them. Eventually, of course, the detectives learn that the woman was having an affair with a married Jewish doctor. Although the husband at first denies he had knowledge of the affair, the detectives learn that he was aware of it, and that it particularly bothered him because his WASP-y family doesn't think much of Jewish people. So there's the motive. Unfortunately, his mother (who seems to control him) offers an alibi for him, so the detectives have a lot of trouble proving the husband's guilt. They catch a break when they search the husband's homes and find an heirloom pin the victim she was wearing the night she died.

Stone and Robinette inherit the case's weaknesses when they go to trial, but they want a confession. They take the unusual step of putting a confidential informant (an armed robber) in the cell with the husband at Rikers, and he eventually confesses to the robber, but the next day, the robber says he made up the story of the confession. Apparently, he recanted because the mother paid him off. To make matters worse, the pin that they thought was unique turns out to be just like 3 other pins in the possession of the family. But then, the victim's lover reveals that there is something unique about one of the pins, and that he can positively state that the pin they found was indeed the one the victim was wearing the night she died.

Important casting note: the rich and controlling mother is played by Nancy Marchand, best known for her role as Tony's mother on The Sopranos. She also once played a wealthy, controlling mother in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Also, Jude Ciccolella, recognizable from his role as David Palmer's chief of staff on the first season of 24, plays the armed robber.

6.1 Bitter Fruit: Rey Curtis' First Episode

In this very good episode (6.1), a homeless man stumbles on the corpse of a teenage girl in an empty lot. Briscoe and Curtis quickly determine the girl's identity, and trace her last steps, learning that she was dropped off by a school bus driver at her piano lessons, who claims he saw her walk in the door of the teacher's building. When the detectives learn the street he claims he drove down was closed at the time, he briefly becomes a suspect, but then tells the whole story: he broke the rules of his bus company and dropped the girl off at a nearby corner. The detectives view an ATM security camera tape, and see the girl walk by, and notice a white van that a witness had told them about. They track the van to a glass company, a significant development because the girl had been found with glass shards in her skin. They track down the driver of the van, Nick Capetti, who denies involvement, but it's clear he's hiding something. He says he was at his mother's in NJ, so the detectives go there, get permission from his reluctant mother to look in a closet, and find some bed sheets matching those found wrapped around the victim. They find Capetti, and when he sees them approaching, he takes off. What follows is one of the longest footchases in L&O history, as Det. Curtis chases after him for close to 30 seconds before catching him. (Most chases on the show last about 5 seconds.) Once arrested, he doesn't have much to say, but they take him off to be arraigned.

The arraignment hearing starts off like those you've seen a million times on the show, but then something fantastically surprising and great happens that changes the tenor of the episode completely, and leaves you tense for about the next 10 minutes: Do you want to know what it is? Somone gets shot in the courttroom, and blood spatters all over the ADA.

There are some further plot twists that are surprising to a degree, though somewhat predictable, as they are of the sort we have seen before on the show. In fact, the victim's father is played by Tom Tammi, who finds himself in almost exactly the same complicated and dismal family situation he was in on the episode "Baby's It's You," which is a pretty funny coincidence.

Curtis' first lines are on the phone to his daughter: "Yes...I'll tell him. Go to bed now." His first line to Briscoe is, "My daughter says goodnight."

Because the show has a lot of twists, I don't want to reveal them here, but most of the show is extremely well done and interesting. In fact, I recommend it as an episode to show your friends who don't watch the show and may be interested in starting.

Finally, as the title of this post indicates, this episode marks the first appearance of Benjamin Bratt as Rey Curtis. Briscoe makes several jokes about how young he is, and there is some tension between them early on. But eventually, this tension was set aside, and in later episodes, they become very close, and are a good match for each other. To tell you the truth, the Jerry Orbach/Benjamin Bratt combo is my favorite of the various detective pairings that L&O has featured over the years. (Dzundza/Noth, Sorvino/Noth, Orbach/Noth, Orbach/Martin being the other choicees.)

Savages

Terrific episode (6.3) in which an accountant murders an undercover cop, and McCoy and Schiff must decide whether to seek the newly-legal death penalty against him.

The episode begins with two guys -- building workers, I think -- discovering a body in a commercial building, surrounded by TV and stereo equipment. When Briscoe and Curtis arrive, a cop comments that the dead guy is wearing a girdle. Briscoe lifts up the body's shirt and reveals a gun tucked into the girl. "Old undercover trick," he says, suggesting that the body is that of an undercover cop.

From their, they try to figure out who killed him. They talk to his partner or boss (it's not really clear which), who says the cop got pretty absorbed in his undercover identity, and didn't check in much. They learn that he was getting ready to make a major bust of a heroin dealer in Hell's Kitchen. The dealer's cover business is an antiques store. They visit him and eventually bring him in for interrogation, during which Det. Curtis gets extremely physical with him, definitely pushing the limits and Van Buren sends Briscoe in to separate the two. But Curtis's intimidation does nothing to rattle the man, and they have to cut him loose. They decide one way to proceed is to investigate the dealer's financial records, so they visit his accountant, who seems a little shady. After much digging, they learn that the accountant had set up a money laundering operation for the antiques dealer. When the undercover cop learned about it, he went to investigate, but the accountant did some research of his own and learned that the cop was a cop. They search the accountant's office and find recordings of phone calls where he discusses the cop's identity. When the detectives search his home, in front of his wife and kids, they find the murder weapon, and some heroin that was supposed to have been dealt to the undercover cop. The evidence is overwhelming.

From here, Schiff, McCoy, and Kincaid debate whether to seek the death penalty for the case. The defendant is eligible to be executed because he killed a cop, which is one of the conditions the statute requires in New York. (Another is killing the witness to a crime.) After some soul-searching, and a discussion with a veteran judge, Schiff decides he has an obligation to pursue the death penalty. McCoy is enthusiastic, but Kincaid has very deep reservations. The effort to get the death penalty is temporarily derailed, however, when the trial judge rules that the audio recordings are inadmissible. Since these tapes are the only evidence McCoy has that the defendant knew his victim was a cop, they can't pursue an execution. However, McCoy devises a new strategy: he argues that thedefendant knew the victim was a witness to several crimes, and use that angle to get the death penalty. He gets the drug dealer to testify to this fact, and he's back on track. Interestingly, we don't see any of the trial of the defendant. All we see is the jury returning the guilty verdict.

Instead, the rest of the episode focuses on the sentencing arrangements. McCoy seeks the death penalty, but the defendant's attorney seeks a hearing on whether it is consitutional. So they go up to the state supreme court and argue it before the justices. The defense attorney says that the death penalty violates the consitution's requirements for "substantive due process," but McCoy, in a somewhat confusing argument, says it doesn't, and that the interests of the state are served by the death penalty. The justices pass the buck, however, and -- spoiler coming -- rule that since no one has actually been sentenced to death yet, they won't rule on it. The jury then sentences the defendant to death. McCoy is satisified, Kincaid is sad, and Schiff just twitches his face in his trademark manner.

The episode has some extremely compelling debate about the death penalty, and looks at some angles of it that are extremely unusual for fictional television. Briscoe makes one point I found very interesting. He tells Curtis a story about a time when he and Logan confronted a suspect in the murder of two Korean deli owners. As he and Logan approached the suspect, he aimed a gun at them, but then dropped it. Briscoe argues that if the death penalty applied in every murder case, the suspect would have thought he had nothing to lose by killing two cops. But since he knew he could only be executed if he killed the cops, he thought better of it, and dropped his weapon.

I think this is Benjamin Bratt's third episode, and Van Buren gets mad at him for his aggressiveness towards the drug dealer. She reminds Briscoe of what happened to Logan (who punched a politician and was then "exiled" to walking the beat in Staten Island), and tells Briscoe to keep his new partner in check.

Finally, at one point Van Buren clearly holds up a copy of the New York Ledger, the fictional tabloid in the show and the namesake of this website.

High & Low

In this very complicated episode (10.22), a young woman is found brutalized and dead in a Hudson University dormitory during spring break. Briscoe and Green learn that she made money by dancing at several strip joints around the city and Long Island. By talking to various people who worked at the strip clubs, they eventually learn that two Long Island skinheads were looking for her, and severely assaulted another woman while trying to get information about her whereabouts.

The detectives trace the skinheads to a "shack on the beach" via a surf shop they bought a roof rack from. They approach the shack with a bunch of LI cops, guns drawn, and find the skinheads along with an elaborate lab to be used for the creation of Ecstasy. A tox screen on the victim had turned up some ecstasy, so there seems to be a connection between the two. Plus, when they were trying to track her down, the skinheads told people they were looking for her because of their mutual involvement in drug dealing.

Green connects the skinheads to one of the strip club owners because they skinheads were using a laptop that contained software registered to the strip club's managing company. This leads the detectives to the conclusion that the strip club owner was involved in a conspiracy to murder the woman, although they don't know why. They arrest him, and he refuses to talk, but they tell the skinheads that he rolled on them. The younger of the two skinheads, who happen to be brothers, confesses to the attack and murder, and says, essentially, that the strip club owner gave them the Ecstasy lab as a payment for the hit.

But why did the owner want the woman dead? Carmichael checks out the owner's finances and learns that he made a lot of money through some suspiciously-well-timed stock trades. She enlists the aid of an SEC investigator, and finds someone else who made the same trades at the same time and also made a bundle of money. This someone else turns out to be a former small-time porn star who (although she denies it) was associated with the strip club owner. It turns out that the porn star was romantically involved with the head of an investment company and -- get this -- was getting insider information from him, which she was using herself and passing on to the strip club owner. But here comes your motive: the victim learned about her boss's insider trading, went to the investment chief, and threatened him: "Give me a job or I'll go to the SEC." The investor told the porn star, the porn star told the strip club owner, and the strip club owner ordered the hit.

All of this takes what feels like forever to uncover, and the show is intricately structured and occassionally hard to follow. At the time you're watching it, you don't really question everything because there's so much going on, but when you stop to think about it, some of it doesn't make sense. The victim, who by all accounts was a bright young woman, supposedly found out about the scheme by seeing some "transaction confirmation" papers lying on her boss's desk. So she concluded from these documents he had inside information? And then she went to black mail the investment chief with the info? How did she know it was him? The episode is a ambiguous at this point. What I've written is the explanation initially offered by the defendants, but later in the episode, it seems like there is another explanation offered, but it still doesn't really hold together. The act of extorting someone seems inconsistent with the image of her personality you get from everyone else in the episode. Although, the pseudonym she used in her stripping life was "Sybil," as in the woman with multiple personalities, so maybe that explains it.

Anyway, as all these people go on trial, McCoy realizes he needs the testimony of the investor to make the 1st degree murder charges stick against the porn star and the strip club owner. But, somewhat predictably, the investor balks once he gets up on the stand and a defense attorney reminds him of his love for the porn star. McCoy has one of his "I can't believe this" moments, and -- spoiler coming -- a mistrial is declared. He then goes after all three of them for conspiracy to commit murder, instead of the murder itself, and gets them all to plea. Happy endings.

Like I said, the episode has a very complex plot, but is still a fun ride, even if it doesn't all hold together.

I just want to point out that the episode prominently features two actors of Asian decent, which is rare for the series. One plays the investigator from the SEC, and the other is the defense attorney for the porn star. Also, there seems to be a literary reference in the name of the investor's company: his firm is called "Foster & Wallace." David Foster Wallace is a contemporary novelist known for his mammoth novel Infinite Jest. Finally the title appears to reference the ups and downs of the stock market and the victim's life, as well as the investor's life. Also, "High and Low" is the name of an old Kurosawa movie in which a wealthy man deals with the kidnapping of the young son of one of his employees.

Surrender Dorothy

In this episode (10.19), a married female graduate student turn up murdered in the trunk of her car. Briscoe and Green learn that she was having an affair with a younger student, and that her husband has an unusual marriage in which she was a very passive "surrendered wife." But apparently the pressures of being a surrendered wife were too much for her, and she rebelled by having the affair, which her husband, a psychologist, learned about. The detectives learn, however, that her husband wasn't the one who originally discovered the affair or killed her: it was her husband's father, another psychologist, who also happens to have written several books on the benefits of being a surrendered wife.

Apparently, her father-in-law used a private investigator to learn of the affair, and then confronted her and humiliated her with the evidence, hoping to "bring her back into the fold." The tactic didn't work, however, and we are left believing that she either killed herself or was murdered. As the father-in-law goes on trial, however, he presents evidence that she killed herself. McCoy and Carmichael are not ready to let him off the hook so easily, however. They argue that since the father-in-law knew about her unstable psychological situation (having been her psychologist when she was 19, and being aware of a previous suicide attempt), he is guilty of manslaughter, because he knew confronting her in this way would lead to her suicide. Pretty sketchy.

Once the defendant gets on the stand, though, he shoots for a rather novel defense: being indicted for manslaughter, he testfies that he outright murdered her. Since being convicted of manslaughter is contingent on establishing that she killed herself and he showed indifference, he figures that by confessing to this crime will get him off the hook. Quite a gambit. Although McCoy has the option of dropping the indictment and re-indicting on murder charges, he doesn't bite, and he continues the trial, sending the jury to deliberate on the charge of manslaughter, despite the man's admission to murder. Pretty silly stuff, but whatever. Spoiler coming: the jury finds the man guilty of manslaughter. Schiff comments that if he did kill her, he effectively engineered for himself a great plea bargain: 3 years for murder.

To me, the logic of this episode doesn't really hold up. If the woman killed herself, why not just let her be found dead where she hung herself? The defendant explains this away by saying, "I didn't think my son and his daughter could handle the grief of knowing she committed suicide." So they would feel better thinking she was murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car? This is terrible and lazy writing. The episode was co-written by Matt Witten, who has written a few decent episodes, but this is not one of his finer moments.

The episode's title refers to a line from the Wizard of Oz, and to the victim, named Dorothy, and her status as a "surrendered" wife, a wife who supposedly improves her marriage by surrendering to her husband and never questioning his judgment. There has been a bit of a revival of this movement in recent years, so this episode is apparently L&O's way of dealing with it.

14.14 City Hall

In this episode (14.14), a shooting at city hall leaves a city councilman dead and a water inspector wounded. Briscoe and Green focus their investigation on people who had a motive to shoot the councilman, including a man who was preparing to face him in the primaries. Their investigation reveals that the would-be opponent was bribed not to run by family members of the councilman, who gave him a no-show job at a printing company. The dtectives reasoned that after the no-show job was terminated, he would be angry enough to seek revenge. However, further investigation exonerates the man, and the episode becomes one of those where the apparent target isn't the actual target of the killer: it turns out the water inspector was the intended target.

The detectives interview people who had a grudge against the water inspector, including the elderly owner of an electronics store. Although they discount him as a suspect, they return when they learn he has a younger son matching the description of the shooter. They learn this by setting up one of those enticement events designed to capture suspects, as when the police offer people who have outstanding warrants free TVs. In this case, Briscoe and Logan set up a water tax amnesty event, hoping to entice the suspect to come in, so the water inspector can identify him via closed circuit tv. In discussing the plans for the event, they make reference to a time when the NYPD otganized a "meet the Yankees" event for people with warrants. Now I don't know if this ever happened in real life, but something exactly like this occurs in the Al Pacino movie Sea of Love. The scene involving the tax amnesty event is pretty funny, as Briscoe pretends he is a bureaucrat and he keeps giving circular answers to all the people who come in. In any case, the ruse works, and the son of the electronics store owner shows up.

The detectives get an arrest warrant, and arrest him, and he shows up for his arraignment represented by a probate lawyer who seems out of his league. The lawyer gives Southerlyn a motion to suppress a gun that he says the police found during a warrantless search of his client's home two days before the arrest. Briscoe and Green deny having made any such search or recovering the gun. Southerlyn looks into it, and eventually learns that federal prosecutors got a secret search warrant from the secret federal courts that issue such warrants in terrorism cases. The federal prosecutors refuse to hand over the gun to McCoy and he gets angry about it, but there isn't much he can do. Branch intercedes with an old friend who used to sit on the court, and then an FBI agent shows up at McCoy's office and turns over the gun.

By this time, the defendant is represented by Danielle Melnick, a defense attorney who has appeared many times on the show, who tells Jack he is complicit in the unconsitutiionality of these secret warrants if he uses the gun as evidence at trial. McCoy is unconvinced, and the trial goes ahead. Melnick tries to tell the jury that her client's rights were trampled by the government, but it doesn't persuade them and -- spoiler coming -- he is found guilty.

The episode spends a lot of time in its last half discussing the merits of the secret warrants (permitted under a law known as FISA) and secret courts. DA Branch is in favor of them, Southerlyn is strongly opposed, and McCoy seems supportive of them insofar as they help him bring killers to justice. The warrant in this case was issued because federal prosecutors believed that the defendant was exporting video game machines to Algeria, and the machines, because they are now so powerful, qualify as "dual-use devices," meaning that although apparently benign, they can be converted into devices used for nefarious ends. It turns out that the electronics store was exporting the devices to toy stores overseas because they needed money to pay their exorbitantly high water bills. The bills were so high because of a clerical error made by the water inspector.

Casting-wise, as I mentioned, Tovah Feldshuh returns as Danielle Melnick, this time using a cane to walk. McCoy refers to her as a victim of gun violence, because she was shot in an episode from the previous season. Also, a real life New York judge, Leslie Crocker Snider, appears as the trial judge in this episode, and has a fairly substantial speaking part. You can tell she is an amateur actor, however. There is a stiffness to her dialogue, and she blinks a lot as she's saying her lines. I'm sure she will improve if they bring her back for more, though.

The plot of the episode is interesting, but all the discussion of FISA becomes tiresome after a while and feels heavy-handed. I blame this on the episode's co-writer, Richard Sweren, who I have frequently mentioned here is my least favorite of the show's writers. The last couple seasons, the writers have seem to made a point of having their characters engage in dialogue about whatever political issue is being discussed on the show. Sometimes it is more effective than others. I think I liked it more several years ago when the characters would only do it occassionally. Now, I think they spend too much time on it and make such a big deal about it.

I should mention that the basic story element of the city councilor being shot at city hall comes from real life. Last year, councilman James Davis was shot in the actual city hall chamber by the opponent he had just defeated in the race. He had allowed his killer to bypass the metal detectors installed at city hall.

The Fertile Fields

In this somewhat boring and slow-paced episode (2.19), a diamond merchant is found beaten and burned in an alley. As police arrive on the scene, they see four young black men running away. Cerreta and Logan initially pursue the case as if it's a hate crime, despite Logan's belief that someone else is to blame. After the case against the boys falls apart at the grand jury when a witness changes his story, the victim's brother, who is also his business partner, comes forward and claims that he is responsible for his brother's murder. However, Stone and Robinette don't believe him and they seek evidence that he is confessing out of fear of someone else. Eventually, they link him to a money laundering operation involving another jeweler. This other jeweler is put on trial for murder, and the brother testifies against him. The main problem is that the brother has lied so many times, he has very poor credibility. Stone realizes it's unlikely he'll get a conviction, but the last 5 seconds of the episode indicate that someone had a plan to deal with that eventuality.

The episode is extremely slow paced, and not particularly compelling. One interesting casting choice: Jerry Stiller is the brother's defense attorney.

Skin Deep: Claire Danes, Murder Suspect

In this snappily-written episode (3.1), the first episode of season 3, a 13-year-old Claire Danes turns in a great performance as the daughter of a former model suspected of killing a fashion photographer. After Cerreta and Logan investigate, they learn that the photographer also served as a pimp to struggling models, particularly those who had fallen on hard times as they got older, including Danes's mother. Despite her shifting alibi, it doesn't take long for the detectives to settle on the mother as their prime suspect. They come up with some underwear found in the woman's apartment that is an 80% DNA match on material found at the crime scene, but an overly cautious judge throws it out. Stone and Robinette have to find another way to convict, but they find a formidable opponent in defense attorney Shambala Green, who is perhaps my favorite of the show's recurring defense attorneys. Green tells Stone "I'll clean your clock, and when I'm done, you won't even care what time it is." She gets off to a good start, and Stone's case ends up looking pretty shoddy, but after some more digging, Stone comes up with a new suspect: the defendant's daughter, Claire Danes. He discovers she had a sexual relationship with the photographer, and suspects that somehow led to her involvement in his death. When Schiff hears this, he's fed up with Stone's bungling of the investigation and says, "Since when did control of this office get turned over to the Marx brothers." The judge orders a psychological evaluation of the daughter, which Olivet performs. Olivet comes away thinking the daughter is the murderer.

It's clear that the mother was willing to be convicted to protect her daughter, a move we've seen a million times on this show, but Stone's not about to let that happen. He confronts the girl's father, who implicates her, and then gets the mother to cave, too. Shambala asks Stone to sentence the girl as a juvenile, arguing the photographer acted cruelly towards her and she didn't understand everthing she was doing. Stone interviews the girl in the presence of Shambala, and she tearfully offers an account of what happened: her mother ordered the photographer to cut off the relationship, the photographer had sex with the daughter then ended things, telling her that his mom's value as a prostitute was more important to him than Danes was. He also told her she was too ugly to be a model, even though he had lured her into the relationship with promises of making her a top model. She flipped and stabbed him in the back with the scissors. Stone consents to the juvenile sentence, and Danes is shipped off to Spofford, the juvenile detention center.

Age is a prominent theme in the episode, as several models discuss how their careers have sagged along with their bodies as they got older, and the women all seem resigned to a more difficult life after the glory days of their late teens. One woman, 38, tells the investigators, "I haven't looked 30 since I was 20." Age also becomes a factor in the relationship between Danes' character and her older lover, the photographer, and it is a critical factor in her sentencing. The theme of young models growing old before their time is also picked up in "Baby It's You," one of the L&O/Homicide: Life on the Street cross-over episodes.

Law & Order Marathon on President's Day!

TNT will be running 11 of what it calls "the best episodes" of Law & Order on Monday. Clear your calendar! The fun starts at 10 AM.

6.9 Blood Libel

In this episode (6.9), an art teacher is killed after school in her classroom. Briscoe and Curtis first focus their attention on a fellow teacher, whom they believe was having an affair with a student that the victim discovered. Instead, it turns out that the teacher was engaged in a money-for-grades scheme that the victim learned about. This gives both the fellow teacher and the students involved in the scheme motive to kill her. Forensics indicates that the killer had a predisposition for diabetes, so the detectives orchestrate a blood test of the wrestling team, since their chief suspect among the students is a wrestler. The sample from the test matches the sample at the crime scene, and they arrest the student. A judge, however, throws out the evidence and the case against the student. Briscoe and Curtis have to start over and connect the student to the crime some other way. Along the way, they discover increasing evidence of the student's anti-Semitism, including an anti-Semitic message he and his friends encoded in the school's yearbook. This is relevant because the victim was Jewish.

Once the detectives assemble enough evidence against the student, they arrest him, and this time he is brought to trial. A new laywer comes on board, however, and plans to mount an unusual defense: his client was framed by a Jewish conspiracy. Although it seems improbable, the judge in the case allows this defense to go forward, which I thought was ridiculous. The judge even allows the defense to discriminate against jurors based on their religion. This is a particularly frustrating stretch of the episode.

Once the trial gets underway, the defense tries to show that the Jewish conspiracy consisted of the lab technician, the principal of the school, and Detective Briscoe. Although McCoy won't allow Briscoe to take the stand, Briscoe tells him he's not even wholly Jewish: his father was, but his mom wasn't, and he was raised Catholic. It seems like there is overwhelming evidence against the kid, but -- spoiler coming -- the jury is unable to reach a verdict and a mistrial is declared. This is pretty unusual for the show, as in cases like these, McCoy usually overcomes the bigoted position the defense asks the jury to take and rely on the requirements of the law. The episode lacks a spirited closing statement from McCoy that usually contains his framing of the issues.

As a result of the outlandishness of the legal matters, and the improbability of the jury being hung, I found this episode not particularly satisfying, especially in the last half. One interesting casting note: Chris Cooper, of American Beauty fame, plays the anti-Semitic defense attorney with ties to the Klan. Also, Zach Grenier, who has appeared in several other episodes, turns up as the victim's husband in this episode.

One final note: at one point, the suspect testifies that a boy named Stan Shattenstein was named captain of the wrestling team instead of him. "Stan Shattenstein" is the name of an incompetent defense attorney who appears in a later episode of L&O and an episode of Criminal Intent.

Whose Monkey Is It Anyway? aka Curious George

In this episode (11.10), a recent convert to animal rights activism liberates more than a dozen monkeys from a lab where he is a security guard. In the process, a monkey escapes and eventually bites a researcher, who suffers an allergic reaction to the monkeys saliva and dies. The activist, George, is eventually arrested and stands trial.

The episode begins with two researches coming across the body of a colleague. The medical examiner concludes that the monkey bit led to his death, while Briscoe and Green attempt to track down the person responsible. They learn that two people have been arrested at the lab previously for protesting, one of whom has a prior record of assault and robbery, They have some trouble tracking this person down, but they work backwards, by finding the animal refuge where the monkeys were brought, and then getting confirmation that George is the suspect. They find George hiding on a friend's boat and arrest him. During interrogation, he confesses, in part to keep his girlfriend, another animal activist, out of the eye of the prosecutors.

His trial isn't going very well, but then McCoy and Carmichael receive notice that he wants to change counsel. His new counsel has a novel defense for his client: he says George acted out of self-defense, and that the word "others" in the self-defense clause of the law applies to animals as well. The judge allows the defense over McCoy's objetctions.

After the change in counsel, the case is going a bit better for the defense, but it's still clear that George is headed for a conviction. His mother pleads with McCoy to make another plea offer to her son. He does so. Before George decides whether to take the plea, he asks both his counsel and Maxine, his girlfriend, what they think. Both tell him to take the plea, but he starts talking about the abolitionist John Brown, and says, "What would he do?" At this point, it is apparent that George, despite his slow andearnest manner, has found purpose and meaning in his life. He refuses McCoy's offer and decides to continue with the trial.

It's obvious that he's headed for a conviction, and when the verdict invevitably comes, he seems unfazed. His girlfriend stands in the gallery as he is taken away and calls to him, "George! I'm sorry George," a line which tends to confirm your suspicions that she more or less put him up to it, although she meant no malice in doing so.

The episode does a good job in setting up the various issues involved in animal rights, and only one character is portrayed as a bit too radical. The most impressive character in the episode is Oyler, the defense attorney provided to George by various animal rights groups. Oyler is brilliantly played by Terrence Mann, well known for his performances in Les Mis and The Lion King on Broadway. This is the strongest bit of guest-casting in some time on the show. Also well cast is the actor who playes the doe-eyed and eager-to-please George, pitch perfect in his portrayal of character who finds himself with an unlikely meaning and path to identity.

The episode is a strong one, and might be a good pick to show a friend who leans to the left politically but doesn't watch L&O.

The episode's second title, Curious George, is obviously a play on words, calling to mind the famous monkey of children's literature, and also the defendand's curiosity about the animal rights movement, which gets him in a situation over his head.

Real Life Judge to Appear on L&O

According to Page Six, an NY judge, Leslie Crocker Snider, has a speaking role in (I think) this week's episode of the original series.

SVU to retell Michael Jackson case

The episode will air during sweeps. More info from Page Six.

Showtime

In this episode (7.17), part 3 of a three-part series, McCoy prosecutes a movie director for the murder of the director's ex-wife, a film studio boss. But McCoy runs into some severe obstacles along the way. The first part of this series is "D-Girl," and the second is "Turnaround."

The episode begins with some civil attorneys going over evidence for a sexual harrassment lawsuit at the film studio. They come across an audio tape made while the victim was still alive which features someone saying that Ms. Ellison, the victim, should be killed if she plans to testify against the studio. The civil attorneys bring the tape to Schiff, McCoy, and Ross. Ross quickly learns that the person making the threat against the victim was her boss, the head of the entire studio corporation. She also learns that the victim had decided in the days before her death not to testify against her employer. Cheekbones also visits the victim's assistant, played by Janeane Garofalo, who tells her story of the studio chief harrassing the victim and other women at the company. Meanwhile, preparations are being made in the courtroom for the trial. Extra seats and tables have to be brought in, and the defense, lead by Cheekbone's ex-husband Neal Gorton, seems to have an army of experts and partners working on his behalf.

As the trial begins, Gorton makes the first witness, a cab driver who took the defendant near the airport, look foolish, and makes him admit that McCoy coached his testimony. Afterwards, McCoy watches as analysts on a CourtTV like channel say it looked bad for him, but they defend his behavior. This is one of many references in the three-part series to the media attention the case is getting. Back at trial, Det. Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) is the next witness, and the defense attorney goes after him, claiming his affair with another studio exec influences his opinion of the defendant. He insists he did not have an affair with her, but it looks bad. He takes his anger out on McCoy, who he feels should have stopped the line of questioning sooner. McCoy says, I would have, had I known you had this relationship with the woman.

Next, the defendant's use of drugs and relationship with his psychiatrist comes into play. When the issue is raised, the judge calls everyone into his chambers, where our old friend Dr. Elizabeth Olivets gets into a bit of a shouting match with the defendant's psychiatrist, a sleazy character named Dr. Duvall, whom she calls a "two-legged pacified" because he over-medicated the defendant. The judge tries to reach an accord with the attorneys, even putting his arms around them both to get them to calm down. As things start looking a little worse for the defense, Cheekbones and her ex-husband meet at a bar and discuss the connection between the case and their post-marital relationship. He says he wants to humiliate her by getting an acquittal. They talk about a plea bargain without really talking about it, and the next day, the conversation shows up in the tabloids: Ross leaked it to make the defense look weak. Schiff praises the move, but McCoy is sick of trying cases outside of the courtroom. Ross and Schiff tell him to get with the times, and Schiff asks him, "How old is your tie?" But the defense attorney Gorton strikes back at Ross by serving her with papers seeking sole custody of their daughter. She then has to deal with that in addition to the case. In a rage, she storms into Gorton's office and angrily confronts him. It's clear he's doing this to her because he knows it will damage her performance in the case against his client. He tells her she'll be able to visit the daughter after he wins custody. From here, we get another look at the personal lives of the investigators, as the story follows Curtis to his temporary apartment, where he meets with his wife and daughters. They seem to be making some progress, but are interrupted when the studio exec who is infatuated with Curtis calls in the middle of it, and Curtis's wife answers the phone. "It's your girlfriend," she says. Ouch.

Looking for more evidence, McCoy and Cheekbones go over the defendant's financial records, and find that he had dinner with his psychiatrist an hour before the killing. When the psychiatrist is put on the stand, he refuses to discuss what was said at the dinner or afterwards, claiming privilege. He also claims privilege about conversations with the victim, who was also his patient. McCoy argues that the vic's parents can release that privilege. They do, and he gets access to the doctor's records about the victim. He and Cheekbones discover that the psychiatrist was the only person who knew that (a) the victim had slept with a male assistant, and (b) she had changed her mind about testifying in the harrassment case. Since her boss also had knowledge of these things, McCoy and Cheekbones conclude that the psychiatrist must have notifed the boss. Ross visits a recently-fired studio executive who corroborates this information, and he tells her that the psychiatrist "handled" the victim's desire to testify, meaning that he convinced her not to, apparently at the behest of her boss. It begins to look like the psychiatrist might have had a reason to kill her, assuming his career would be over if she ever found out about this double-dealing.

McCoy and Cheekbones look into it a bit more, and the Gorton catches wind of it. He insists that all their evidence be turned over to him. McCoy argues that none of it meets the various burdens for having to be turned over, and the matter is scheduled for a hearing before the judge. McCoy begins to prepare for that hearing, and just as a pile of relevant case law comes in, Cheekbones announces she's going home to be with her daughter. McCoy can't believe it, and they argue about priorities. When she's had enough, Cheekbones yells at McCoy and SHE QUITS. McCoy is left with an incompetent female assistant who is unfamiliar with the case and not as talented as Cheekbones. Oh well. He has a bit of trouble at the hearing the next day, and the judge rules that all evidence must be made available to the defense.

Though Cheekbones is no longer at the case, we still learn what's going on with her. We follow her to family court, where she has the custody hearing with her ex-husband, whose attorney argues that Cheekie spends too much time at her job. Ross counters that she's quit and she's looking for a more flexible position.

Back at the trial, Janeane G. takes the stand, where the defense gets her to admit that she accepted a large payment from a tabloid, "The National Tattler," for leaking a story about her boss (the victim) and an affair with an actor. The story had enraged her boss at the time. Things are going well for the prosecution now, especially that Cheekie's not around. McCoy and Schiff regroup in Schiff's office, where McCoy paces around until Schiff tells him to get some help: "Call Cheekbones," he says. McCoy heads over to her house (again at the house!) and convinces her to come back on board, because the defendant is "a monster" and he can't "send him to hell" without her.

Cheekie gets right back to work and cross examines the studio boss, poking a whole in the defense's theory that the psychiatrist committed the crime, arguing that since she decided to testify, there was no reason to kill her. After this, she prepares McCoy for cross-examining the defendant, telling him all the tricks that her ex-husband would have used to prepare the witness for McCoy's cross. In his examination, McCoy forces the defendant to admit to all the coaching he received from his attorney, and then gets him to pick up the murder weapon and demonstrate how he hacked up his wife's body, exactly what the defense didn't want the jury to see. Thanks, Cheeks! Once the guy has the knife in his hand, McCoy really goes after him and gets him all worked up, and finally manages to squeeze a motive out of him: the victim had control over the defendant's career, and had him directing movies about talking bears instead of movies like "Crooked Streets," the promising film he directed 8 years earlier that had been critically hailed as a "daring foray into neo-realism." Once he starts remembering the bad old times, the defendant gets very emotional and enraged, and starts gesturing with his hands while he's still holding the big knife. Finally, he snaps, and jumps up and calls his wife a "vindictive bitch." It's all over after that, and everyone knows it. I hate these kinds of endings that rely on sudden emotional outbursts, but what are you going to do.

The jury comes back, and --- spoiler coming --- finds him guilty. McCoy is pleased, and the defendant collapses. The victim's parents are happy, and McCoy and Cheekbones share some kind of weird caressing high-five handshake gesture that indicates all is well between them. Outside the court room, Gorton announces he is dropping the custody proceeding against Cheekie as soon as she convinces McCoy not to seek the death penalty against his client. Of course that falls flat, and he gamely signs a letter dropping the matter anyway. Contrived. Back at the office, for some reason, Schiff, Cheekie, McCoy, Curtis, and Briscoe are all gathered around, talking about how the defendant was sentenced to death. McCoy proposes going out for a drink, by Schiff's headed home, Briscoe has a date, Curtis has a date with his wife (awwww!), and Cheeks is headed home to her daughter. Everybody but Schiff and McCoy leaves. Although the previous 10 minutes of the episode have felt pretty contrived and forced, the next minute makes up for it all:

Schiff says to McCoy, "it began with a murder and ends with an execution. Take the rest of the week off." "Adam, it's Friday," McCoy replies. "So it is, says Schiff. "See you Monday." Schiff exits, sucking his side teeth as always, and McCoy sits down and reaches for a drink, alone. It's a terrific portrayal of the lonely fight for justice, and a moment that captures McCoy's character and life perfectly.

The major theme in this episode, and indeed the whole three-part series, is the relationship between one's work and family life. The victim, defendant, Ross, and Curtis are all caught up in the tension between the two. For the defendant, it was too much for him to bear, and he killed his wife/boss. When her husband used their daughter to manipulate her performance on the case, she had to choose between the two, and at first, she chose her family life. Curtis, meanwhile, gets cross-examined on the stand about a supposedly adulterous affair and how it affected his judgement on the case, but he has to deal with the consequences of his testimony at home. In the end, it is McCoy who has only work to think of: his job is his life, and so he has no conflict of interest. Nothing stands between him and the pursuit of justice.

Turnaround

In this episode (7.16), part 2 of a 3-part series, McCoy gets an arrest warrant for a murder suspect who fled to California, but legal wrangling prohibits him from getting the suspect back to New York to stand trial.

This story arc began in the episode "D-Girl" and continues in "Showtime". In D-Girl, a female film studio boss turned up in the river, hacked to pieces. At first, the prime suspect was her personal trainer, with whom she also had a physical relationship. However, by the end of D-Girl, he has pretty much been cleared, and the focus turns to a movie director named Eddie Newman, the exec's ex-husband.. This effort is all about gathering evidence linking him to the crime, and getting him shipped back to NYC.

The episode begins with a little boy chopping up his sister's stuffed animals with a big knife. It turns out he found the knife in a field, and that this knife was the weapon used in the murder of the studio exec. Briscoe and Curtis visit the boy and learn that he found the knife in a field. They are able to put the ex-husband near the scene where this knife was found. He took a cab by there on his way to the airport. This leads them to investigate what happened at the airport. They theorize that the suspect boarded an airplane owned by a very powerful movie director named Berger. Berger is very much a Steven Spielberg type, and he appears to have been purposely dressed to call that to mind. There is a funny scene where Briscoe and Curtis attempt to question Berger, and they end up in a very large conference room with about 10 lawyers, assistants, agents, and publicists. The lawyer answers every question on behalf of his client, and Berger doesn't say a word in the entire scene. Berger's publicist says something like, "We'd prefer if you did not leak this information, but if you do, please give Cindy Admas first dibs." Nevertheless, the detectives get the info they need: their chief suspect, Newman, was on the plane.

Briscoe and Green then talk to others who were on the plane with Newman on that flight. They come across one man who says Newman was acting agitated and kept going to the bathroom. Cheekbones (aka Jamie Ross) gets more information on the relationship between Newman and his ex-wife by interrogating their old suspect in the case, the personal trainer, who is still in jail. It seems to me they'd have someone better to talk to than him, but whatever. Anyway, she learns there was a history of violence between them, a history that had been implied by another precinct's detective in D-Girl. Ross visits the detective and learns that he never actually arrested Newman, even though he brought him to the station once. Ross theorizes that he was dirty, and was bribed by Newman. They get a search warrant for Newman's apartment, and don't find much except a lot of illegal pills.

Briscoe and Curtis head out to California to arrest him, but he's in rehab, and the local DA's office think they'll have trouble extracting him. Regardless, the detectives arrest Newman while he is in the presence of his local attorney, his psychiatrist, and his chief counsel, Neil Gorton, who happens to be Cheekbone's ex-husband and law partner.

Gorton fights the extradition proceedings and finds a CA judge sympathetic to his cause. McCoy, Schiff, and Ross learn this on the TV back in NY, and Schiff dispatches both of them to California. When he gets there, Gorton tells an angry McCoy, "You're not in Kansas anymore," and this becomes increasingly evident as the episode proceeds. Gorton then asserts on television that his client is the victim of planted evidence. At the habeus corpus hearing that follows, McCoy has to prove that there is probable cause to have issued the arrest warrant, but Gorton argues the evidence against his client was planted by the detective who once made the arrangement with Newman. He argues the detective was angry with Newman because the director never followed through on his promises to the detective after the assault incident. Back in NY, Briscoe and Newman angrily confront the detective, who insists he didn't do anything wrong, but he's not very believable. In the middle of all this, Curtis has another date, in NYC, with the studio exec he met in California (Lauren Graham, now on The Gilmore Girls), but it is obvious he is pre-occupied with his difficult family situation. This becomes even more clear when he returns to LA and has dinner with the woman on her yacht, where she tells him she can get him a job in the security department of the studio, travelling the world and making three times as much money as he currently does. He refuses the job, and her offer of sex, and essentially ends things with her.

Back at the court hearing, Gorton presents his argument that the hair and fiber evidence found in his client's car was planted. As the judge begins to rule in his favor and refuses to extradite Newman, McCoy gets himself in hot water. He says to the judge, "Can you say that louder, your honor? I think some people in the Bronx didn't hear you," meaning that he felt the judge was taking control of the case away from New York City. He continues a little tirade, after which the judge rules against him, finds him in contempt, and fines him $2,000. But as they leave the courthouse, McCoy and Ross agree that Miller, an "overzealous bastard" did attempt to frame Newman.

So they are left trying to find indisputable probable cause for the warrant. They manage to get a search warrant for the movie director Berger's plane, and they find a ring and some blood in the plumbing. They return to court, present the evidence, and the judge has no choice but to allow the extradition to proceed. The judge seems to silently acknowledge a bit of respect for McCoy as he renders his ruling.

Subsequently, Cheekbones and her ex-husband meet for lunch, where he tells her his client is innocent and passed a lie detector test. She goes to NYC, where the news about the lie detector is leaked by Gorton, and then returns to her house, where she finds Gorton has come by and picked up their child, contrary to the terms of their custody agreement. She seems to have the daughter back by the next morning however, as she is apparently late to work. Schiff gives her hell for being late, and berates her about putting her family ahead of her job. Very unusual for him, so it's obvious he's pissed about something. It turns out that Gorton is trying the case in the tabloids, and Schiff feels he has an unfair advantage. He instructs McCoy to get a conviction, "whatever you have to do" and tells him, to "kick the living daylights out of Neil Gorton." I've never seen Schiff so angry, and even McCoy almost melts from the heat of Schiff's passion. It's a really terrific scene. And so the episode ends.

The episode is so plot-driven, it's hard to find much to really comment on, but it's notable when the story follows Ross back to her house. It's the first time I can remember a scene being film in either an attorney or detective's home. Interestingly, it happens again in the next episode, part 3 of this story, when we see Curtis's house.

Finally, the episode's title refers to a situation in Hollywood when a script is proceeding through development, and then gets "turned around" and stalled. This is cited as one of the reasons the corrupt detective was angry at Newman, but the word also seems to refer to McCoy's winning the hearing the second time around, and the continual coast-to-coast travel made by the lead characters in the episode.

D-Girl

In this episode (7.15), part one of a three-part story arc, a man just released from prison is caught dumping his brother's body into the river. As police investigate the scene, they discover the headless torso of a woman. By tracing her breast implants, Brsicoe and Curtis learn the woman is the head of a Hollywood film studio. The ex-con is quickly eliminated as a suspect because he was in jail at the time the woman was killed, so the chief suspects soon become her ex-husband (a film director) and her personal trainer, who was the last person known to have seen her alive. The trainer becomes the main suspect, but refuses to yield to a blood test. When his fingerprints are found in her apartment, along with some blood, Briscoe and Curtis go to arrest him, but find he has left for Los Angeles. And that means....Briscoe and Curtis head to LA.

They find him working as a fitness trainer on a film set, and make note of what appear to be scratch marks on his neck. He claims he got them rock climbing. The detectives search the trash at the film studio and (somewhat improbably) find his discarded bandages. They test the blood on those, which matches the semen found in the victim, and arrest him. They arrest him on the beach in the presence of famous character actor Robert Culp, playing himself. Culp says he knows an attorney, and the suspect ends up retaining this attorney, who charges $700/hour.

Once he's been arraigned, the suspect reveals more information about the night in question: he was with the woman, he had sex with her, and then he borrowed her car and drove to New Palz. He says there's a receipt from the toll plaza in her car, but the detectives can't find it. But while checking out the car, they learn that the victim's ex-husband expressly ordered that his car be cleaned "inside and out," and it begins to look more and more like he is the suspect, possibly with some kind of complicity by his therapist, who is also the victim's therapist.

On top of all this, there are some significant sub-plots. The main one involves Det. Curtis, who is seeking a new apartment because his wife kicked him out and is leaving him "dangling in the wind," apparently because of an infidelity referred to in previous episodes. But when he gets into LA, he has a heavily flirtatious relationship with a female studio exec who is the detectives' main contact there. They go out to dinner, and they even kiss, but Curtis backs away from spending the night with her. He ends up spending the night on the couch in Briscoe's hotel room. As a result, there's a funny scene where Briscoe and Curtis are both standing there in their boxer shorts talking to each other.

The other subplot involves Cheekbones, aka Jamie Ross. You may remember that she used to work as a defense attorney at her ex-husband's law firm. In this episode, we meet her ex-husbund, who is being retained by the film studio to represent the interests of the victim's ex-husband who, as I said, is also a director for the studio. Cheekbones and her ex have a rather testy discussion in the presence of Jamie's young daughter, who seems puzzled by the whole thing. The interaction between them is likely to become more tense, since it's looking more and more like her ex's client will soon be the main suspect in the case.

Unlike at least one other previous episode which had scenes in LA (Three Dawg Night, I think), it appears that L&O actually did some filming in LA. There are palm trees and everything.

Casting-wise, the appearance of Robert Culp was funny. Briscoe even makes a reference to the old show Culp was on with Bill Cosby, I, Spy. I thought maybe the show was making a bit of a joke, too, having the suspect be in the company of a man named "Culp," as "culp" is a root word (loosely) meaning "guilt." The other great bit of casting is that JANEANE GAROFALO shows up as the studio exec's assistant. She is droll and snappy as ever, maybe a bit more agitated and cold than usual. It was great to see her in there with Curtis and Briscoe.

The episode's title is a film industry term and stand for "development girl," referring to someone responsible for reading scripts, etc. It would seem like Janeane, not the victim, is the d-girl here, so I'm not sure what that was all about. By the way, there was also an unusual episode of The Sopranos called "D-Girl," which starred Alicia Witt memorably playing the title character.

This three-part series is continued in "Turnaround" and "Showtime".

Loco Parentis

In this episode (10.10), a high school boy turns up dead, wrapped in a trash bag. Investigation leads Briscoe and Green to believe the boy was killed by another boy he was bullying, but then they learn he was the victim of bullying himself. The boy who bullied him apparently killed him using a scythe-like weapon called a kama, and then disposed of his body. The suspect had a history of bullying and fascination with violence, but a judge prohibits McCoy from introducing this as evidence. Their case against him is entirely circumstantial, and it's weak circumstantial evidence, at that. As a means of getting the boy's violent history introduced, Schiff raises the novel idea of charging the defendant's father with murder, too, since he showed depraved indifference towards his boy's violent tendencies. This seems so far fetched even McCoy resists it, but he gives it the old college try. The trial isn't going particularly well, however, but as McCoy badgers the boy's dad, trying to get him to admit that he had an opportunity to prevent the murder, the boy's mother stands up in court and basically tells everyone the father encouraged the violent behavior. The defense asks for a mistrial, but it's not granted. Time for the old Family Meeting In The Conference Room trick! During the meeting, the boy's mom essentially forces her son to admit he killed the boy, a fact McCoy couldn't really establish at trial. The father caves, too, and accepts a plea, though it's not entirely clear why: even if his son killed the victim, that doesn't mean he was directly responsible for it. (Although I suppose the mother might have offered damning testimony about the father's parenting style that would have hurt his case.)

The story was co-written by Richard Sweren and Matt Witten. This is funny to me because Sweren's episodes tend to be among my least favorite, and the Witten's tend to be pretty good. The writing is very noticeable in this episode, because of Schiff's unusual reach for the charges against the father. This seems more like the kind of thing McCoy would propose and Schiff would reject. Also, the mother's outburst at the end feels very much like a deus ex machina device, and that sort of thing tends to be a symptom of weak, unrealistic writing. It's particularly bad in this case, since the whole point of the episode is whether the father should be held responsible for his son's actions, and the mother's outburst merely distracts from, and then renders moot, that issue. I think it was a cop-out on the part of the writers to include it.

Also interesting in this whole parental responsibility discussion is that the defense attorney cross-examines Briscoe about his own daughter. As we know, she was killed by drug dealers for preparing to testify against them, and she was a drug dealer herself. The judge allows the defense to question Briscoe about this, which doesn't seem realistic to me for many reasons, including the fact that he was there to offer evidence about the physical evidence against the suspect, not the father's responsibility in the murder. The attorney even suggests that "according to Mr. McCoy's theory" Briscoe is reponsible for his daughter's death, but of course, unlike the situation in this case, Briscoe's daughter was not a minor child at the time she was killed. In any case, this episode starts off with a decent and bold enough premise, but it ruins it by seeking out plot expediency in the last 10 minutes of the episode. Chalk up another one in the loss column for Richard Sweren.

8.2 Denial: Emil Skoda's First Appearance

Dead baby episode (8.2) which begins with some maids in a hotel discovering blood-soaked sheets, but no injured person. Forensics indicates that a baby was born, and Briscoe and Curtis track the credit card used to pay for the room to an Upper West Side architect who says the card was stolen. It turns out, however, that his daughter took the card, and her boyfriend paid for the room. After repeatedly denying and lying about what happened, the girl says she miscarried a fetus and flushed it down the toilet. However, additional forensic evidence shows that the baby was carried to term and was alive when it was born. McCoy can't get the couple to turn on each other because they are defended by the same attorney, so he manages to get the lawyer disqualified from representing the boy. The judge, however, orders the girl to be evaluated for competency. Skoda (in his first appearance on the show) makes the diagnosis that she is "a narcissistic bitch" but fit to stand trial, so the trial proceeds.

Eventually the whole story comes out: the baby was born alive, one of the kids strangled it, wrapped it in a towel, and left it in a trash can covered with newspapers. Then, the teenage girl's father heard what happened, drove to the hotel, retrieved the baby, and buried it in a construction lot he had access to. However, the girl's father doesn't want to send his daughter to jail, so he refuses to testify against her, even when offered immunity by McCoy. McCoy has him arrested and placed in custody. Without the father's testimony, it sure looks like that no one will be punished for the death of the baby.

What happened in this episode is that McCoy got outlawyered by the girl's attorney, played by L&O regular James Rebhorn. No wonder they keep asking him back.

One interesting thing that happens is that McCoy and Cheekbones have to work over the weekend because something comes up on a Friday afternoon, so we get to see Cheekbones in jeans, something I've never seen before.

Night and Fog

In this episode (3.13), Briscoe and Logan investigate the apparent assisted suicide of an elderly Holocaust survivor. Her husband immediately admits that he gave her the pills she requested so that she would die peacefully, but evidence shows that he also put a pillow to her face and suffocated her, breaking her nose in the process. Soon enough, the detectives come to the conclusion that he probably killed her without her consent.

But why? Apparently because his wife came to believe that under another name, he was a collaborator in Poland during the Nazi occupation, and was responsible for the deaths of many fellow Jews. Poland had even convicted him in absentia, and under his previous name, of war crimes. So now it's up to Stone to convince a jury that his motivation for killing his wife was to protect himself from being identified as the war criminal. Stone is hindered, however, by the man's aggressive and creative defense attorney, and by the US Dept. of Justice, which wants to extradite the man to Poland so his identity can be confirmed and he can pay for his crimes. Stone weighs whether his responsibility of convicting the man of the murder in NYC outweights his obligation to allow the man to be extradited to pay for "the greater evil." In a great scene, Schiff counsels him that his first responsibility is to the people of NYC. They're in the criminal business, Schiff tells him, not the evil business. Stone replies, "Adam, I thought you of all people..." but Stone tells him to do what he has to do to try the case. This is a great bit of long-distance foreshadowing: Many years later, Schiff leaves the DA's office to go prosecute Nazi war criminals.

There are some interesting casting choices in the episode. Eric Bogosian, the avant garde comic/monologuist, turns in a slightly stilted performance as the defense attorney, one of two times he's appeared on the show. A very young Diane Venora (a long-time Shakespearean actress, but maybe best known for her role as Al Pacino's wife in Heat) plays the suspect's protective and self-sacrificing daughter, character actor Paul Schulze (now Ryan Chappelle on 24 and Father Phil on The Sopranos) shows up as an EMT, and I think that's Toni Lewis (who went on to be a detective on Homicide) playing an uncredited bit part somewhere in the episode.

14.13 Married with Children

In this episode (14.13), a woman is found dead, suspended in the branches of a tree beneath her hotel balcony. Did she fall or was she pushed? She was pushed. And just like the other two episodes with victims who've plunged to their deaths I've watched tonight, guess who the prime suspect is. That's right: the ex-wife. Only this time, the ex-wife is (practically speaking) the ex-wife of the female victim: they were lesbians, squabbling over the custody of their adopted daughter.

The victim was a former Olympic swimmer and a motivational speaker. At first attention focuses on some basketball players she was hanging out with, but then Briscoe and Green shift their attention to a woman who at first claims to be the victim's sister, but then turns out to be the jilted lesbian lover, who flees with the child. Briscoe and Green track down her and the child upstate, and charge the woman with kidnapping, and eventually with murder in furtherance of that kidnapping.

The woman's defense is novel. She claims that because the law in Florida (where she originally lived with the victim) doesn't allow marriage or gay couples to adopt, that law is unconstitutional, so she shouldn't be charged with a crime that wouldn't apply if she were heterosexual. It's a stretch at best, and McCoy offers her a plea bargain, but she and her ambitious lawyer reject it, holding out hope that they will win a court challenge to the law in Florida and be found innocent of the murder in New York. At trial, the defense tries to connect with the jurors of the issue of parenthood, but it doesn't work very well.

The trial judge is Judge Walter Bradley, that that hard-nosed guy who is always acting like he's very angry and in a hurry. He's maybe my favorite judge on the show, because he never takes any nonsense from anybody. Another casting decision I like is that the defendant is played by Lucinda Jenney, who had an unforgettable role in Homicide: Life on the Street as Annabelle Wilgis, the "White Glove Killer" with multiple personality disorder who caused Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) so much anxiety for a few episodes.

This episode is notable for its discussion of gay marriage and the laws that govern it. Southerlyn is very much in favor of unrestricted gay marriage, and seems not very pleased with putting the mother on trial. DA Arthur Branch says he's in favor of gay marriage, too, which is a surprising position for him, but he is less sympathetic to the defendant. McCoy closes the episode with by joking that gay people should be allowed to marry too, so '"they can be just as miserable as the rest of us," but Southerlyn is so pissed off, she doesn't seem to think it's very funny.

By the way, the other two episodes I watched tonight that involved plunging female victims apparently done in by ex-wives are Blood and Dazzled.

Securitate

In this episode (3.20), a Romanian immigrant is shot in the head and dragged underneath his car. Briscoe and Logan eventually find the car through a chop shop, find the kids who brought the car parts into the shop, and then connect a counterfeit credit card found on one of the kids to a counterfeiting ring run out of the antiques shop the victim ran with his brother. The victim apparently had no knowledge of the counterfeiting operations, but his brother Alex, a former member of the Romanian secret service, ran it with his right-hand man, Tony. The theory of the crime becomes that when the victim learned about his brother's illegal operations, he was going to turn him in, and Alex and Tony killed him in retaliation.

However, the key piece of evidence in the case (the truck used to ram the victim's car) is thrown out because the detectives lacked a warrant to search the garage where they found it (Tony had give them permission and keys, but his name wasn't on the lease), and the charges against Alex are dismissed, and he is set free. But, as Schiff says, he soon has to answer to a higher court: he's found dead in his apartment.

At first the Romanian wife of the victim is the suspect, and she offers a confession. However, as often happens on the show, her confession does not match the facts of the crime, and it's clear that she is covering for her nephew Leon, Alex's son. Leon is arrested, but his lawyer argues mental defect as a result of "cultural insanity," suggesting that Leon's difficult life in Romania exposed him to a culture of violence, and that the effects of this life were heightened by witnessing his father commit acts of brutality and being rewarded for them. Elizabeth Olivet interviews the boy, and thinks there's something strange about his story, and doesn't believe he's actually insance. This belief is bolstered when Stone and Robinette interview Tony, who knew the boy back in Romania, and learn that his father had rejected Leon and wouldn't have him around. There goes the insanity defense. They further learn that Leon was the one who told his father that the victim was preparing to go to the police about the illegal enterprise, and that is so doing, he knew his dad would kill the victim. Confronted with this theory, Leon confesses to the whole thing in the conference room.

A note on the casting:. Alan King plays the boy's defense attorney.

Dazzled

In this episode (12.20), a young woman is found in the garden area outside her apartment building. Did she fall or was she pushed? She was pushed. Sounds like the ex-wife might be involved. Sound familiar? It's the oldest story in the book, one we've even seen on L&O a few times before.

In this ep, however, the motivation seems to be jealousy and money. The ex-wife has been cut out of the will because the new, younger wife is pregant. At first the detectives suspect the husband, then the boyfriend of the current wife, and then finally set their sites on the ex-wife, but they think the boyfriend might have been involved to.

A tox screen on the victim shows that she had a sedative called "Dazzle" in her system, a drug that the ex-wife, an anesthesiologist, had access to. I'm writing this as I watch the ep, and I have to tell you: I think the first wife's kids did it. Those little rascals!

Hey, now McCoy and Southerlyn think the same thing! Time for the big family meeting in the conference room! Oh, McCoy, that trick works every time. I don't know how you do it. There she goes...the daughter's breaking down now. Let it all out, honey. Tell us how it happened.

Not much notable about the episode...we've seen it all before, including James Rebhorn, a L&O fave, as the ex-wife's defense attorney. I think the program directors at TNT realized the cookie-cutter nature of this episode, too. They aired it back-to-back with "Blood", an episode that features practically the same story line.

8.7 Blood

In this episode (8.7), a white woman married to a pharmaceuticals executive is found dead on the pavement outside her apartment building. Did she fall or was she pushed? She was pushed. At first it seems that her husband, named Joshua Burdett, killed her, because three weeks earlier, she gave birth to a black baby, whom the couple gave up for adoption. Briscoe and Curtis try to figure out with whom she had an affair, but when they learn that the baby had a rare inherited medical condition that Burdett also has, they come to a more surprising conclusion: Burdett is a black man, "passsing" as a white one. This supposition is all but confirmed when Van Buren confronts him in the the interrogation room and greets him as "my brother" and talks to him about what it must have been like back in the day as a black man passing as a white one. She even uses the n-word to try to provoke a response out of him.

The detectives reason that Burdett killed his wife to preserve his secret, figuring he feared he would lose his job and friends if they learned he was actually black. It might seem unreasonable to assume that he'd be fired, but since he answered that he was white on his original job application for the company back in the 1960s, he might be worried that he could be fired for lying 30 years earlier. (This suspicion is confirmed by McCoy and Cheekbones later when Cheekbones talks to Burdett's lawyer, an expert in civil rights, who implies, without breaking privilege, that this is exactly what was going on.)

But when the baby's adoptive parents disappear with the baby, out of fear of having her taken away, the investigators stumble on to a new motive: Burdett's ex-wife, who is white, doesn't want the racial identity of the baby known, either. She is worried that the information about the baby will become public because she learned that Burdett and his wife were pushing to cancel the adoption proceedings and reclaim the baby from the adoptive parents. She was worried about the ramifications of the black baby being parented by the Burdetts because all her friends would think ill of her if they knew she was previously married to a black man, and she claims that she doesn't want her son to be labeled black. But, more to the point, it becomes clear that the woman herself is racist, and she sought a divorce as soon as she learned her husband was black. (She learned this when his sister showed up one day.)

Next thing you know, the ex-wife is on trial for Murder 2, and she's chosen a black female attorney to defend her, and her attorney does a pretty good job, despite the difficulty of the case. Her defense hinges on the idea that the ex-wife was motivated out of fear for her son's well-being and that the murder was unintentional. However, Cheekbones and McCoy uncover some evidence deep in the ex-wife's divorce proceedings that shoot that defense to pieces [spoiler alert]: the defendant actually fought not to have custody of her child, apparently because he was half-black, and she didn't want anything to do with him. She asked for 3 times the original alimony proposal before she agreed to take him on. Confronted with this evidence, she agrees to a plea bargain.

This is one of many L&O episodes to deal extensively with the theme of race, and as I've said before, the show tends to deal with race in a fairly nuanced and intelligent way. This episode doesn't do as well in that area as some others, but it's still fairly good. I had a little bit of a problem with Van Buren's conversation with Burnett, since the writing seemed a little easy and and it assumed to much. Also, the ex-wife's character is a bit one-dimensional: she's the evil uppity racist high-class white lady, using words like "monkey" to describe black people. Nonetheless, the essential issues the episode deals with, namely how race intersects with love and family, is important, and for the most part, the show handles them well.

Some good backstory gets introduced in the episode, too: While talking to the detectives, Van Buren receives a call that Briscoe and Curtis theorize is from the department, calling about Van Buren's performance on the captain's exam. In later episodes, we learn that Lt. Van Buren does not get the promotion to captain, and she sues the department as a result, alleging bias based on her gender (and possibly her race). It was clever of the writers to start this story arc in this episode about prejudice. Also, Cheekbones and McCoy have a conversation about a woman named Madeline (sp?) whom Cheekbones has set up with McCoy. They talk about a date McCoy had with her, during which McCoy brought up Claire Kincaid. "She brought up [something something] drunk driving. I wasn't obsessing," he says. It only lasted 30 seconds, but it was maybe the longest conversation I've ever seen on the show about a character's love life.

Endurance: First Appearance of Nora Lewin and Rudy Giuliani

What an episode! This episode (11.1), the season premiere of season 11, features the first appearance of Dianne Wiest as DA Nora Lewin, a guest appearance by Mayor Giuliani, and a twist ending that is actually surprising.

The episode begins with a woman running out of a burning apartment building and grabbing the cell phone away from a passer-by so she can report the fire to the FDNY. But it's too late: the woman's son dies in the fire. The fire investigators quickly determine that paint thinner was used as an accelerant in the fire. Briscoe and Green initially focus their investigation on a store owner who had a failing business on the first floor, but then move on to the woman's ex-husband. Eventually, however, they come to believe that the woman herself set the fire. Her son was severely disabled, and the detectives believe she may have set the fire as a way out. Their suspicions are confirmed when forensics shows paint thinner on the woman's nightgown, a nightgown obtained by a bit of a ruse: Green and Briscoe visit the friend's house where the woman is staying (although she isn't there at the time), and Green fakes a cough and asks to come in and get a glass of water. In plain view in the living room, he finds the woman's nightgown, and asks the woman's friend if he can borrow it so FDNY can run some tests on it as a routine matter. The friend agrees, and the tests serve as evidence.

During interrogation, the woman requests a lawyer, and gets one, a verbose and occasionally incompetent one named Barry Peck, played by the increasingly familiar character actor Nick Chinlund. Peck is a well-dressed wind bag who flirts with Carmichael (to no avail) and irritates the judges. His examination of witnesses doesn't seem very productive either, but midway through the case, McCoy seems unsure that he can get a conviction on the Murder 2 charges that Lewin had sought. He offers a plea on Man I, which Peck rejects on behalf of his client. Shortly thereafter, Peck changes his client's defense to one of not guilty by reason of mental defect. McCoy objects, but it's allowed. Skoda is convinced the woman is not crazy, and McCoy gets her on the stand to take down her defense. However, in the somewhat extraordinary scene that follows, the woman breaks down and confesses through her sobs that in fact, she set the fire, but the fire is not what killed her son. She admits that the boy had a seizure, and instead of giving him the anti-seizure injection she usually does, she allowed him to seize until he died, then she attempted to overdose herself on his pills and set the fire, killing them both. She says she changed her mind midway through, however, and that's when she ran out to call for help. McCoy believes her, and is quite affected by her story. He tells both Carmichael and Lewin that he feels even Man I is too strong a charge, and that she does not deserve the punishment that charge would call for. Lewin tells him, "You have to do your job, Jack," but when the judge gives him a chance to include lesser charges in the instructions to the jury, McCoy lets the opportunity pass, and effectively lets his whole case go down the crapper. Lewin's response is sympathetic, but not very believable. He countermanded a direct order from her, and let a guilty woman walk away. Would a DA approve of such a turn of events on her first case? I don't think so.

The episode is obviously notable because of Giuliani's brief appearance and Lewin's introduction. The Mayor introduces Lewin to Jack in a funny little scene where he says Lewin helped him prosecute many organized crime cases, tells McCoy he's doing a great job, and introduces himself to Carmichael, who's all smiles. (Here's a screen capture of Lewin and Giuliani from the episode.) Also, McCoy tells Lewin that Schiff is off working with Wiesenthal in Vienna, tracking down Nazi war criminals. (This, by the way, aligns Schiff with Robert Morgenthau, his real life counterpart who has long been active in Jewish causes.) This episode paints Lewin as a bit tougher than she usually is. In subsequent episodes, she is maddeningly soft on various criminals who deserve much worse than her platitudes on guilt and human nature. Although I like Dianne Wiest as an actress very much, I've always felt that Lewin's character is ill-conceived and works against the justice-above-all credo that the show has always followed. It's a good thing that she was only an interim DA.

Big L&O Night on Sunday

Cancel all your plans for Sunday night: TNT is airing 5 back-to-back episodes on Sunday night, including the three-parter from Season 7 that begins with the episode "D-Girl". The mini-marathon begins at 6 pm EST.

DR 1-102

Serena Southerlyn faces the disciplinary committee in this episode (12.13) after putting her life at risk to free a hostage from a knife-wielding sexual predator.

The episode begins with two young men discovering the bodies of two women in an apartment across the hall from a party they're attending. Forensics and other evidence indicates that the women were killed a few hours apart by a visitor to the building who did not have to force entry. Eventually, the Briscoe and Green suspect a worker at a hardware store who duplicated keys for many people in the neighborhood. It appears that he would copy the keys and then break in to their apartments and sexually assault the women. When the detectives go to his home to question the man, they find he has fled the scene moments earlier, but in his room they find a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about the double-murder and other sexual assualts in Yorkville, which is a neighborhood on the far Upper East Side. At this point, the episode takes an extremely unusual turn: the police corner the suspect in a pharmacy where he has taken a hostage at knifepoint. Briscoe and Curtis arrive on the scene, but don't have much to offer, and the hostage negotiator isn't making much progress. While still holding the hostage, the suspect requests a lawyer. Shortly thereafter, Southerlyn shows up, having been called down to observe any violent action that the SWAT team might take. After some debate, it is decided that Southerlyn will go in and talk to the hostage. He asked for a lawyer, so that's what he's going to get. You can see the subsequent legal problems coming a mile a way, but Southerlyn straps on a bulletproof advice, gets some quick advice from the negotiator, and heads in to talk to the suspect. She has a brief, but tense, conversation with him where she says she can only help him when he releases the hostage. He does, and she convinces him to put the knife down. As soon as he does, the tactical team moves in, and the suspect is arrested.

Serena is almost immediately chastised by her boss, soft-spined DA Nora Lewin, for misrepresenting herself to the suspect. Lewin removes Southerlyn from the case, but McCoy wins it anyway. This is at the episodes 40 minute mark, so you know there are still some twists yet to come. And here it is: Lewin calls in Southerlyn to chastise her yet again, and in so do doing informs her that she is being brought before the bar association for disbarment proceedings.

Southerlyn is flabbergasted, and attempts to prepare her defense, but can't find anyone to represent her. She says lawyers hate appearing before the committee, even just to represent someone. McCoy offers to help her, a move Lewin resists, but she can't really say no.

The remainder of the episode is about the disbarment hearing. McCoy argues on the human aspects of the case, whereas the aggressive "prosecutor" on the case, a prominent defense attorney, argues that the ethical rule in question, "DR 1-102," is hard and fast and does not allow for exceptions based on extenuating circumstances. He also argues that Southerlyn did not merely act to save human life, but also structured her conversation with the suspect in such a way that it would preserve the integrity of her case against him. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want to know what the committee decides.

The committee decides to reprimand Southerlyn but not disbar her. She and McCoy consider this a victory. They celebrate afterwards, but then ole dumb Lewin comes in and tells Southerlyn, "If you wanted to save people, you should've become a doctor." What a wet blanket. Thanks for your support, Nora, now go to hell.

The episode is obviously unusual for a lot of reasons: the hostage situation, Southerlyn's involvement in it, and of course, the bar committee hearings. Southerlyn is very emotional throughout the episode, especially when talking to the suspect during the hostage incidence, and at the end when thanking McCoy for his help.

Also, the airing of the episode is a bit coincidental since it deals with a sexual predator on the Upper East Side/Yorkville, and just last week, police arrested a man suspected of several sexual attacks in exactly the same neighborhood.

8.5 Nullification

In this very unusual and engaging episode (8.5), three masked men commit armed robbery at an off-track betting facility in New York City, opening fire with sub-machine guns and killing a security guard and severely injuring another. One robber is killed in the gun battle, one is injured, and one escapes. When Briscoe and Curtis arrive on the scene, they discover that two of them men have the same tattoo, which they use the Internet to trace to a militia group in a New York suburb. The detectives quickly establish that more than a dozen local men are involved in the group, and they get twenty search warrants, executed simultaneously at 6 AM. Dozens of heavily armed officers storm the residences of the militia members, and Curtis soon uncovers an arms cache containing many high-powered weapons. Every member of the militia, including the 17-year-old son of the dead robber, is arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit robbery and murder.

Once they are in custody, a montage sequence follows each of the suspects as they refuse to give any information besides their name, date of birth, and rank and serial number in the militia. No amount of arm twisting can get them to talk. At the arraignment hearing, a leader of the group, Phil Christie, insists that the members of his group are prisoners of war, and that the court has no jurisdiction. He makes this same plea to the trial judge who refuses his motion, but allows Christie to serve as his own attorney.

The trial is a wild one. As McCoy attempts to make his case, the defendants routinely start loudly reciting passages from variou seminal American documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the writings of Thomas Paine. The judge repeatedly removes defendants from the courtroom. Additionally, Christie's questions tend to be things like, "Have you ever read the Constitution of the United States?" and "Do you pay taxes?" even when he is questioning people like the balistics expert. McCoy objects, and is sustained, but he still ends up looking like a bit of a bully.

The integrity of the trial is called into question when a juror passes a militia newspaper on to another juror. The judge dismisses both jurors, but McCoy fears the entire jury pool has been tainted. He knows he can get a mistrial if he manages to get one more jury dismissed, so he tells Cheekbones to order Briscoe and Curtis to dig up everything they can on the remaining jurors. Cheekbones returns with a document indicating that one of the jurors was in a radical student group in the 1960. The information came from the so-called "Red Squad," an NYPD unit that used to photograph protesters back in the day. McCoy contemplates it for a moment, then crumples up the sheet and throws it in the trash, telling Cheekbones and Schiff that he won't allow the DA's office to become what the militia group thinks they are.

The decision is a costly one. As the trial goes on, it is evident that jury is beginning to identify more and more with the defense. Christie himself takes the stand, and over McCoy's objections, discusses the concept of "jury nullification," which would allow them to acquit the defendants in the interest of justice, despite the evidence before them. This seems to have an impact on the jury, as does Christie's closing argument about the nature of democracy and the state. During the trial, you sort of get the impression that this is going to be one of those episodes that comes down to McCoy's closing arguments, and indeed that's how it turns out. McCoy delivers and impassioned and well-reasons summation that outlines the responsibilities of the jurors to come to their verdict based only on the facts of the case, and he reminds them that the passage quoted by the defendants -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- applies to everyone equally, including the victim of the crime, who was denied his life, even though he was merely a private citizen, not an agent of the state, a guy with a job, just like the jurors themselves.

When the jury returns from deliberations, we learn that they have been deliberating for 9 days without reaching a consensus. I won't divulge what the outcome is but The outcome -- a hung jury after 9 days -- results in an exchange of words between Christie in McCoy in which they disagree who the winner is. Ross tells Jack he won by playing it straight and that counts as a moral victory, but he's not so sure. He says the fact that "those clowns" could find even one person who would vote to acquit says something disquieting about this country.

The episode is Law & Order's take on the militia issue in this country, and it is well-handled. It makes the militia members seem radical, but not crazy, and it presents both sides of the issue well. The episode is well-acted and well-written, and even at times exciting. It is unusual in many ways. The opening gun battle is shown in the teaser, which may be only the second time or so I've seen automatic gun fire on the show. The search warrant scene is ambitiously staged and edited, and the story line -- 20 defendants, a defense that isn't really a defense, and the jury nullification issue -- are all exceedingly rare for the show. We even see Profaci have a little more than his standard five words of dialog...he gets to briefly interrogate a suspect.

Coincidentally, Christie is played by Denis O'Hare (profile), an actor who has the lead guest spot on what may be my favorite episode ever of the series, "Pro Se". As the title implies, he defends himself in that episode as well.

Burned

In this episode (8.9), Robert Vaughn guest stars as the rich, powerful, and controlling grandfather of a boy accused of a fatal arson. The episode begins with a man coming home with a woman he apparently met at a bar. As they start to get busy, he leaves her for a moment to get a drink, and she takes the opportunity to listen to his answering machine, apparently trying to figure out if he has a girlfriend or something. The message she hears scares her. It's is a woman's voice saying, "Don't worry...I killed Didi." She freaks out and runs out of the apartment, and heads to the precinct, where she tells Briscoe and Curtis her story. Although Briscoe is dismissive, they follow up.

At first, it appears that the man whose apartment it was may have done something to his ex-girlfriend, however, she eventually is found, and the man reveals that he used to get a lot of phone calls for the person who used to have the same phone number. The detectives track this guy down, and he turns out to be a divorced alcoholic who was found responsible for an accidental fire that killed his daughter, Diane, aka "Didi." So now, the detectives have to figure out who really set the fire.

The trail, based on years old evidence, leads to a teenage boy, whose voice is "a sixty percent match" for the voice on the answering machine message. He has a high-pitched voice, which accounts for why everyone initially thought the message was left by a woman. It turns out that the boy is the grandson of Robert Vaughn's character, Carl Anderton, who has a long history of being a political power broker in New York and who has known Schiff for decades. Anderton even says there's a picture of Schiff holding the boy when he was a baby.

With the help of Skoda making one of his third-hand diagnoses based on what McCoy tells him, the investigators begin to suspect that the boy has bipolar disorder and that may have led him to set the fire. They offer a plea based on mental defect, but Anderton, the boy's legal guardian, refuses it. Nobody can figure out why, but eventually McCoy theorizes that Anderton himself is bipolar and doesn't want the world to know. He's afraid that if the boy is found to have a disorder, people will think it came from Anderton. He puts his grandson's well-being in jeopardy by refusing the plea so that he can protect his own reputation. He gets very angry about the prosecution, and Schiff even goes to his palatial home to try to change his mind, but Anderton merely implicitly threatens Schiff, which doesn't go over very well with the DA. Earlier in the ep, Schiff had asked McCoy to treat Anderton with respect, but McCoy -- typically -- replies he won't treat him any differently than he would anyone else. By the end of the ep, Schiff seems to have much the same feeling. Eventually, McCoy gets Anderton's daughter to confront him and the boy ends up pleading guilty and being remanded to a psychiatric facility.

The episode is notable for several reasons, mainly Vaughn's guest appearance. It's pretty unusual for a star of his caliber to show up on the series, and even though his performance is hammy and a little over the top, it's fun to see him going head to head with Schiff and McCoy. Also notable is the odd nature of the teaser, which involves no actual crime, just a confession left on the wrong answering machine...a very unusual kind of setup for this show. Finally, Schiff leaves the office to have an extended dialogue with Anderton, and this sort of thing is also rare, and it gives great insight into Schiff's character.

The title refers both to the arson and, I think, to Anderton's feelings about being "burned" by Schiff, his old friend.

The episode, though at times over-acted and a bit implausible, is fun to watch.

3.12 Right to Counsel

In this colorfully-written episode (3.12), a rich old lady is found murdered in her big apartment. It turns out the woman is worth $20 million, and many people stand to gain from her death. The initial suspect is her much-younger boyfriend, a 38-year-old fashion designer in serious debt. Logan, Briscoe, Stone, and Robinette work up a pretty strong circumstantial case against him. On the advice of his working class attorney, the designer please to Manslaughter, and is sentenced to at least 7 years in prison. However, during his allocution, he mis-describes certain details of the murder, and Robinette suspects he might be innocent. Further investigation points to the trust attorney responsible for the management of the victim's estate, who was also a friend of the victim and stood to gain a substantial amount of money from her death. It turns out that this attorney set up the fashion designer, and even referred him to an attorney who he knew from childhood and whom he knew would be likely to seek a plea bargain. Once they match a fingerprint from the scene to the attorney, he's arrested and tried for the murder. The designer's lawyer admits she was somewhat complicit in railroading her client. Things look pretty bad for the defendant, but he does show up for an early morning court appearance. Guess what Briscoe and Logan find when they visit his apartment.

The episode is notable for a few reasons. It's unusual to see a defense attorney become a suspect in a crime, but that's what happens here. Also, it's rare to have an initial defendant get all the way to pleading guilty before they realize he's the wrong suspect. The teaser is a little bit strange, too. It starts outside the victim's apartment building as a couple of painters discuss an impending marriage (or something like that) and the camera follows them into the building. But there is a cut as they enter the victim's apartment with the doorman. The conversation goes on for a long time, and so -- rare for teasers -- the whole sequence drags a little bit.

I mentioned the episode was colorfully written. There are a lot of little jokes throwaway one-liners that liven up the dialog a little bit, and one older female witness the detectives visit even seems to be flirting with Briscoe a little bit. All in all, it's a pretty decent straightforward episode with a few not-quite surprising twists, but it still holds your attention.

The title seems to refer ironically both to the counsel that the victim received from her attorney and eventual murderer, and the bad counsel that the wrongly-accused fashion designer received from his attorney.

The Collar

Decent episode (12.11) in which a teenager kills a priest while the priest is in a confessional. It turns out that the teen killed the wrong priest, though: his intended victim has taken the night off from hearing confessions, but the killer didn't realize it until it was too late. This mixup causes Briscoe and Green to spend some time investigating various motives to kill the dead priest, so they have to rework their investigation once they realize who the intended target was.

Once they get themselves on the right path, they connect the dots between the intended victim and the murderer through the murder weapon (which had been stolen from a gas station) and some evidence suggesting the teen's involvement in the earlier murder, and a suggestion that he may have confessed this involvement to the priest who was his intended victim.

The investigation hits a brick wall, however, when the priest refuses to tell McCoy and Southerlyn what he knows about the boy's involvement in the murder. McCoy believes that the boy's statement to the priest is not privileged, since privilege only attaches if the boy was seeking spiritual advice. McCoy and Southerlyn try all kinds of tactics to get the priest to speak out, but he steadfastly refuses, even though it would mean freeing the man wrongly convicted of the original murder. McCoy has several meetings with bishops and a priest who is an old friend, but all is for naught: the priest simply refuses to betray the confidence of the young murderer, even though he was nearly of victim of the boy himself. Finally, after the priest loses hope that the boy will ever come forward to confess to legal authorities, the priest has a conversation with McCoy in which they discuss the ethical and moral implications of privilege for priests and lawyers, and the priest agrees to testify, which he soon does.

The episode is an interesting look at the issue of clerical privilege, and shows the quandary that priest's can find themselves in as they must choose between justice and their oath to the church and obligations to their clergy. In this case, after testifying, the priest ultimately decides he can no longer serve as a priest, and in the closing moments of the show, he pointedly removes his color. A little over the top, but it's still a moving moment.

The episode is notable for two quick moments. First, when that cute female detective -- the one who replaced Profaci and Mo -- brings Green and Briscoe a lead, she calls Green "Eddie" with what seems to be a touch of intimacy. Briscoe comments on it pointedly: "Eddie?" Also, when they show the courthouse downtown, it is being guarded by National Guardsmen in uniform, a fixture that mirrors a real-life response to 9/11.

Finally, the episode features another edition of the Ed Green 5-Second Foot Chase™ as Green briefly chases after the suspect when they confront him. Although the suspect had a good head start on Green (which made me think the chase might last longer than the usual 5 seconds), the chase ends when the suspect encounters a chain link fence. Oh well.

Untitled

In this episode (10.20), an unbalanced former artist dismembers and murders the patroness of a controversial artist, then claims "the painting made me do it." Briscoe and Green track down the man through a variety of means: witnesses at the scene, a drug store bag he left behind, and witness accounts of his belligerent behavior at an exhibition. The defendant claims that the artist's work was so reprehensible, he had to do something to stop it. He cut off the hands of the patroness, a gesture that mirrored the very painting he objected to.

The trial part of the episode goes on far too long, a victim of a plot that had nowhere to go. The episode was co-written by Richard Sweren, who I have said before is responsible for writing some of the weaker episodes of the series. The episode isn't really notable for anything in particular, except for trying to link recent news about controversial art exhibitions to crime. The basic premise of the episode seems like a stretch to begin with, and it's pretty thing gruel by the time they get to the 45 minute mark. I suppose the episode is notable because of it's title, which is a sort of play on words, since "Untitled" seems to be referring to the dismemberment of the woman as the defendant's final piece of art.

The teaser involves a young couple entering a loft apartment, and as the man goes to take a shower, blood drips down from the light fixture on the ceiling: the dead woman upstairs was bleeding through the floors into the apartment below. Yuck.

Virus

In this episode (3.19), two patients die and several become critically ill after being administered incorrect dosages of insulin at a clinic that specializes in diabetes. Initially, Logan and Briscoe focus their investigation on a male nurse who was a doctor in the Dominican Republic but is not board-certified in the US. That turns out to be a dead end when more patients go into hypo-glycemic shock while the nurse is being interrogated at the precinct. While talking to one of the directors of the clinic, Briscoe suggests that maybe the insulin machine could have been tampered with. A discussion with a technician leads to evidence that a computer virus has infected the hospital's computer network, and the virus was uploaded via a person dialing in to to the network. The virus would raise the reported blood sugar levels of patients who had the digit '2' somewhere in their birthdates. An NYPD computer forensics specialist examines the source code of the virus, and uses the old "every programmer has a signature" canard (also seen in this episode of Criminal Intent) to attribute authorship of the virus to a group called Department of Doom, aka DOD. The detectives speak to the head of the DOD who denies involvement and finds a message on his groups BBS that suggests a hacker named Striker One is responsible. The DOD guy hacks into Striker Ones email as Briscoe and Logan stand over his shoulder, and finds a message from yet another hacker, this one named Hat Trick. They track down Hat Trick and get Strike One's real name out of him. They raid his house, where they find him busily deleting files.

Predictably, the evidence against him, and his subsequent statements, get thrown out because of violations of the Fourth Amendment. I guess at the time this was novel: virtual trespassing is the same as physical trespassing, although nowadays it's taken for granted. Anyway, Stone and Robinette then have to come up with another way of pinning the crime on the young hacker, so they can argue "inevitable discovery" and get the charges re-instated. They come up with a motive for the crime: his paranoid dad thinks he was blinded by the clinic, so they figure his son wanted revenge. They take this to the judge, but no dice. So they decide to go after the father for conspiracy, hoping they can prove he had knowledge of his son's intentions, and that, as Schiff says, the son will "get a case of the guilts" and confess.

Stone takes it to a grand jury, and turns down the defense's offer for a plea, and finally gets the kid to confess in front of his tearful father. Everybody's sad. The kid is 16 and won't be out before he's 40, Stone says.

This might be the earliest incident of technophobia in Law & Order history. I mentioned in a post the other day how the writers of this show have built fear of computers and the internet into a bunch of episodes (like this one), usually with the same predictable results. It's a little annoying, because they never seem to acknowledge any of the good things that have happened because of computers, although I think Green and Curtis changed that a little bit when they would find evidence on victim's laptops and so on. Anyway, the episode is filled with in-the-know technobabble that alternates between being somewhat accurate and laughable. The discussion of how the hospital's network is vulnerable and how the virus works are relatively realistic, but the stuff about the hacker signature...specifically the assertion that it was encoded using "thunderbolts and crossbones" is ridiculous, as is the sequence where the detectives watch the hacker break into a phone system and the email account of the defendant. He's trying to trace a phone number with a Toronto area code, and he dials up, and he says, "I'm in Toronto." Cut to his computer screen. It says: "In Toronto." Heh.

Castwise, the episode is notable because Leslie Hendrix makes an early appearance as the medical examiner Rodgers, the guy from Clockers shows up as the male nurse from the Dominican Republic, and the defense attorney, Carla something, went on to appear in the show in numerous other episodes, as did the judge. (TV Tome is down right now so I can't look her up.)

The teaser involves the Dominican nurse and another male nurse talking about getting fat from too many cookies, and one guy says to the other, "Those cookies are a sign she's trying to kill me," a parallel to the way that sugar-related incidents are about to cause the death of several patients. Also, this is one of those rare teasers that is split between two locations. In this case, it's the hospital, and then the precinct, where Profaci is teasing Logan with a bagel and says he'll give it to him if Logan answers the ringing phone, which turns out to be an anonymous call tipping them off to the attempted murder at the clinic.