The episode begins with the doctor talking to a parking garage attendant. She climbs into her Mercedes and drives off, but shots ring out a moment later, and the attendant discovers her shot in the head, dead. Briscoe and Logan find her wearing a bulletproof vest and come across a wanted poster with her name and face on it in her purse.
They visit her place of work, which is almost surround by rabid abortion protesters who are apparently there every day, harassing the doctors and the patients. They learn that a woman named Nancy Gunther specifically requested the last appointment on the day she was killed, came in, refused an abortion, and left. The detectives reason that she came in just to learn the doctor's identity and make her movements predictable. Under pressure, she admits to the detectives that she turned this information over to two other anti-abortion activist: a de-frocked priest named Sealy and a man named Randall Jenkins who has disappeared and quickly becomes the chief suspect.
As the detectives are searching Jenkins apartment (where they find the murder weapon), they get a call that Sealy has Jenkins over at their organization's HQ. When the detectives show up, Sealy is standing next to Jenkins giving a press conference about how Jenkins was doing God's work by committing the murder. Briscoe and Logan push through the reporters and arrest Jenkins.
He demands a trial because he wants to use it to deliver his political message, and at the urging of Sealy, he offers a justification defense: he was saving lives, so he had to act. His defense falls apart, however, when Kincaid talks to his estranged wife and learns that the only reason he killed the abortionist was because he was mad about his wife's getting an abortion. (Jenkins had previously burst in on his wife while she was at a different abortion clinic preparing to have an abortion.) With no justification, and therefore with no defense, he pleas, but then fingers Sealy as the one who orchestrated the crime. Sealy is standing right there as he does it, and it's clear that Sealy has orchestrated this too: realizing the the political opportunity would be lost without a trial, he offers himself as a defendant.
At trial, Sealy represents himself, and things are going ok, until McCoy applies great pressure and forces Sealy to admit that the reason he arranged for Jenkins to commit the murder instead of doing it himself is that, in his heart, he knew it was wrong. So there goes his justification defense. He pleads to Murder 2.
Schiff succinctly wraps up the irony of the situation: Sealy's admitting that "he can't kill anyone nails him for murder."
Casting note: Sealy is played by veteran character Edward Herrmann, who is most famous, perhaps, as the chief vampire on the Lost Boys. He's appeared in several other L&O eps, including one or two with Diane Wiest, his Lost Boys co-star.
At one point in the episode, Schiff references the fact that Kincaid attended Harvard Law School, and McCoy tells Kincaid he doesn't want to turn the trial into a debate about feminism. This picks up a theme in their relationship from McCoy's first appearance in the series. It's worth pointing out that as he tells her this, he's standing extremely close to her, in an intimate way that suggests they are involved romantically.
The episode begins with a kid and his grandfather discussing the old days vs. the modern era of baseball. Suddenly, there's a loud car accident between a woman in a Volvo and a pick-up truck. Briscoe and Green are called to the scene because the woman is found with small-caliber bullet hole in her skull. A bag lady says she saw an SUV leave a spot, and then the two other cars crashed. The immediate theory of the crime was that it was a dispute over a parking spot.
The plot deepens when the driver of the SUV comes in to the precinctly voluntarily and says he had nothing to do with what happened, and he didn't get a good look at a fourth vehicle involved, although he says it was a mid-sized green sedan. Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is the same kind of car driven by the victim's husband. They lean on him, but nothing comes of it. They also learn of a business dispute between the victim and her cousin -- some kind of educational internet company that didn't pan out, but the cousin is clean, too. He tells the detectives about a meeting the victim had downtown that day, right near where she was killed. They head down there, and review the security tape of the parking garage in the building where she had the meeting. The find a Volvo entering the garage around the time she would have been there, and the woman driving matches the description of the victim. But guess what? It's another similar-looking lady driving a similar-looking car. This raises the possibility that the killer killed the wrong person! This looks like even more of a possibility when they learn that the other woman is an investigative reporter who covered the mob, among other things.
The reporter is reluctant to reveal much about the stories she was working on, but she does share some notes, which she has partially censored. Somehow, they track down the green car used in the shooting. It got stopped after the driver ran a red light. Turns it was stolen from a rabbi, used in the crime, brought to a chop shop in the Bronx, and then sold to the kid who got stopped at the light. From the prints in the car, they track down the apparent hitman, an oldish con named Martin Black. Briscoe to Black: "You did the wrong broad, Jack." The case against him gets stronger when a search team finds hollowpoint bullets hidden in his VCR, the same kind of bullets used in the killing. They suspect a certain mob family put him up to it, but he says it was some other guy, a wiseguy unconnected to this specific mobster. So what's the motive?
It turns out one of the other stories the reporter was working on involved some irregularities in a state senator's recent election. The DA's office uncovers a conspiracy to disable a bunch of voting machines in her local precinct (where she was expected to lose), substitute paper ballots, and then discard those paper ballets. They find the voting machine tech who was paid by the mobster to break the machines, and they trace it back to the state senator.
They confront her in her office, but she blithely denies any involvement. Her assertive chief of staff looks on, and ends the meeting quickly. But in order to prove anything, the McCoy and Carmichael need a witness who can testify to a solid connection between the senator and the mobster. The reporter seems to have had a source who could do this, but she won't reveal the source's identity.
After a big flap over whether the paper ballots (which the hitman turned over in exchange for leniency) should be counted (they are, but then -- just like real life! -- an injunction is issued to stop the counting), McCoy feels like his case against the senator is falling apart. In desperation, he visits the reporter, and urges her to name the source, or get him to identify himself. He reasons that her work indirectly led to the death of an innocent woman, and she owed it to the woman's family to see the killers come to justice.
Cut to the courtroom, where the visual set-up and off camera dialogue imply that the source is about to testify. Surprise, it's the chief of staff! Well, not much of a surprise, really, but still fun.
But before all this, in the middle of the investigation, Carmichael tells McCoy she's gotten an offer to work in the office of the US Attorney for the Southern District. She's going to work for "the taskforce for major crimes." McCoy is happy for her, and they leave the courthouse arm-in-arm. This is indeed her last episode.
The credits dedicate this episode to Fred Chalfy and Anthony Monteforte. Chalfy was a set dresser on the show, and Monteforte apparently worked in craft services. SUNY Binghamton offered this obituary for Chalfy:
Fred Chalfy '69 died March 10, 2001. He was 53. A set dresser for TV shows and films in New York City, Fred worked on Blood Simple, Eddie and the Cruisers and 84 Charing Cross Road. He also acted as translator and screenwriter on several projects for an Italian film-production company. Fred was with TV's Law and Order from the show's inception, working as head set dresser and then prop master. Memorial celebrations were held on the Law and Order set and at the home of Fred's sister, Roberta Chalfy Miller '66, in Sarasota, Fla. "Fred's wit, intellect and generous, loving spirit are sorely missed by family and friends," wrote Roberta.
The episode begins with the driver of a street sweeping truck coming across a dead body in the street. Briscoe and Green quickly learn his identity, but they can't figure out why someone would want to kill him, or what he was doing in the uptown neighborhood where he was found. They track down a homeless guy who frequents the area, but he didn't see much. The victim's wife says they led a normal life, and a co-worker says he was meeting someone downtown the day he died.
Along the way, Briscoe's cellphone rings, and he answers it. This might be the first time in the history of the show this has happened. Even Det. Green comments on it, saying, "You finally gave out that number, huh?" The ME has news: a blow to the skull killed the man, sometime between 9 and 11 pm the previous night. They learn that the previous night, the victim attended a show at an art gallery and had a private meeting with one of the artists, a female videographer. Briscoe and Green suspect the man was having an affair with her, but we learn that their relationship was innocent: he wanted to make a birthday tribute film for his wife. The artist even shows them test footage the two had shot the night before. So we see the victim clearly on videotape, something that doesn't happen very often. But the question remains: How did he get all the way up to 108th street, and why?
Near the artist's office, they ask some loading dock workers whether they saw anyone that night. They say they think they might have seen him talking to someone in a cable van, and they saw him get in the van. Since the homeless guy had mentioned seeing a cable van, this sounds like a lead. They check in with the cable company, and learn that one of the trucks had been reported stolen. They check out the guy who reported it stolen. He seems like a nice guy, but soon enough, the van turns up, and there is some physical evidence in it. They arrest Mr. Garcia, the cable guy, who has a hammer matching the ME's description of the wounds.
It turns out he might have a motive: he is a client of the health insurance company the victim worked for. The victim decided who got what kind of medical treatment, so maybe there's something there. Unfortunately, the insurance company closes ranks and refuses to reveal what the victim's relationship to the suspect was. Eventually, McCoy gets an order for them to reveal that relationship, and we learn that the victim refused to cover a new and expensive, but successful, treatment for a form of leukemia that Mr. Garcia's daughter has. He voted against the treatment on a committee, and he was the deciding vote. An assistant had unintentionally relayed this information to Garcia, and he apparently acted on it.
The defense, sensing a sympathetic story, presents a justification defense: he thought his daughter was going to die, so he did what he thought he had to do to prevent it. While the case is going on, the insurance company decides to cover the experimental treatment, in a bid, apparently, to get some public sympathy. It all works out for Mr. Garcia in the end: the jury is hung 9-3, and a mistrial is declared.
The episode begins with a young hipster couple walking by a jewelry store and hearing gun shots. A man runs past them, and they enter the store, finding a carnage-filled scene. Green and Briscoe go undercover from pawn shop to pawn shop, and find a guy who bought the stolen merchandise. They get a hit on a fingerprint, and trace it to a Georgian national, who they arrest at a local bar, and who is identified by the injured customer in a line-up. The suspect, Ed Travanza, wants a jury trial, despite the fact that his guilt is obvious. But before the trial can be begin, the witness disappears. He is found not guilty. So where's the witness go?
Prints at the witness's apartment in Chicago reveal that his real name is Levi March who killed his girlfriend years earlier but skipped bail and was convicted of the crime in absentia.
Briscoe and Green jump through all kinds of hoops to track March down, and they eventually go to Montreal(!) and arrest him. His lawyer argues, however, that it was unconsitutional to try his client in absentia, and he manages to get a court to throw out the verdict. Since the case happened 20 years ago, McCoy wants to retry him but has a heck of time putting together a case. Eventually, however, March's current wife rolls on him after an extra-marital affair is revealed, and says March admitted the murder to him.
Casting notes: Andrew McCarthy plays the jewel thief's defense attorney. McCarthy also worked an episode of Criminal Intent, where Vincent D'Onofrio had a rather famous run-in with him, and pretty much threw him off the show. Also, the detective who worked the original investigation into the March case is played by John Tormey, who always shows up in mob movies, and who is Forrest Whittaker's "master" in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
The episode begins in a boutique where two employees watch as the model, Nadia Parkova, attempts to shoplift some merchandise. She slips into a dressing room, and they wait for her to come out. When she doesn't, they open the door, and find her dead. Did she fall on the stool and crack her head? Does the needle in her purse have anything to do with it? Briscoe's teaser-ending wise crack: "She shopped til she dropped."
The ME finds that Parkova was loaded up on a variety of drugs, including Valium, Halcyon, and one called Deverol that becomes crucial later on. They visit her family -- her father, her mother, and her younger sister, none of whom speaks English particularly well, though the sister can at least communicate. The father seems particularly tightly wound, and blows up in the presence of the police. They talk to her modeling agency, who says she was "accident prone," leading them to suspect that her father beet her. Her boyfriend, a dock worker who claimed he would lead her to the big time, is also a suspect, but he seems like a nice guy, and is innocent. They also talk to her accident doctor, who says she was under too much stress because she had been supporting her whole family since she was 15 years old. She says she suspected that Nadia injured herself as a way of releasing herself from the responsibilities of providing for the family. When the asthma doctor learns that the woman had Deverol in her system, she says that the combination of Deverol and her asthma medication could cause a heart attack. So the question becomes, Who sold her the Deverol, and did he know about her asthma medication?
Her pharmacy reveals that a Dr. Heinz called in her prescriptions, but Dr. Heinz is nowhere to be found. Eventually they learn that he is accessible only via cell phone and meets his patients/clients in a restaurant. Briscoe calls him and meets him at a restaurant, pretending to be a patient, and they take him in for questioning. They also learn that he publicizes himself with pamphlets that describe his as "doctor to the stars," and that his primary method of therapy is to prescribe his patients Deverol, which is a powerful narcotic, no matter what problems ail them.
The next step is to prove that the doctor knew that the model was taking asthma medication, and they talk to all kinds of former patients in an attempt to prove how shady this doctor is and that he did something illegal, but all his patients think he is a saint. Southerlyn leans on the victim's sister to get her to admit that she told the doctor about the asthma medication, but she won't budge. Finally, her mother provides Southerlyn with a piece of paper that shows Heinz knew of the medication, but told the model to wait 24 hours between taking Deverol and her other medication.
At trial, things are going horribly for McCoy. He finally gets the sister on the stand, and she says she translated the directions from the doctor to her sister and told her "Wait 2 to 4 hours" between medications, NOT "24 hours." OOPS!! Looks like little sis was responsible for Parkova's death. Though there's barely any point in continuing the trial, it proceeds, and the jury naturally finds the doctor not guilty.
Casting note: the younger sister is played by Alexis Dziena, who has gone on to act in several other higher profile parts.
The episode begins with a cable guy discovering the beaten body of the ball player's father. They talk to the victim's second wife, who divorced him in 1982, who tells them that he was a hustler, always on the make for money and women. They also talk to a woman who was having an affair with the victim. She has a black-eye given to her by her husband, who learned of the affair. He's briefly a suspect, but they discount him as Briscoe plays a game of pool against him. (Briscoe wipes the table with him, by the way.) Next, they focus on the chiropractor/bookie known as "Papa Doc" who, the word is, looked out for the victim, apparently protecting him because of all the money owed to him.
Finally, they talk to the ball-playing son who says his father had a gambling problem but had cleaned it up. Briscoe makes a comment about how a lapse during recovery "doesn't happen to all of us." Logan's slightly surprised response makes me think this might be the first episode in which Briscoe reveals his drinking problem.
Evidence of the father's current gambling problem keeps mounting however, and an informant of Lt. Van Buren's informs the detectives that the victim was in debt $800,000! At this point, the ball player himself becomes a suspect, the theory being that he was giving all this money to his father, and his father was losing it all gambling.
The son, meanwhile, argues that Papa Doc killed his father as a message to the ball player to pay up. They find a guy named Lang who actually beat the father, and he says after assaulting the victim, he left him alone with Papa Doc. Papa Doc is arrested.
At trial, Lang retells his story, and the son says that it was his own money, and his father was just placing bets for him. This story doesn't hold up well under examination by the defense attorney however: the son can't remember the specifics of any of the bets, and finally McCoy forces him to admit (off the stand) that his father was the one with the continuing gambling problem, not him.
And look who shows up with background information about the ball player: Former Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez! He suggests something was going on with the ball player and his wife. In the family conference room at the DA's office, the truth comes out, and the ball player finally admits the truth: he was angry at his father over the gambling debts, assaulted his father, and accidentally killed him. He please to Man 2.
Quick casting note: Yep, that's really Keith Hernandez, playing a character with a different name. This was right around the time Hernandez also showed up in a two-part episode of Seinfeld called the boyfriend. As baseball players go, he's a pretty good actor, and has an honestness that is apparent in his appearances on Seinfeld and L&O.
The episode begins with a chaotic scene downtown as automatic gun fire is heard, people dive to the sidewalk, and a speeding car screeches to a halt in an intersection, and man runs into the subway. Once everything has calmed down, the detectives learn that one victim, an employee from a nearby bank, is dead, and someone else -- a white man -- was dragged into a van, which disappeared.
The kidnap victim is identified as a Mr. Powell, a diamond dealer. By the time Briscoe and Green show up to interview his wife, the FBI is already there, co-ordinating the investigation into his disappearance. Neither wife nor his father, also a diamond dealer, has any idea why he would have been kidnapped. At his office, Green checks the victim's PDA, which shows some cancelled appointments. They visit a diamond dealer whom he met with about selling some diamonds he expected to get his hands on. During this interview, the detectives learn that a van matching the one used in the kidnapping has been found. When they get there to check it out, the van is already hooked on a city tow truck, and the city marshal responsible for it refuses to release it until it gets to the tow pound. They have a heated debate, but Eddie Green settles it when a uniform points out blood dripping from the back. He picks up a crowbar and smashes in the back window of the van. (This scene is depicted in the L&O ad often shown on TNT.) When they look in the van, they find Powell's body and see that his hand has been dismembered, apparently so the perpetrators could get access to a briefcase he was carrying.
As the investigation continues, we learn that the perpetrators used Uzis and that Powell had bought the briefcase earlier that day at a gift shop across the street from a branch of the bank where the other victim was a vice-president. Surveillance tapes from that bank show Powell and the employee entering the safe-deposit box area of the bank and leaving a few minutes later. Bank employees explain that the safe deposit boxes contain the collateral for various loans, including....$100 million worth of diamonds, which apparently were carried out in that briefcase. They also learn that both cars used in the heist came from the same used car dealer.
This bit of evidence leads them to their next suspect. They talk to the car dealer, who says one of his employees (who fits the description of the man seen fleeing into the subway) hasn't shown up at work in a couple of days. The Emergency Services Unit swarms into this man's apartment, and finds a man from Sierra Leone who will only offer his name, rank, and serial number in the Sierra Leonian army.
After much arm-twisting and after realizing he has been abandoned by the people who sent him on this mission, the soldier admits that he was sent by his commanders to recover these diamonds, which are called "conflict diamonds" because they come from countries torn by civil war, where rebel armies use the diamonds as bargaining chips with each other and with their governments. He reveals that he and several other soldiers had conceived this plan to get the diamonds, but he won't reveal how he knew Powell would be at the bank at that specific time.
McCoy goes after the head of the diamond company who claimed ownership of these diamonds, arguing that he had learned of the planned heist and hired the Sierra Leonian army to his dirty work for him. The trial isn't going very well, but eventually Powell's own father reveals that he was the one who told the head of the diamond cartel about the planned heist -- not knowing his own son was involved. He had hoped to win the favor of the diamond cartel with this information. On the stand, the soldier tells a story about how diamond-hungry rebels had cut off his sister's hand after she took some of "their" diamonds, so he returned the favor on Powell. The head of the diamond company says he didn't know that the soldiers were planning to kill people, and at DA Nora Lewin's urgin, charges against him are dropped.
Quick casting note: the Sierra Leonian soldier is well-played by Lance Reddick who appeared in another episode as a FBI agent reluctant to turn over some files to McCoy, and who also went on to appear in Oz and The Wire.
The episode begins with the Briscoe and Curtis investigating the death of the woman in the subway station. Their victim is Marianne Hollis, a professor at New York City University. They learn that the woman ran out of a diner without paying, followed someone into a bookstore, and then into the subway, where she was pushed.
After some legwork, including some clues from the bookstore, the detectives find their suspect, a man visiting NYC with his daughter, to drop her off at college. Once he's identitied as a suspect, the man retains Prof. Norman Rothenberg (a recurring character) as his defense counsel. Rothenberg is one of the city's best defense attorneys, but he's got a tough case ahead of him when several people pick his client out of a line-up.
In attempting to retrace their suspect's footsteps and connect him to the victim, they go through his credit card statements, and find a charge for Grimaldi's, a pizza restaurant in Brooklyn. How would a tourist know to head out to Brooklyn for a pizza? Good question. The ask the owner whether he recognized him, but he doesn't. They do a background check oon him, and learn that he didn't go to UCLA as he had claimed. In fact, he doesn't even seem to have existed before 1985. This leads them to believe that the man has adopted a second identity.
This suspicion is confirmed when they show his picture to a friend of the victim, and she identifies him as .... HER OWN HUSBAND who had kidnapped their two daughters years ago and fled. She identifies him as Nick Tasca. She wants to get her children back immediately, but her kids seem to be in the thrall of their father, and one of the daughter's provides an alibi for her father, saying that they encountered the victim but left her at the subway. It turns out they killed her because she recognized Tasca, and confronted him.
We learn from his ex-wife and from his interactions with everyone else that he is a bit of a control freak. His daughter confesses to the crime, but Skoda examines her and concludes that the father did it, but she's lying to protect him.
At trial, McCoy gets the current wife on the stand, and eventually gets her to break down and admit that he husband is a control freak who terrorized her and her children. As he's being betrayed, Tasca jumps up and shouts "You can't do this! You stupid cow!" and "I only married her so my children would have a mother." He pleas out.
The kids, meanwhile, reject the concept of returning to their birth mother's care, but the father has to give up any claims to custody as a condition of his plea arrangement. Nobody seems very happy by the end of this one.
The episode's title refers to the "blank slate" Tasca created in his children's mind after he kidnapped them. He ereased their sense of identity and built them up from nothing.
ps. I believe this is the 150th "original series" episode summary I've written.
The episode begins with two yuppies attempting to play a prank on one of their friends outside a bar. They try to mess with his Lexus, but they pop the trunk (somehow) on the wrong car, and discover a man's body. Green and Briscoe investigate.
The victim's apartment contains $100,000, giving the detectives the idea that the man was not completely lawful. They find a financial connection to a doctor, whom they visit. As they walk in, the doctor assumes the detectives are their to collect a debt, and he talks to them as if they are bookies. This leads them to believe that the victim is a bookie. This suspicion turns out to be true. The doctor tells them that the victim was involved in an internet-based gambling operation.
From here, they track down the vic's partner Stevie, a mild-mannered man who doesn't seem much like a criminal or a murderer. Not much going on with him, so they explore other possibilities: a mistress with a black eye, the mistress's husband, the ex-girlfriend, etc. They talk to the gambling company's accountant who reluctantly reveals that Stevie was stealing money from the company, and that Stevie and the victim were scheduled to have dinner the night of the murder. They arrest Stevie 19 minutes in to the episode.
And then we meet Randy Dworkin, brillaintly played by Peter Jacobson. He makes a scene at his client's arraignment, alleging bias and disputing the concept of "the people of New York versus," arguing that it's not really about the people versus his client, it's about the DA's office. Dworkin meets with his client, McCoy, and Southerlyn at Rikers. He enters the room, and effusively praises McCoy and mentions "the Gelfant case," which impressed him. Dworkin's manner is distracted and jumpy, and he comes off as being incompetent and irreverend, but McCoy doesn't know what to make of him. Dworkin says there is a second set of books that he is willing to turn over. After the meeting, Southerlyn says she checked out Dworkin and learned that he clerked for a federal judge and turned down partnership at a prestigious law firm.
Soon after, we see McCoy and Dworkin doing jury selection. McCoy asks very careful questions of each juror, making sure each juror will be able to render a fair and impartial verdict. Dworkin, meanwhile, asks questions like, "Where'd you get that tie?" and follows up with "I love this guy." McCoy is confused, but can't really object.
Once the trial begins, Dworkin objects to practically everything in a humorous manner that frustrates McCoy but gets the jury laughing. And then midway through the trial, we finally learn the defendant's true motive for his crimes: he was embezzling money to give to the defense of Jewish people in Israel. McCoy objects, saying that this explanation amounts to a justification defense, but Dworkin says "I didn't hear the word justification," and then turns to the judge and asks, "Did you?" It turns out that during jury selection, Dworkin was focused only on one thing: was the prospective juror Jewish. This explains his casual approach, and why all the jurors have last names like Ruben, Nathan, Schwartz, Finkel, and Cohen. The judge, too, is Jewish, and gives Dworkin a lot of latitude. McCoy feels like he's been sandbagged, and Branch tells him stories about how he once one a case by making a judge laugh. McCoy attempts to get the judge recused and says a lot of stuff about how he doesn't think the jury will be able to render a fair verdict because of their sympathy for the cause of the defendant, who still insists he's innocent of the murder. McCoy offers a plea, but Dworkin refuses, so you know the case is going to come down to McCoy's closing arguments. He tells the jurors they have to decide if they are going to be Jews first and citizens second.
The verdict comes back: guilty. Dworkin's unconventional strategy failed him.
The episode is notable for the appearance of Dworkin, who has appeared in another episode and whose unusual personality and approach to the law make him a worthy adversary to McCoy.
The episode begins with two city tow truck operators discussing golf. They come across an abandoned vehicle and pop the trunk, apparently to see if there's anything worth stealing. That's when they discover a body in the trunk of the car. Briscoe and Curtis investigate.
The first step is to figure out what the victim, Douglas Bender, was doing there. The car is registered to a Millicent Sheridan, who turns out to be a nurse named Millie Bender, wife of the victim. Her husband had a prior criminal record, and the detectives theorize that he had gotten in touch with some old friends and gotten into trouble. His parole officer, in a hurry to get to lunch, gives the detectives some info about past acquiantances, but nothing too helpful. They learn from one of these guys that Bender was in touch with a guy named Max Sheridan, who is Millie's brother. He, too, is a convict. In fact, he's skipped bail in Georgia and was working his way up north. Briscoe and Curtis theorize that Bender went down to meet him at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike and then got into trouble. They man they get this information from says, "It's like I told the other cops..." What other cops, Briscoe and Curtis wonder.
They find the hotel where Sheridan (their new suspect) is supposedly staying, and they rush in, and nearly get their heads blown off by two shotgun-wielding men who they learn, once everyone stands down, are bounty hunters.
The bounty hunters explain they are trying to find Sheridan, and the detectives take an immediate dislike to them. They want to hold them on weapons charges, but it's hard to make them stick. They also learn about the possibility of a planned heist at JFK airport that Sheridan might be in on, so they head out to JFK to stake-out a payphone. They pick up a member of the robbery conspiracy at the phone in a clever scene in which Ray sends a paging message to the suspect, and watches as he returns the call from a payphone. They pick him up, and he admits the robbery scheme. Just as they're putting the pieces together, they get a call about a multiple victim shooting. They head over to Millie's apartment, where Millie and her babysitter have been shot dead, Max Sheridan is badly injured, and Millie's toddler is hiding under the bed. Guess who's responsible for the shooting. Yep, the bounty hunters, who are still on the scene. Briscoe punches one of them.
They arrest the bounty hunters, but again, charges are difficult, because as their lawyer explains, such men are granted very wide latitude by the law. Even Carmichael is sympathetic to them.
For the time being, they pursue the weapons charges. Their guns are registered to a senile old man, who signed some papers for a gun dealer, who sold them to a convict, who sold them to the bounty hunters.
At their arraignment, they are charged with murder. The one who seems most likely to roll on the other is held without bail, but the other one is released on his own recognizance. McCoy figures this will encourage the one in jail to roll on his partner. The ploy works, and he explains how his partner shot both the original victim (Bender) and shot up the apartment, killing Millie and her babysitter, because their prize, Sheridan, appeared to be reaching for a gun. The rest of the trial is boring, but in the end, the judge dismisses the charges. Everyone is shocked and chagrined.
The episode begins with a professional dog walker finding the deceased victim in his house. Briscoe and Green investigate, and learn the victim is Bradley Osterhaus, a high-profile stock broker. Soon enough, they connnect the stockbroker to Jackie Scott, aka "the Makeover Maven," who has made a fortune and earned fame selling beauty products. They also learn that the stockbroker was sleeping with a fashion photographer named Lindsay Tucker. What takes them a while to figure out, however, is that Tucker is Scott's daughter, and the two were both sleeping with Osterhaus. Yikes!
The apparent motives grow more complicated when the investigators learn that Osterhaus had advised Scott that shares of Pylon Petroleum were about to start trading lower, and she should sell. She did, and then the SEC investigated her . It looks like Scott killed Osterhaus so that he wouldn't mention the sale to anyone, but before they can put the case together, Tucker (the daughter) confesses to the murder.
Her story doesn't add up, however, and they continue to focus on her mother. Once they uncover hard evidence of the insider stock trade, they arrest her. Her lawyer offers a novel defense: she did it because hormone replacement therapy related to her menopause made her irrational!
McCoy can't believe it, so he has Olivet and Skoda take a look at her. Olivet rejects the defense outright and says the woman is simply a narcissist, but Skoda thinks it sort of makes sense. McCoy tells Skoda, "Sorry, Emil, you'll have to sit this one out," but Scott's defense attorney calls Skoda as an expert witness. The case is further complicated because Scott happens to be an old friend and supporter of DA Arthur Branch.
The case is going to hell when Branch saves it by privately speaking with Scott and telling her that he is going to finish the prosecution himself and bring up every sordid detail of her life. She backs down, and she pleads out.
The episode is notable, of course, because it re-tells the Martha Stewart story with a violent twist and because Skoda and Olivet take oppositing viewpoints, although not as angrily as they did last time.
Couple of casting notes: Fred Grandy, formerly "Gopher" on the Love Boat and a US Congressman in real life, plays the head of the petroleum company, and Lucy Arnaz, daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is Jackie Scott.
The episode begins with two cops in a park discussing a trip to the Grand Canyon, when a man approaches them and says he dozed off in the park for 5 minutes and someone stole his baby. Initally, Briscoe and Logan focus their investigation on a bald man seen with a camera in the park earlier that day. But they check him out and he's not responsible -- he was just interested in picking up nannies. This leads the detectives to focus their attention on the father. His super says the dad has a bad back, but the detectives know he had supposedly walked 30 blocks with the baby on his back earlier in the day. They become suspicious, and bring him in for questioning, giving him the old good cop/bad cop routine. Logan shouts at him, then Briscoe tries to appear sympathetic, appealing to their shared backgrounds as fathers. After quite a lot of this, the father admits he buried the kid over by the Hudson River.
They dig him up, but the ME can't establish whether the baby was suffocated or just died of accidental crib death. They check out the baby's doctor, who reveals that the parents had two other kids who had died of apparent crib death. Whoa! Now it turns into a real murder investigation, because they want to prove that the couple are essentially serial killers, except their own children are their victims.
Evidence is hard to come by, however. They talk to the sister of the father, who blames the mother and says she was always looking for sympathy. They also talk to an expert on crib death who says the deaths seem to her to be homicidal, and they talk to a psychiatrist who explains that the mother appears to suffer from Munchausen Syndrome, aka Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome, in which a parent sickens their child to gain sympathy. (I think this condition is well-known now, but lesser known, at least in the mainstream, when they filmed this episode.)
During all this investigation, the detectives and DAs try to get the parents to talk, but they are pretty creepy. The mom comes off as a deranged woman trying to appear normal, and the husband is obsessively defensive of his wife. McCoy approaches him at his work place and lays out photos of the man's 3 dead babies, but to no avail. (By the way, I think this might be the first ever L&O use of this now-common technique of getting the suspect to break by showing him photos of the victims. Vincent uses it all the time on Criminal Intent.)
Against Schiff's advice ("Don't expect it to be a walk in the summer rain"), the case goes to trial without much evidence, and the judge bars McCoy from bringing up the deaths of the two previous babies. The mother accidentally mentions her "experience" as a mother, opening the door to such a discussion, but the judge prohibits McCoy from mentioning the other babies' deaths. Oh well. The jury, therefore, is hung. McCoy wants to retry her, but Schiff says no way, make a deal. McCoy then says he'll make a plea deal on the condition that the mother get sterilized. Kincaid and he have a heated discussion about the morality of this, and McCoy actually proposes it to the judge, who of course refuses it.
However, the necessary plot twist comes along, and all is saved: the woman is pregnant again already. The husband is upset and rolls on his wife, telling McCoy et al. how she killed the baby. McCoy accepts a plea on Man I.
The episode is notable, I guess, because of its treatment of Munchausen-by-proxy, a syndrome that began showing up in a lot of tv shows around this time. Schiff is reluctant to raise the issue at a jury trial: "Munchausen, Shumchausen!" he sniffs brilliantly, rejecting the idea before even really considering it. What a line.
Update: These rumors, of course, have now been confirmed, as has the rumor that Dennis Farina will take over the role of the senior detective, as a character named Joe Fontana. Also, Elisabeth Rohm, aka Serena Southerlyn, announced on June 23 that she will be leaving in the middle of next season, the show's 15th.
The episode begins with a couple of painters discovering the delivery man's body outside the door of a basement apartment. The body has been brutally beaten, and there is blood everywhere. The back of the man's skull has been pulverized. Briscoe and Green investigate.
The focus their investigation on a homeless man who was known to sleep outside the apartment, which had been unoccupied for some time. They track him down through some previous tenants, who mention that he said he was a veteran. They get his prints, trace them through a federal database, talk to his sister, and find him outside a bodega. Under questioning, and for a reward of chocolate donuts, he says he was rousted from the area by a group of teenagers: four boys and one girl. He says the girl had a key to the apartment. The super to the building says he gave the key to a "tile guy," but the tile guy says he returned the key as promised. He did, however, see a girl come in as he was leaving, saying she was looking for "Mitch or Mike." The detectives re-question the apartment's previous tenants and learn that the girl is obe of the tenant's younger sister, and they had lent her the key so she could hang out with her boyfriend, Mitch.
Mitch is evasive during questioning, but eventually rolls on his group of friends, blaming them for the death. They pick everyone up, and they are arraigned en masse, but each defendant moves for a separation, so they can be tried as individuals. Mitch, the original suspect, is the only one above age 18, and when he's telling Lewin about the arraignment, McCoy tells Lewin that based on the facts of the case, he wants to seek the death penalty. Lewin is taken aback, but McCoy is calmly insistent. He says the boy orchestrated the murder, has a previous juvenile record of violence, and deserves to die, based on the statute. Lewin argues that the boy is barely 18 and doesn't deserve the death penalty. But during this conversation, Carmichael takes a phone call that might render the whole debate moot: a judge approved a plea bargain in which Mitch pleads guilty and avoids the death penalty. McCoy is upset and appeals, arguing that he didn't have a chance to even present a motion for the death penalty, and that the defense had essentially short-circuited the legal process. The appellate judge agrees, the plea is voided, and the death penalty is back on the table.
This forces Lewin to make a deeper consideration about whether to execute the boy. She calls a meeting of "senior staff," a meeting I don't believe we've ever seen in the series: All the Executive ADAs, Carmichael, and Lewin meet to discuss whether to seek the death penalty. It's cool to see the "other McCoy's" and gives you a sense of the breadth of the DA's office. They debate various points related to the case, but only one senior ADA seems sympathetic to the defendant. Everyone else agrees that the death penalty should be sought. After much thinking, and a further conversation with Carmichael (who, as we know, is from Texas and likes to kill everybody), she decides to seek the death penalty. She announces this is a remarkable speech on the courthouse steps in which she says that although it goes against her personal beliefs, she feels that the statute requires the state to ask for capital punishment. She delivers her speech with a bit of a noble/grandiose tone, but it is very well written and effective.
After all this -- we don't even see the trial...we're just told the jury quickly returned a guilty verdict -- and we go straight to the sentencing phase. McCoy and Carmichael discuss the fact that all the kid's witnesses have been thrown out for one reason or another, and the only one left is his mother. She offers emotional testimony in which she discusses the boy's alcoholic father and his strict step-father, but McCoy's cross of the mother shows that he had a difficult, but not abusive, childhood. Then the boy himself takes the stand. His high-powered defense attorney (also from Texas) attempts to make Mitch seem sympathetic, but there is something hollow in his apologies. When it's McCoy's turn, he shows that during his testimony a minute earlier, the boy lied about his reason for comitting the crime. He says another boy argued that the delivery man had seen their faces, and so had to be killed, but McCoy establishes that in fact, Mitch himself had made this statement, and that he had sought all along to murder the victim. Things don't look very good for Mitch at this point.
The jury returns its verdict: they sentence him to death. His mom cries out, and McCoy turns around in his seat and gives that shocked look he shoots around post-verdict sometimes. Lewin, in the courtroom, glumly steps out the back door. As the episode ends, the McCoy, Carmichael, and Lewin discuss the likelihood that the boy will be executed soon, and Lewin leaves, saying "God have mercy on our souls."
As I mentioned, this episode is very well-written, and deals with the issue of the death penalty in a nuanced and intelligent way. There are a few other episodes that debate the issue equally well, but this one focuses primarily on the issue of "how young is too young." The meeting of the senior staff offers some great arguments on both sides of the issue, and shows how each side is valid. Ultimately, however, the law trumps personal feelings, and Lewin does what she has to do. You sort of knew that McCoy was going to shred the kid on cross, because the script seemed to require that Mitch be shown to be essentially evil and remorseless. I think this was fair on the part of the writers, because it distills the episode down to its essential points: is 18 too young, even if the kid is a bad kid.
The episode is a fantastic example of how great the show can be. More recent episodes have been focused on plot twists that they forget that the essence of the show, particularly the last half, is the law, and that it is perfectly interesting to show these kinds of moral debates, since they breathe life into the dry text of the laws, and help us see how the system can be tested.
Couple of casting notes: one suspect's defense attorney is played by Clayton LeBouef, best known as Col. Barnfather on Homicide, and who has shown up in a couple of other L&O eps. Also, the lead defense attorney is played by Murphy Guyer, a pretty recognizable character actor who has also done a bunch of L&O episodes.
The episode "rips from the headlines" a troubling trend in NYC from a few years ago: the thrill-killing of food delivery men. A similar incident happened earlier this year, too.
The episode begins with the woman being worked on in an emergency room. As they work on her, a nurse asks, "What's that smell?" and passes out. The patient dies, and her body is treated as a bio-hazard. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and discover that there were traces of cyanide in her system.
The medical examiner is not able to examine the body fully because her office is not equipped to deal with it, so while they're waiting, the detectives poke around the victim's life and try and find out where the cyanide came from. When they talk to her husband, they learn that she had breast cancer, and he's frustrated that a murder investigation is occurring: he believes she died of cancer, and wants to leave it at that.
Soon enough, the detectives learn that the woman was seeing a "doctor" who gave her advice on how to treat her breast cancer. The doctor, actually a woman with a Ph. D. in Biochemistry, gave her a "natural" solution containing various fruits and vitamins. The solution contained apricot seeds, which contains trace amounts of a substance similar to cyanide. McCoy wants to prosecute, but can't really find evidence of a major crime, since she was selling an "alternative" and not a "cure."
In the midst of all this, we (and Claire Kincaid) meet Jack McCoy for the first time. His first line of dialogue is spoken as Claire knocks and enters his office, "Yeah!...Claire Kincaid..." Kincaid immediately asks about rumors that McCoy has had affairs with three of his female assistants. He confirms this, but adds that it was only 3 affairs in 24 years and says that one of them went on to become his ex-wife. She tells him that she just wants to be clear that she's not interested in extra-curricular activities. She also says that McCoy specifically requested her immediately after Ben Stone resigned. Later in the episode, Claire brings up a feminist angle on an issue of privacy, and McCoy says he doesn't think feminism enters into the debate. Later -- and this is a moment that never made sense to me -- he actually CHANGES HIS PANTS in front of her, while only partially obscured by a door. Why does this happen? Is it supposed to make a point about what a free-wheeling character McCoy is? It's just offensive, in my opinion. Who would change his pants in front of his new female assistant? Only a skeezbag. Is McCoy that skeezy?
Anyway, back on the case, despite Kincaid's initial reluctance, McCoy continues pursuing the case against the doctor, trying to show that she knew her cure didn't work or contained cyanide or was fraudulent or something. It doesn't go very well, until, of course, he gets the initial victim's husband to stop protecting the doctor and admit that he pressured his wife into going to this doctor because he wanted her to avoid a mastectomy because he wanted her "whole." The woman pleads to Man 1, and Kincaid says she wants her to serve the maximum sentence.
Quick casting note: The husband is played by Woody Allen-favorite Tony Roberts, who has appeared in several other eps of the series.
The episode raises some interesting points of tension between McCoy and Kincaid, and shows their differing views about gender, but it seems heavy handed at times. And I just can't get over the ridiculous moment with the pants-changing.
The opening moments of the episode obviously borrow from the case of the toxic woman in California.
By combing through various trash cans, the team eventually discovers lots of body parts, all from the same person, all wrapped in the same brand of trash bag. The learn the brand of trash bag, and then find one more bag of the same brand with regular household trash in it. This bag contains a magazine, and the magazine has a page torn out. The page was an advertisement featuring a photo of a man who turns out to be...the victim's son. Briscoe and Green tell this guy what they know about the victim, based on what the ME had told them: he was Latino, he walked with a cane, he had arthritis. That's him, the son says. So who killed him?
Without too much poking around, the detectives learn the man had a deaf girlfriend, an artist. After much asking around, they track her down at her studio, and when they find her, she runs. Green tackles her, and they discover something unexpected about her identity: she is a he!
They also learn that this "girlfriend" is actually a wealthy man named Eli Madison who was investigated for the murder of his wife several years earlier, and had been attempting to live an anonymous life as a woman ever since. Whatever. McCoy says Arthur Branch's predecessor, Adam Schiff, had pursued the case against Madison but was unsuccessful. Madison's large defense team seeks a change of venue, but the judge refuses, and simply disallows evidence about his wife's murder to be heard.
At trial, Madison claims he killed the victim because they were watching a basketball game together, and Madison got excited and yelled, revealing his true identity as a man. In the subsequent fight, he says, the victim had a heart attack and died. Then he chopped up the body because he thought the police would suspect him in his death. The ME admits she doesn't know the cause of death, and no one can prove that he didn't have a heart attack. Based on this lack of evidence, the jury acquits Madison.
But McCoy isn't done yet. He learns that Madison's friend and alibi witness died in a "mountain climbing accident" during the investigation into Madison's wife's death. McCoy investigates this situation, and is eventually able to put a case together. He manages to convict Madison of this death.
The episode begins with the Japanese man staggering down the stairs of the hotel's lobby and collapsing. At first they think he had a heart attack, but one of the detectives notice he has a small bullet hole under his arm. They trace his business contacts and reasons for being in New York, and eventually learn that he was a night club owner in Japan who hired blonde American women to sing and, eventually, serve as prostitutes. Briscoe and Logan track down some of these women, and find one who claims that the victim was abusive to her while she was over there. She becomes their main suspect, but when they arrest her, her feminist attorney adopts "battered woman syndrome" as her affirmative defense, claiming that the victim kept the defendant in such a state of fear that she had to kill him.
The defense begins to fall apart when she testifies and on cross-examination, Kincaid has her read excerpts from books about battered women that mirror her testimony word-for-word, indicating that she memorized and rehearsed these passages. McCoy is worried that the jury will acquit her based on their anti-Japanese sentiment. (Remember the old days when we were culturally biased against the Japanese! Boy, we sure were worried they owned everything.) Japanese bias is a major theme of the episode, and it seems like a really alien concept as you watch the episode now. Anyway, the judge issues avery strongly worded instructions to the jury about setting their biases aside, but it doesn't do any good: the woman is acquitted.
Casting note: Aida Turturto, John Turturro's sister, and Janice on The Sopranos, is a barmaid in the episode. Also, Laura Linney playes the defendant. And finally, Ron Orbach plays the recurring defense attorney Max Hellman.
The episode begins with an unusually long sequence in which two boys shoplift from a bodega, and flee after he spots them. They run into a vacant lot, where they come across a skeleton with a missing left hand. The ME tells them that a stain on a finger bone on another finger indicates that a ring had been on the finger for a long time, post mortem. The detectives realize that the boys probably took the ring. The boys fess up and turn the ring over to them. They trace it. It's Harry Winston from a few years ago and it's worth $45,000. They get a list of people who have bought that ring, and they visit everyone, asking to see the ring. One of the people they interview is the son of the wealthy and prominent Hagen family. While they talk to him, he's eating a desser which he refers to as "killer chocolate." Sense some foreshadowing here? They visit his wife, too, and she shows them the ring. One of the other purchasers of the ring is a young woman named Kelly Summers. When they visit Summers' apartment, her neighbor tells them she died on 9/11. Genetic tests show that the skeleton belongs to her, but her dismembered hand and purse were found at Ground Zero, which leads the detectives to believe that she was killed before 9/11, and her body parts were planted at the WTC. But by whom?
Her sister isn't particularly happy to to learn that Kelly didn't die on 9/11. Briscoe forces himself to suggest to her that her family may have fraudulently claimed that she was killed in the collapse so they could collect on reparations. That doesn't go over very well, and the sister asks the detectives to leave. She tells them that she gave the reparations ($40,000) to Kelly's fiancee, who gave it to the NYPD/FDNY widow's fund.
While investigating motive, the detectives look through her financial records and discover that she had some unusual bank activity shortly before her death. It turns out that she had 4 deposits of $10,000 each, and this is how she paid for the ring. Looks like someone else paid for it. They also see that she had dinner on 9/10. They head to the restaurant where she ate, and guess what kind of dessert they serve there? Yep, the rich guy is now a suspect. (Why she would have charged the meal on her credit card when she's a secretary and her date just gave her a $40,000 ring is beyond me, but, like I always say, whatever.) The detectives check the victim's and the rich guy's LUDs to see if they phoned each other, but they didn't. Van Burken is skeptical. "We're basing all this on a ring?" she asks. Briscoe replies, "It's a hell of a ring." Van Buren suggests they check the people's email for evidence of an affair. The annoying red-haired computer forensics girl hacks into the guys email (whatever!) and finds all these hot and heavy messages, so they go question the rich guy again. Hagen denies everything.
Southerlyn talks to the victim's fiancee to see if he knew about the affair. He says he didn't, that she would never do such a thing, but he tells her to check out a storage place where he keeps all her stuff. They find a picture of Summers and her neighbor there, indicating they are friends, so Southerlyn questions her, and she confirms the affair. She also says she saw Hagen and Summers drive off together the evening of 9/11.
Even with this mounting evidence, Branch is reluctant to prosecute with this disturbing lack of evidence. Indeed, they have no physical evidence whatsoever. Based on this nonsense, they bring Hagen to trial, but then Southerlyn comes up with the brilliant observation that the handbag found at the WTC was an evening handbag, not the sort of handbag a girl takes to work with her, so then everyone becomes sure she was killed on 9/10. For some reason, this leads them to believe that Summers fiance, not Hagen, is responsible for her death. They get a warrant to search his email, and Annoying Red-Haired Forensic Girl hacks into his email, too, spitting out all sorts of annoying utterances like "Ooh, this guy is good," and "this firewall blah blah blah." She finally breaks in when Briscoe tells her to try the password "booboo," since that was Summers nickname for him. Surprise -- it works! He confesses.
The episode begins with some elevator inspectors discovering the woman's body. When Briscoe and Green enter her apartment, they learn that she was a packrat. Meanwhile, her superintendent gives off a strange, creepy vibe. They canvas the building but no one saw anything. They talk to a dressmaker downstairs, who also happens to own the building, and she says she didn't see anything. During the interview, however, her employees seem to know something, but won't say it in front of her. She refers them to the building's janitor, who says he didn't know the victim. They learn, however, that the victim had given him $5,000 to help with his family's expenses. They pick him up (he's in hiding, for some reason), but he doesn't turn out to be the perpetrator (knife is the wrong size). They then learn through various real estate records that the woman was only paying $350 for her rent-controlled apartment, even though it could rent for thousands on the open market. They also learn about a 20-year history of litigation between the tenant and her landlord. More and more, the landlord looks like a suspect. This becomes especially true when one of the woman's employees gives the detectives some pinking shears covered in the victim's blood.
Under pressure, the woman points the finger at the superintendent who -- get this -- turns out to be her estranged brother AND the victim's former lover! He looks like a suspect, too, although his motive isn't clear.
After alot of hoo-ha, the script takes a rather arbitrary twist and it turns out that a real estate who wanted to make a commission on the property, or buy it himself, killed the victim because he had given her $50,000 to move out, which she accepted and then refused to leave. Blah.
The possible suspects are her husband, her ex-husband, and her 17-year-old daughter. Can you guess who did it? That's right! Can you guess why? Right again!
After many false starts, including a misconceived investigation into the ex-husband, who happens to have been abusive, Briscoe and Logan learn that the current husband lied to them three times, and knows more than he is saying. Eventually, they learn that the daughter was IN LOVE with her step-father, and that -- yuck -- the two were having an affair. The mother, at least, never found out, but in her zeal to have her step-father all to herself, the girl killed her own mother, and the step-father helped her cover it up because she said she would tell all if he didn't. All of this comes out in the old Family Meeting in the Conference Room™, the event where all dirty family secrets are eventually found out. In this case, this includes the daughter giving graphic details about the first time she had sex with her step-father. Her description sounds familiar to the step-dad's other girlfriend (he was busy!) who is disgusted and shoots his alibi to pieces.
The episode begins with two boys tossing a football around, until it bounces into the street, and boy runs out to get it and is killed by a passing car, a black Cadillac, which speeds off. Logan and Briscoe investigate, but the perpetrator eventually turns himself in, in the company of a lawyer. He says he was driving slowly, and forensics looks at the skid marks and confirms this. A grand jury hears evidence, but decides not to indict him. He is free to go.
A local reverend who is prominent in the black community is angry about this and makes a lot of threats to anyone who will listen. He produces a witness who claims he saw the driver speeding, but not even the police believe him. The reverend makes a speech that gets everyone riled up, and next thing you know, there are riots uptown.
The riots lead to the killing of an innocent passer-by, who was Italian but was targeted because some in the crowd claimed he was Jewish. Briscoe and Green use local tv footage of the incident to track down a witness, who eventually rolls on the guy who committed the crime. They have trouble arresting the suspect because he declares that the church he's hiding in is giving him "sanctuary," but this argument doesn't hold up very long and they arrest him.
Recurrent character Shambala Green defends the suspect, and argues that the boy was influenced by a mob mentality and the sublimated rage he feels as a black American. At trial, calls various experts to testify about mob psychology, and even calls the driver in the original incident, who admits that he is afraid of black people, though the relevance of this fact is not clear to anyone. The judge gets fed up with Shambala's tactics, and throws out all the testimony related to mob psychology and race. It doesn't help Stone much, though: the jury can't reach a verdict, and the judge declares them hung. Schiff refuses to retry the case.
Schiff's refusal to pursue the case any further, and his reluctance earlier on, demonstrate how he differs from Stone. Schiff is mindful of certain political considerations that Stone completely ignores. The two have different jobs, and Schiff seems more aware of this than Stone.
Casting notes: J.K. Simmons, who went on to play police psychologist Emil Skoda, shows up in this episode as the tv producer who shows local news footage to the detectives. Also, the reverend is played by Tony Todd, who is perhaps most memorable as a vengeful Vietnam vet who sets people on fire in an episode of the X-Files.
The episode begins with a drive-by shooting on a bicycle. Witnesses say they saw a cloudy-eyed shooter kill their young friend "Big Boy," who it turns out, is a small-time drug dealer, or perhaps just a "mule" who carries drugs from one place to another. Briscoe and Green discover that the shooter's cloudy eye is actually a glass eye that hasn't been properly maintained. They check with local clinics to get a list of kids who have glass eyes, and eventually hone in on a young man named Foster Keyes. Through the help of some very young boys hanging out in a stairwell (including a very good child actor), they learn that Keyes is hiding at his girlfriend's place. When Briscoe and Green go there, they find him hiding in the closet.
Keyes quickly lawyers up with a man named Wills, who seems a little creepy, and Briscoe and Green try to shore up their eye-witness case against Keyes. They have two witnesses, both young: Jimmy and Shana. Jimmy is eager to testify against the man he saw kill his friend, and shows a great deal of courage, even when Southerlyn tells him how much danger he could be in. Shana, meanwhile, does not want to testify, and must be co-erced by everyone involved in the case, but she still resists.
At the trial, Jimmy does great on direct examination, but is killed by a mysterious shooter before Wills can cross-examine him. This comes as both a legal and person blow to Southerlyn, who seems to have been inspired by this young man's courage. But, without any witnesses, they don't have much a case. Wills moves to dismiss, and the judge dismisses the charges against Keys.
McCoy and Southerlyn then set about showing that a conspiracy existed to kill Jimmy, so they charge Keyes, his drug-dealing cousin, and another associate who apparently actually killed Jimmy. The cousin has a history of intimidating witnesses, and he attempts to intimidate some witnesses in this case through various means, including bribery. Even Wills seems to have been somehow involved in the intimidation, sitting in on meetings between his client and the witnesses.
In the course of all this investigation, the investigators revise their theory of the crime: Big Boy was killed not because of a drug feud, but because he was involved with one of the defendant's girlfriends.
Shockingly, the verdict comes back not guilty, and all three defendants walk free: no one is held responsible for the deaths of Big Boy or Jimmy. Southerlyn and McCoy are shell-shocked.
The episode is mainly notable for the tweaked emotional responses of both Green and Southerlyn. Both seems particularly in-tune with the other characters in the episode, and Green's reactions are more colorful than usual. Southerlyn, meanwhile, is deeply emotionally affected by the courage shown by the witnesses, particularly Jimmy.
The episode's title, I believe, comes from a Public Enemy song of the same name.
The episode begins with Lt. Van Buren being chastised by department brass at what appears to be a department-wide meeting. Her commanders tell her that her clearance rate of homicide cases -- 22% -- is too low, and she better improve her numbers, or they're going to find someone else to take her position. They tell her to close cases, even it involves opening up cold cases. Why the department would want her detectives to concentrate on decades-old cases is beyond me, but it makes for a good story, so Briscoe and Green comb through the old files looking for something that looks solvable.
The settle on the murder of a young woman that had a lot of promising leads but never got solved. The chief suspect in the case was a plumber, but his wife provided him with an alibi. The detectives reason that the wife may not be so interested in protecting her husband after 20 years, so they pay her a visit. No such luck. Even though they're now divorced, she sticks to her story. Briscoe knows the (now retired) detective who worked the case all those years ago, Tommy Brannigan, so he goes to visit him. Brannigan isn't much help, and their chances are further diminished when they discover a lot of essential evidence -- including the murder weapon -- has gone missing from the property room, apparently the victim of several moves. Through the few leads that they have -- including boys (now men) who went to high school with the victim, Green and Briscoe start taking a closer look at a one of her classmates, Michael Sarno, who is the son of an ambassador and the nephew of a Senator. Sarno's alibi was that he was at college at the time of the murder, but upon investigation, the detectives learn that he had been suspended that week, and his car (a Triumph TR-7 his father let him drive) even received a parking ticket in NYC that day. Suspicious! So why didn't Brannigan figure all this out when he was investigating the case? That will eventually be revealed.
Their case against Sarno is bolstered when a man steps forward and says Sarnow once confessed in front of him while the two were in group therapy at rehab. Good evidence, but a judge suppresses it, arguing that doctor/patient privilege applies in this context, even to the other patients in the room.
Meanwhile, the detectives get closer to an explanation as to why Brannigan didn't solve this case: they find property room records that suggest Brannigan signed out the murder weapon, a wrench. Carmichael tracks down the property room clerk from that time, who is now a very old man prone to discussing his earlier days on the job, back when he still walked a beat, and he tells her that he didn't remember who signed out the wrench, but he remembers that whoever it was told him he was a driver for a certain police inspector. Records confirm that Brannigan was the driver for this inspector. With much reluctance and under a great deal of pressure, Brannigan eventually admits what he has spent the last 20 years covering up: his boss, a friend of the Sarno's, told him not to pursue sarno as a suspect, and provided him with a promotion in exchange.
With this new leverage, McCoy pressures an apparently drugged-up Sarno into making a plea, something he is reluctant to do until McCoy says he's going to go after Sarno Sr, the ambassador, for obstruction of justice (covering up the crime).
The episode begins with Briscoe visitng his old friend Brannigan and offering his forgiveness. "Do you forgive me?" Brannigan asks. "All day long," Briscoe replies. "All day long."
As I mentioned above, the case bears a strong resemblance to the Moxley case. Both cases were cold for decades, a man with close ties to a powerful political family and a penchant for drugs and alcohol is a suspect, and an associate from rehab testified about a confession.
The episode begins with the discovery of the young man's body. He was strangled to death. Briscoe and Green seek witnesses, but don't find many. They do, however, catch a break when the medical examiner discovers a shirt button in the boy's stomach, a piece of evidence which becomes crucial later on. They also talk to the boy's girlfriend, who says they were soul mates and gives them insight into the boy's seemingly contradictory personality: he was a peace activist, yet he was prone to confrontation. She tells them that he was active in a demonstration against a Halliburton-like company that was capitalizing on the war in Iraq. They also track down a mailman, Kenny Silva, who says he had gotten into an argument with the kid earlier that day, and they find a police man who had arrested the kid after the argument, but let him go because he didn't want to deal with the hassle of pressing charges. The cop who drove the kid back to his car, however, seems like a suspect when he eventually admits that he yelled at the kid and scared him. The cop even told his partner he vandalized the kid's SUV, but it turns out someone else was responsible for that. That "someone else" is another war veteran who admits the vandalism, but says he was working underground at the time of the murder. (For some reason, the cops never check his alibi, which makes no sense.)
Eventually, we learn that the victim had several prior run-ins with Silva, including one at which he argued against naming a street after Silva's son, who had been killed in Iraq. By coincidence, the kid ran into Silva at a bar, and Silva eventually admits following him out of the bar and killing him, in the presence of the other veteran, who supposedly was underground at the time. However, he offers the defense that his extreme emotional disturbance -- resulting from his grief and anger -- led him to kill the boy. At the rather boring trial, McCoy establishes that Silva knew what he was doing. He asks the judge to throw out the EED defense, but it doesn't work. The jury goes on to find Silva not guilty of Murder 2, and they jury gets hung on the manslaughter 1 charge. Unable to get the jury to come to a conclusion, the judge declares a mistrial, so Silva goes free. Doesn't seem likely, but again, this is the sort of logical silliness I've come to expect from recent seasons of the show.
Casting note: Kenny Silva is played by Paul Calderon, an under-rated, under-used character actor who has been in a million things, including several other episodes. I mainly remember him as Jesus in the Spike Lee film Clockers.
The episode begins with a couple making out and stumbling over the comatose victim, who turns out to be a homeless man named Roland Kirk.* Briscoe and Logan find the victim with a crack pipe and $2200, and a business card indicating that he is a psychiatric patient. One witness, Leon Proskey, the owner of a nearby restaurant says he didn't see much but a man with a red hat near the scene. Briscoe and Logan manage to track down the red hat wearer who is in possession of the victim's Medicare card, but turns out not to be responsible for the murder. They next track down the victim's sister, who is surprised to learn the victim had $15,000 is his bank account, and was withdrawing $200 per day. Where did the money come from? Nobody knows yet.
Soon enough, however, the detectives learn that the money came from a successful lawsuit the victim had filed against the neighborhood association. He said that they had waged a campaign of harassment against him, and he won. In retaliation, the members of the association filmed him screaming at them and pushing them around. It turns out he even mugged an old lady and pushed a boy into traffic once.
Around this time, Kirk comes out of his coma, and starts spewing a lot of nonsense about a bald woman in a flowered bathrobe sitting on his chest. These delusions turn out to be a description of a local dentist who found the victim and administered CPR to him. This dentist becomes a suspect in the attack, but eventually points the finger at two other neighborhood residents -- the restaurant owner and the father of the boy who had been shoved into the street. It seems the two had co-ordinated and planned the attack, but they offer a justification defense, arguing that they felt in constant danger from Kirk and had to do something about it. The scene in which Kirk testifies at the trial is great -- he gradually loses his composure and ends up boasting about how he is going to sue his attackers and use the money to "buy enough crack to last a lifetime" and get a "Rolls-Royce wheelchair." One of the defendants testifies on his own behalf, and Stone destroys him on cross, until he suffers the requisite emotional outburst that simultaneously makes you look guilty and unsympathetic. Nonetheless, the jury buys the justification defense, and finds the defendants guilty only of second-degree assault. The sympathetic judge takes the unusual step of moving into the sentencing phase immediately, and sentences the defendant only to time served, meaning he is free to go.
The name of the victim here -- Roland Kirk -- is interesting because it appears to reference Rahsaan Roland Kirk, an unusual American jazz musician who often presented himself as being not quite in touch with reality, and who had many psychological problems.
One casting note: one of the defendants is Dennis O'Hare, who has appeared as a defendant in two other episodes. In both of these, he defends himself.
The episode begins with a man walking his dog who hears gun shots coming from an apartment and sees a Hispanic male running from the scene. The police find a dead couple inside the apartment. Initally, they focus their investigation on a former assistant of the male victim, who was a researcher of Parkinson's disease. The assistant, now a cab driver, is an arrogant bastard, and calls Green a "primate" and refuses to cooperate until Green threatens to kick his ass. Doesn't matter, though: he isn't the guy. Additionally, ballistics shows that two separate guns were used in the shootings, a fact that suggests two shooters.
Briscoe and Green learn that the female victim, also a professor, was active in seeking human rights for women in Muslim countries. They learn that a local young Muslim man was aware of her work, and disliked her for it. When they go to question this man, Mousah Salim, they are surprised to learn that he is white and upper middle class. His mother speaks of him as "nothing but a disappointment," but says he is in Pakistan. Through his former high school and a dull-witted friend he had there, Green and Briscoe track him down -- not in Pakistan, but at a local mosque, where they arrest him.
The suspect, whose real name is Greg, fires his counsel and insists on hiring a Muslim attorney. He gets Anwar Muhammad, whom McCoy has apparently known for a long time. At trial, Muhammad does his best, but his client keeps making outbursts, screaming about how the US wants to eradicate Islam, and so on. He eventually fires Muhammad and represents himself. This development concerns McCoy and Branch ("our new DA") because they argue that if he is found not competent to represent himself, then perhaps he will be found not competent to stand trial. This doesn't make any sense to me, but whatever -- it's just the weak logic of the series' later episodes.
To get a better read on the defendant's psychological make-up, McCoy asks Elizabeth Olivet to attend the trial. She states the obvious: he hates women, and suggests he joined Islam because it keeps women in check. McCoy comes up with a tactic we could see from a million miles away: he has Southerlyn cross-examine him. Predictably, the kid loses his temper and accidentally reveals that he knew his victim personally, via one of her graduate assistants. It turns out the assistant had brief romance with Greg and, apparently, laughed at him during some intimate encounter. This incident, combined with the effect of his domineering mother, seems to have led him to hate women. When McCoy has the grad student confront him in the conference room, he freaks out again, and, off-camera, admits to the crime and agrees to a plea deal. McCoy, Southerlyn, and Branch breath a sign of relief that he wasn't a "real" Muslim or terrorist, and say they are worried about how "easy" it is to craft a terrorist. All you have to do is laugh at his manhood, they imply.
The episode is notable because it retells the story of the American Taliban and because it is Senator Fred Thompson's first appearance as DA Arthur Branch, replacing the spineless Nora Lewin. We learn that he's from Georgia and that his wife's name is Lillian.
Initially, it appears the motive for the violinist's murder is robbery: her violin, worth a million dollars, is missing. Through some black market connections, Green and Briscoe learn of a fence who would likely be the one moving such stolen merchandise. The scene in which they go to question him is very unconventional: it begins with the fence running through a door. The camera holds on the door for a few seconds, and then our man Eddie Green comes bursting through, looks around, and chases after his prey. This turns into what must be the longest Ed Green Five Second Foot Chase™ in history: it lasts for a full 35 seconds! He runs and runs and runs! He finally catches the guy when he tries to unlock his van. That was a dumb thing to do, buddy. Eddie tackles him. Once he's interrogated, the fence rolls on the guy who stole the violin: a stagehand from the orchestra. The stagehand offers the improbable story that he stole the violin but did not murder the girl. It seems awfully coincidental, but as far as the episode's script is concerned, it's the truth.
So that leaves the investigators looking for other motives. They learn she was having an affair with her egotistical, controlling conductor, who is married. They come up with some good forensic evidence during a search of his car, but it gets thrown out by an overly-antagonistic judge, who says the warrant only applied to the house, not the car. Whatever, judge.
This leads to a subplot of the episode that actually turns into a bigger deal in future episodes: the judge, Judge Wright, is very confrontational towards both McCoy and DA Lewin (Dianne Wiest). He says he'll be watching McCoy very carefully, and he doesn't like showboating. He pretty much threatens Lewin that McCoy will never get a fair trial with him, but he makes this threat without really saying it. For once in her life, Lewin shows some backbone and stands up to the judge, even saying, "I'll take you down." This comes across as a somewhat lame attempt by the show's writers to give Lewin an image as a "tough liberal." It doesn't work very well, but reminds us of other episodes in which Judge Wright appears to be corrupt. (I'll link to these other episodes soon. I thought that this episode was the one that introduced the corruption story, but according to TV Tome, this is Wright's last episode. Hm.)
Anyway, back in the main plot, the conductor has a tight alibi, thanks to his wife and the records of the E-Z Pass automatic toll collection system. Eventually, however, the wife learns that her husband was planning to move out of the country with the violinist, and thus spurned, she seems ready to roll on him. When it comes time to testify against him, however, instead of fingering him, she confesses to the crime herself! She does so in apparent last-ditch effort to re-win the affection of her husband, but, she'll be going to jail, so who knows what good it will do her. But, the heart wants what it wants, so who are we to judge. Especially you, Judge Wright, you corrupt bastard!
Asked whether it's good to be so unsure about who committed the actual murder that your about to imprison a woman for, Lewin responds, "We're sure enough."
This episode is notable because it touches on the story arc involving Judge Wright (he's the one who looks like Peter Boyle), and because it has the really long Ed Green Foot Chase in it.
The episode begins outside a benefit concert, when two rich people hear a gun shot and rush to an alley where they see a wealthy woman shot in the arm, and a dead man. They were hit by the same bullet. The woman was taken to the hospital, but the man died. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and at first try to figure out who would want the man dead. The man was an escort of the shot woman, Mrs. Crosby, so the detectives investigate NYC's escort (aka "walker") subculture, and uncover some tiffs, but based on forensics decide that Crosby, not the escort, was the target of the shooting.
Mrs. Crosby says she doesn't know anyone who would want to hurt her, but the harbormaster of her yacht club says he saw her squabbling with a much younger man, a man who rode a distinctive motorcycle. The detectives track the man using the department's database of classified ads (lucky), and learn that he is married to a wealthy older woman, and that he has a gun matching the caliber of the weapon used in the shooting. He's looking like a good suspect.
Mrs. Crosby, meanwhile, heads off to Saratoga Springs, but they learn that the young man, named Denny, had booked a flight to Saratoga Springs under the assumed name "Alex Robson," and had sent a gun up to a motel addressed to a person with that name. He is placed under arrest, and Carmichael learns that Alex Robson is the name of a Jamaican who disappeared a few years back, apparently while in the company of...Mrs. Crosby, then using a different name. While combing Mrs. Crosby's welfare records, Carmichael learns she had a son: Dennis. Aha! Looks like Denny and Mrs. Crosby know each other a lot better than they were letting on. In fact, they are mother and child!
When Denny offers an Extreme Emotional Disturbance defense, Skoda learns that they knew each other better than most mothers and sons: Denny admits he had a sexual relationship with his mother. Crosby admits this at trial.
Denny is given a chance to plead out on the murder charges and save his current wife from conspiracy charges, if he testifies against his mother for the murders of the Jaimaican Robson and her last husband, but Denny chooses not to testify against her, leading McCoy to press charges against his wife for sending him the gun in Saratoga Springs, and allowing the jury in Denny's trial to return a verdict of guilty on Manslaughter 1. As Schiff says, it could have been worse: Mrs. Crosby could have had twins.
Casting note: Mrs. Crosby is played by Laila Robinson, who appeared twice on The Sopranos as young Livia Soprano, Tony's mother, and once before on L&O as McCoy's ex-girlfriend Diana Hawthorne.
The episode begins with a boy entering his home with a family friend. His parents are missing, and the apartment looks like it was prepared for a dinner party that never happened. Curtis and Briscoe find evidence of foul play, but come up short as they look for a motive. They learn that the couple had a bit of a falling out with their landlord, who had promised to put an art gallery on the first floor of their building, but had instead opened a coffee shop which he himself owned. (The coffee shop is named "Stellar Coffee." Like Starbucks, get it?) The grievance had evolved into litigation, but when Briscoe and Curtis track down the landlord to question him, they find only his abandoned van. He's been kidnapped, too!
The detectives then try to figure out who would have a problem with the landlord. They check out former tenants of his building, whom he had forced out so that he could change the building into a high-rent condo. While questioning one angry ex-tenant, they find an anonymous pamphlet lamenting the gentrification of the neighborhood. Shortly afterwards, an editor from the Daily News shows up at the precinct and says they've received a letter about gentrification, along with a demand that it be published in its entirety the following day, or else more people will be kidnapped. Skoda analyzes the letter and says it was written by an intelligent, educated white male in his 30s or 40s who is familiar with the work of Max Weber and "Bucky Fuller."
The next break in the case comes the day after the letter runs in the paper. A lawyer arrives at the precinct and says that based on the language in the published letter, his client believes he knows the indentity of the kidnapper, but wants to make sure that the kidnapper is treated with care by the police, because he is mentally unstable. They manage to get a search warrant for the lawyer's office(!), and find enough clues to lead them to the identity of the lawyer's client, Ben O'Dell. The detectives believe O'Dell is the kidnapper, but he insists that someone else he. After obtaining promises that only Curtis and Briscoe will follow him, he leads them to the supposed hideout of the suspect, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It turns out they brought along a SWAT team in an unmarked van, and the SWAT team finds nothing. Everybody's angry and feels lied to.
Nonetheless, O'Dell eventually relents, and reveals the identity of the man he thinks is the kidnapper: his brother. Before doing so, he talks to Cheekbones and gets her assurance that if the brother is insane, the DA's office won't pursue the death penalty. Cheekbone's assurance is ambiguous, but O'Dell takes it as a promise, and leads police to his brother's whereabouts. Briscoe uses the old "It's ConEd...we've got a gas leak" trick, and they arrest O'Dell's brother, Matthew.
During interrogation, Matthew says he merely wrote letters and pamphlets, and the kidnappers must have just been responding to his writings. He doesn't offer much more information than this, besides a weak alibi. Hitting a brick wall and fearing that time is running out for the kidnap victims, the police as the suspect's brother, Ben, to talk to him. He agrees on the conditions that he be left alone, and that the discussion take place in privacy. Ben manages to get an admission out of sorts from his brother (though we don't hear it), and Ben leads the detectives to a warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the police find the bodies of the couple and their landlord.
Matthew's defense attorney wants him to get a psychiatric evaluation, but Matthew resists and fires the lawyer. Recurring character Danielle Melnick (Tovah Feldshuh) takes on the case, and follows his orders not to order a psych evaluation. She's aggressive in her approach to the case, and when pressured by Cheekbones about a certain point, she responds sharply, "Come on, Ross." Heh. She's a tough cookie, that Melnick. In any case, McCoy informs Melnick that he's thinking about the death penalty, and this upsets Ben, who felt he had a deal with Cheekbones. "You lied to me, Miss Ross," he says. "I sold out my brother for nothing." It would seem so.
Melnick earns a major victory, however, when she gets all the evidence from the warehouse suppressed. She argues that because Matthew asked Ben for a lawyer during the police-instigated conversation between them, that Ben was acting as an agent of the police, and should have made arrangements for an attorney to be present. Seems tenuous to me, but the judge buys it after a longer-than-usual, fast-paced, and well-written exchange between McCoy and Melnick. During this hearing, Matthew is shown taking copious notes on yellow legal pads, and it's clear that he's at least fairly compulsive, if not insane. Anyway, without all this evidence, the case against O'Dell is very weak, but still strong enough to proceed, based on circumstantial evidence and O'Dell's faulty alibi.
The case takes another twist when the Daily News editor shows up again with evidence that O'Dell was institutionalized in the 1970s and 1980s. O'Dell had steadfastly insisted that no evidence related to his mental competence be introduced at his trial, but McCoy fears that if the evidence is published in the newspaper, it will taint the jury. He moves to have the jury sequestered, and the judge allows it.
In an unusual script development, the trial is not shown. Only the verdict is: guilty on all counts. The brother is still upset with Cheekbones, and angrily confronts McCoy. The sentencing hearing is coming up, but Cheekbones insists to McCoy and Schiff that Matthew does not deserve the death penalty. Her pleas fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately for her, McCoy has another hearing to attend the morning of the sentencing hearing, and Ross must make the argument in favor of the death penalty. At the hearing, she is questioning Ben, the defendant's brother, and he says that at a certain point, he was concerned that his brother might do something to hurt someone. Just as this is happening, McCoy walks in the back door of the courtroom to watch Ross's handling. After glancing meaningfully at McCoy a few times, Ross does something courageous and possibly foolish: she purposely destroys her own argument for the death penalty. She moves towards O'Dell and asks him, "Why? Why were you concerned?" After a brief hesitation, O'Dell recognizes the opportunity that has just been handed to him, and he blurts out all this stuff about his brother's mental illness. Matthew starts yelling at him to stop -- he doesn't want to be called insane -- but O'Dell continues. Matthew actually climbs over the defense table, yelling for his brother to stop and saying he was betrayed, and the judge orders him removed. It's a very emotional moment for Cheekbones, the defendant, his brother, and, I think, the viewer, because we see that Cheekbones is willing to tank her own career just to do what she believes is the ethical thing. This kind of behavior is something we more commonly associate with her boss, McCoy, so it's refreshing to see one of his assistants take such a bold and principled stand.
We learn from a press gaggle outside that the death penalty was rejected, but Schiff says he isn't going to second guess the jury. On the courthouse steps, Cheekbones asks McCoy if she'll get fired, but he says don't worry about it. She says, it sure was convenient that you had that other hearing, implying that McCoy purposely gave her the opportunity to shitcan the capital punishment. As he walks by, Schiff sucks his cheek and says, "You two take a lot of liberties."
Just want to point out that the hearing that McCoy attended instead of the sentencing hearing was a bail hearing for Charlie Harmon, the assistant DA who was a law school friend of Cheekbones and who was successfully prosecuted for corruption and murder in a previous episode, "Shadow". (He first appears in another episode that deals with drug crimes.)
As I mentioned above, this case bears many similarities to the Unabomber case. In each case, a published letter led a man to turn in his own highly-educated, politically-radical brother, and each defendant steadfastly insisted that his mental state not be introduced into evidence.
The episode begins with two brothers in the club's bathroom fighting over one brother's cocaine use. As they are talking, we hear a boom. They open the door, and the stage is on fire, and people are screaming. They run to the bathroom window, but it's been barred over. By the time Briscoe and Green show up at the scene, the bodies are lined up outside. The investigator from the fire department tells them that the fire was accelerated by the soundproofing in the ceiling.
They begin their investigation by trying to find out who knew about the pyrotechnics display ahead of time. They visit the band members at the hotel. The lead member, Teddy Connor, professes ignorance, and says his manager arranged the whole thing. The band's manager says the club owner knew what was going to happen, even though a clause in the contract prohibited pyrotechnic displays. They even performed with the display the previous night. The manager leads them to the stage manager/head roadie who tells them he is a careful technician, and that he didn't cause the fire. Briscoe and Green next interview a young witness, an 18-year-old girl named Terry, who witnessed the fire and called 911. She says that as the show began, two band members did not stand where they usually did, but a third one -- the bass player -- did. He was immediately set on fire by the flame-throwing pyrotechnic device, and the enflamed ceiling soon "fell on his head," killing him.
The forensics labs tells the detectives that one of the flame-throwing devices had been filled with twice as much flammable powder as the other throwers, and so the flame was twice as big. It shot all the way to the ceiling, igniting it. This was the thrower immediately next to the bass player. The stage manager explains that everyone, including the band members, knew how to set up the devices, so the detectives just need to figure out why someone would fill the device more than usual. One of the roadies offers a possible motive: Teddy had recently discovered that the bass player was "banging" a groupie Teddy was involved with. This groupie tells the detectives that she saw Teddy with another groupie: Terry, the 18-year-old. Hmm. Terry never mentioned anything about that.
They reinterview Terry, who says the sound guy was not backstage when everyone else was, so maybe he over-filled the flame-thrower. The soundman says he's innocent, but finally offers some useful information: Terry kept saying how he wanted the flames bigger, figuring that a bigger spectacle would lead to more energy and more fans, and this would somehow launch the band back into the big time again. A shoddy theory of success, but Teddy, when questioned, admits this. After a conversation with Lt. Van Buren, Briscoe and Green arrest him.
His confident defense attorney tells McCoy to buy a new suit -- she's filing a motion to allow tv cameras in the courtroom. Something about ensuring that her client is crucified in public, she says. Even though it's against New York law, the judge allows it, over McCoy's strenuous objections.
At trial, Terry the 18-year-old groupie changes her testimony and now claims that she was having sex with Teddy in the tour bus at the time that the device would have been rigged. Of course, this gives Teddy a perfect alibi. McCoy and Southerlyn are stunned, and are convinced the girl is lying to protect Teddy out of some misconceived idea of love or loyalty. They pressure her to change her story but she refuses. They even try to get her mother -- who is obviously stunned to learn her daughter is having sex with 52-year-old men -- to pressure her daughter to change her story. Time for the big Family Meeting in the Conference Room™! Can you see it coming? Turns out the girl is the illegitimate secret DAUGHTER of Teddy. (We should have guessed..."Terry and Teddy"? Come on, what are the odds of that?!) She says she was lying to save him, her father. Her mom gives everybody a lot of lip about how it's not worth it, but the daughter is insistent and then CONFESSES to setting the fire herself, because she wanted her dad to be in the big time again. Way to go, honey. You're both famous now.
In the epilogue, Southerlyn tells Branch and McCoy a lame story about how she tried to impress her dad by playing tennis, but he would just to "paperwork" at her matches. Poor, put-upon Serena. Life is so hard.
Casting note: Teddy the lead singer is played by a guy named John Doe. Although there are a couple of John Does in the world, this one was the lead singer of the 80s punk band "X," who I think I've actually seen in concert at a rock club about the size of the club in the episode. John has been acting for a long time, and was a regular on Roswell.
At Bell's apartment, Curtis turns his attention to a website frequented by the biker community, and learns that Bell was supposed to go to the bar that night to meet a man selling his motorcycle. The detectives track down the girlfriend, and Curtis talks to her in Spanish, but doesn't get much info out of her. She says she was in the bathroom. Briscoe feels left out of the conversation, and jokes somewhat bitterly about Curtis's linguistic skills.
Meanwhile, a search of the neighborhood has turned up the murder weapon: an oil can opener with the guard removed. It's also used for puncturing beer cans, we learn. Briscoe and Curtis go to lunch, where they discuss this method of drinking. Curtis tells Briscoe about beer bongs, and Briscoe tells Curtis about "depth charges," where you drop a shot into a beer glass. Curtis says, "We should try it some time," and then says, "Sorry..." apparently referencing the fact that Briscoe is a recovering alcoholic -- information that Briscoe had not yet shared with Curtis. Briscoe, being a detective, notices this and accuses Curtis: "You checked up on me." They have a slightly awkward conversation about the matter, but the tension is not too heavy. It's in stark contrast to the initial tension between Briscoe and Green which was much angrier and foreboding, a tension which to some extent has never gone away.
In any case, Curtis continues using his techno-savvy to track down a biker named "Axel" who was going to sell the bike to Bell. Axel turns out to be a "Rubber," a nickname for "Rich Urban Biker," who is not involved in the killing, and who says he left because Bell was late to the meeting. He did, however, point out that he left a bit early because of the presence of some members of a biking gang known as the "Yankee Rebels." Curtis and Briscoe visit the Yankee Rebels clubhouse down on 4th Street in the East Village. (I am pretty sure the club house of a real biking club is right around there somewhere.) They run into Rocky Mountain again, and right behind him is "Igor," the apparent club leader who tells Curtis, "I don't talk to Spics unless I'm drunk." Curtis doesn't like that kind of talk one bit, and grabs Igor by the collar, slams him against the wall, and puts a gun in his face. "I'm buyin'," he says. Briscoe tries to keep everyone calm, and once the situation has settled down, tells Curtis that he doesn't like such confrontations. He has a point.
Curtis gets back on the BBS, finds an account of the stabbing, and learns that Caridad's ex-boyfriend was involved. Curtis talks to some of Caridad's Puerto Rican girlfriends to learn the unsurprising fact that Igor is her ex-boyfriend. So, naturally, they arrest Igor who denies knowledge of anything. Curtis again turns the computer and strikes up an email correspondence with the guy who wrote the account of the stabbing, who goes by the name of Stiletto. Apparently not knowing he's talking to a cop, Stiletto says he'll meet Curtis at an abandoned building's rooftop. Curtis and Briscoe get stood up, but they trace Stiletto via his email address and -- get this -- by driving around in a van with a police technician who is using an antenna and Ghostbusters-like device to "triangulate" the signal from Stiletto's cellular modem, with Curtis instant-messaging Stiletto all the while. It's high comedy to see the technician beep-beeping and listening to his bulky ear phones, cradling the "Yagi" antenna like it's his first born. The silly technique works, however, and they arrest Stiletto, who turns out to be a podiatrist named Milton Stillman.
When Stillman talks to McCoy, he insists he doesn't have to testify, even to a grand jury, because he says that posting to the BBS qualifies him as a journalist, and he has the rights of any journalist protecting his sources. There are several hearings to determine whether this is a legally valid argument. McCoy argues that the issue doesn't really matter, since even if he is ruled a journalist, he must still testify to those events he witnessed directly. For some reason that is not entirely clear, he confesses to the murder, though this makes no sense. Caridad later argues that Stillman did it because Igor pressured him to, but this is not logical. Is whatever Igor had in mind for Stillman worse than going down for a murder that you didn't commit? I don't think so.
In the meantime, Caridad finally agrees to testify to what she saw, and she says she saw Igor kill Bell. The motive is still at issue: it's not jealousy, but then it appears that the biker jacket Bell was wearing at the time had something to do with it. Kincaid starts investigating, and eventually learns the real motive for the murder: Bell was wearing a Yankee Rebels jacket that Caridad had given him. Igor didn't like it, and stabbed him to death. Oh.
It also seems that Caridad, upset because Bell had broken up with her earlier that night (at his father's urging and promise of financial reward), and she thought that giving him the jacket might get him in trouble. Way to go, Dadi. With this information, Briscoe and Curtis return to the Yankee Rebel clubhouse and arrest Igor.
Since this is the second episode featuring Det. Curtis, we get all kinds of garbage showing us how tech-savvy and fluent in Spanish he is. It feels really heavy-handed and unnecesarry, like the script is trying to cram down our throats what are sharp contrast there is between him and Briscoe. We get it already, so lighten up! They did the same thing when Det. Green came on board. Look how hot-tempered he is! Look, he's black! Give us a break.
Casting notes: Stillman is played by Robert Knepper, who I thought appeared as a biker in a motorcycle-themed episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, too, but I can't find evidence of this on his TV Tome profile.
The title of the episode refers to the motorcycle gang, and also to the rebellious attitude of the victim towards his father.
Regardless, Stone and Robinette soon find themselves with bigger fish to fry. The victim has admitted that she and her boyfriend were trying to extort Alcott for $10,000, but they only got $2,000 out of him. Soon, however, they file a civil lawsuit against him for $10 million. Things aren't going to well for Alcott: his wife is also divorcing him, and wants $1 million, half of his assets. But the biggest surprise (that isn't really much of a surprise) is yet to come: the baby wasn't even Alcott's! It was the boyfriend's. Shockingly, the victim and her boyfriend STAGED the attack, resulting in the death of her fetus, just so they could sue Allcot for millions. It takes Stone a while to figure this out, and once he does, he still has to prove it. It turns out the boyfriend was a lawyer in Wisconsin (although he was eventually disbarred for suborning perjury) and he very carefully assembled this scheme so that even if they fell apart, the couldn't really be charged with anything. (Although it seems to me they left themselves wide open to extortion charges.) Nonetheless, Stone wants to charge them with attempted murder. To get a conviction, he needs to show that the defendants did not know the details of the law they were violating, at least as it pertained to the 24-week rule. The debate over this point gets extremely muddled at times, and it's hard to keep track of everything, but one thing you learn is that Stone is prosecuting using arguments he knows not to be true. This is very much a McCoy tactic, and is extremely unusual for Stone, who tends to play things very aggressively, but within certain iron-clad ethical boundaries. Doesn't matter much, though: once the "victim" gets up on the stand and says, we didn't do anything wrong and "no one was hurt" the jury is ready to crucify her. Guilty.
Casting notes: Reed Diamond, who went on to play a detective on Homicide, plays the boyfriend. Also, Yancy Butler, who went on to star in Witchblade until she self-destructed and took off for rehab, has a bit part as a co-worker of the victim. She was about 21 at the time this episode aired.
He looks even guiltier when the mistress admits that the surplus of money in her credit card accounts came from a massive embezzling scheme the two had perpretrated at their insurance company. McCoy tries to get him to plead to Murder 2, and he'll "throw in" the embezzlement charges, but he refuses. Skoda profiles the dad based on the evidence available to him, and suggests he must look at his life as a big disappointment. McCoy finally gets a break when the man's wife admits that in couples therapy, the dad said the boy "would be better off dead," but this statement is thrown on on privilege grounds. (Interesting, because the judge had to decide about doctor/patient privilege and spousal privilege.) With this evidence gone, the man is released on his own recognizance, and McCoy is struggling to assemble a case. He needs hard evidence linking the man to the germ, but the bio company, AllGen, won't give it up.
McCoy comes up with the idea of charging the executives of the company with neglitent homicide, and even gets a former executive to testify that the company willfully sold germs to questionable customers. The ploy -- exquisitely crafted by McCoy -- works, and the company gives up the order form McCoy was seeking. McCoy almost manages to get the company fined so badly it ends up receivership. The detectives link the address on the form to the dad, and sends McCoy and Curtis to go arrest him. When they find him in a motel in New Jersey, he's hung himself. As Briscoe says, "It ain't Fiji."
Couple of casting notes: the father of the boy is played by Dylan Baker, a well-known character actor probably best known for his appearance in the Todd Solondz film Happiness. Also, AllGen's defense attorney, Mr. Axtell, is played by Jack Gilpin, who has appeared as the same character in several other episodes.
The epsiode opens with a man bringing his wife into an emergency room. She has been shot in the head, and she is bleeding badly. Briscoe and Curtis talk to the man, and quickly get the sense that there is more to the story than he is letting on. They take him to the scene of the crime to get an idea of what happened. While they are visiting the victim's parents, they receive a phone call informing them that she has died. The detectives visit the forensics experts who tell them about the trajectories of the shots fired at the car. Curtis realizes that one way the odd trajectories can be explained is if the driver's side door was open at the time of the shooting, an idea that supports the idea that the man shot his wife, then got back in the car and drove to the hospital. The couple's young daughter, who was in the car at the time, tells Briscoe that her parents were fighting at the time of the shooting, a fact which also seems to point to the husband as the shooter.
When the pressure is on, the husband finally admits that he was up in that area to buy a diamond ring from a fence (a person who sells stolen property). But instead of meeting the fence, he got shot at.
Briscoe and Curtis track down the fence via a pager number and a girl named Loretta, and he tells them that some Dominican guys were in the area, flashing a gun around. He gives a description of the men, and Briscoe and Curtis head over to a local club where the fence said he saw them. One of the men is there, and they arrest him. Soon enough, they have the other two in custody. Two of them roll on the third, who happens to already be in Rikers awaiting trial on drug charges. They just need the murder weapon.
Cheekbones visits the suspect at Rikers and pretends to be an incompetent ADA trying to deal with the drug charges. She says she can do that as long as the suspect turns in the gun the undercover cop saw him with during the drug transaction. She says he can give it to the mayor's guns-for-toys program and get his charges reduced. In the presence of his attorney, he agrees. They get the gun, and it turns out to be the murder weapon. Inevitably, the man's defense attorney makes a motion for the suppression of the gun, but the judge allows it, though he has strong words for Cheekbones.
But the case is just getting going: As they are preparing to wrap up the case against their suspect, Cheekbones notices a notation on the victim's chart: there is a discrepancy related to her time of death and the start time of the organ harvesting procedure. She talks to a neurologist to get to the bottom of it, and he admits that he wasn't present for the test to determine whether the victim was dead or not, even though he signed the document saying he was. This leads to an investigation of another doctor. This other doctor is evasive but confident, and it sure looks like he hastened the woman's death so that he could get her organs. They learn his motive was that he wanted to supply them to another hospital that needed them to save another girl's life. The surgeon was looking for a job at this hospital.
After much back and forth and somewhat boring discussion about the medical aspects of the case, McCoy notices that the victim was billed for morphine as part of the organ harvesting procedure. Of course it's strange to give a pain killer to a dead person, so this bit of evidence becomes the smoking gun that McCoy was looking for. The doctors pleads guilty.
Briscoe and Green at first focus their investigation on a married man who was having an affair with the victim and who had access to the building. He claims that he led the woman to the building and was preparing to have sex with her when he realized he didn't have any condoms. He ran out to get some and when he came back the building was on fire. He says he went to call 911, but a young blonde woman was on the nearby payphone already and said she called. Using the records for this phone, they visit the young man who received the call. He is evasive, and they learn from his superintendent that several people were staying with him recently, including a blonde woman and two young men. They also look into his credit card transactions, and view a security tape from a gas station that shows two young men and the blonde girl. They using face-matching software to learn the identity of the woman on the tape. (I don't buy it.) They track her down, and find her at a bus station with the other two men, preparing to leave.
It turns out that the three of them are radical environmental activists who destroy "targets" provided to them by a website. The building they burned down was a target of the movement because the property was formerly a community garden, and the city had sold the land for profit to a developer. McCoy wants to nail the slightly-older man who runs the website, but he seems to have protected himself from prosecution, and those on trial won't do anything to implicate him.
McCoy's case against the defendants is week, but by hammering home the point that the victim was an innocent teacher and did not deserve to die, he gets the female accomplice to testify against the others. They refuse to take a plea, and they are sentenced. As Roche, the man who runs the website says, young people still believe they can change the world.
This episode is somewhat similar to another one in which a young man refuses sympathy so that he can become a martyr in the animal rights movement.
The episode begins with a woman arriving home to find her daughter missing. She checks her answering machine messages and hears an electronically altered voice talking about her daughter and her daughter's doll. She calls the school, and then calls the police. Briscoe and Logan show up to investigate, but before they really get started, the girl shows up with her nanny! They had been out shopping at a toy store. Nonetheless, Briscoe and Logan feel the voice on the machine is not done with this family.
Sure enough, the extortionist sends a note demanding $20,000 along with video of the girl walking around with the mom and her nanny. A voice-over on the video intones "it would be so easy to take her." He says they should leave the money at the fountain in Central Park. Briscoe, Logan, and Van Buren go undercover to monitor the drop-off of the money, and wait to capture whoever comes to pick it up from the trash can where the mom left it. They pick up a scruffy fellow with a few minor prior offenses who says he was given $20 by someone in a Lincoln to pick up the package. He gives a description of the suspect, as well as a description of a decal on the car. The decal is a parking permit for a country club where the parents of the child are members. This and other circumstantial evidence begin to point to the involvement of a man, Judge Thayer. When Kincaid shows a photo lineup to the scraggly guy and he picks out Thayer, Kincaid immediately leaves the room and tells Stone she should be recused from the case because she used to be a clerk for Thayer. He refuses, saying the connection is only tangential.
They arrest the judge, and he retains prominent attorney Arthur Gold as his counsel. Gold, played by George Grizzard, has shown up in several previous episodes, and is a major adversary of Stone. At this point, Kincaid admits there was more to her relationship with Thayer than she let on. In fact, she says, she was romantically involved with him. Stone is very angry and says she should have said something earlier. In the meantime, Thayer has filed charges against her with the disciplinary committee. Kincaid resigns from the DA's office. At her hearing, Thayer claims that she tried to seduce him and that he spurned her advances, but she persisted. The committee believes him, and she is censured.
Off the payroll of the DA's office, Kincaid follows a hunch and confronts the mother of the nearly-kidnapped girl. She admits that she, too, had an affair with the judge, and he grew angry and controlling when she tried to cut it off.
With this new development, Thayer agrees to plead guilty, but he is extremely reticent at his allocution, and he refuses to say what happened. Stone and the trial judge keep insisting that he admit what he did, and finally, after much prompting, he does.
Briscoe and Green visit the school to learn more about the girl, and notice that the athletes at the school all wear a varsity jacket that matches the description of the jacket given by the building's doorman. While at the school, they learn of a website run by some students where other students can rate their peers sexually. They also learn the victim had been upset about this site, learned who was responsible for it, and turned them in to the administration. The boys responsible for the website were very upset with her, and confronted her. One of these boys, they learn, was kissing a friend of the victim's at a party that seems to have been attended by everyone involved in the case. It eventually comes out that two of the boys had attempted to coerce the victim to have sex with them at the party, but she refused, saying she was a lesbian.
This opens up a whole new angle in the case, and Cheekbones begins to believe that the victim's best friend was engaged in a lesbian relationship with the victim, and did not want this fact to come to light, so she killed her. I don't know how much this really makes sense, but whatever. Anyway, the girl eventually confesses.
The husband was also having an affair with a young blonde chemistry student. The mistress says that a few days before the murder, she saw the husband arguing with a scruffy, bearded man outside the victim's apartment. The husband says he doesn't recall this, and when they later identify the bearded man, the husband denies knowing him.
The physicist/husband's specialty is area of study they call "proton decay." He was trying to prove that over time, protons decay, and this will eventually lead to the end of the universe. This causes McCoy to give some thought about the meaning of life, but Briscoe reminds him that the victim would want to see justice done. Proton decay also becomes important, because it turns out that the bearded man was in fact a former student of the husband, and he had recently resurfaced to posit a solution to some of the problems the husband was having in his research. It eventually comes out that the husband attempted to take credit for the bearded man's research, and the bearded man, in anger, sent the bomb to the wife's house, not knowing the two were separated and headed for divorce.
One of the pieces of evidence that points to the disgruntled bearded man is the image of a spring that shows up on a piece of unexposed film inside a camera found at the crime scene. The spring, they determine, was radioactive. At first, the detectives figure this can be explained by the nuclear reactor that the husband uses at work. They are pretty proud of themselves when they confront him with this information, but he is dismissive, saying that his reactor is incapable of such stuff. This leads them to investigate the other machine in the city that could be responsible for making the spring radioactive: a super-collider at another research facility. It's here they eventually learn the identity of the bearded man, find the bomb-making materials, and connect him to the husband. He initially suggests that the husband hired him to send the bomb to kill the wife, but eventually his motivation was simple revenge. The problem is, in order to prove their case, McCoy needs the husband to admit that he ripped of the research of the bomber. Since this would mean academic ruin, he doesn't want to do it, byt he finally does. The result is a guilty verdict for the bomber.
This episode was directed by Dann Florek, who once played Captain Kragen on the show. Its title refers to the big bang of astro-physics, and also to the bomb used as the murder weapon.
After denying involvement for a long time, the defense attorney finally asserts an affirmative defense: extreme emotional disturbance. The disturbance he asserts came from the defendant's being under constant pressure to succeed. The defense brings in experts to testify about the psychological impact of affirmative action, but the judge eventually throws it all out. When the defendant is on the stand, he confesses, saying, "I couldn't carry the weight." When things look like they are not going his way, he pleas out to an unusually sympathetic McCoy.
This is another episode that deals with race in America and certain aspects of being African-American as a defense. There is another episode, starring Courtney Vance as an investment banker, which is extremely similar to this one. The series handles racial issues much more deftly than many other shows, although this episode isn't as careful as it might have been.
The title refers to the name of the community center where the defendant met (and ultimately murdered) the victim, and also to the concept of being safe from the outside world. Clearly, what should have been a haven for this young man turned out to be the opposite.
I just want to point out that the name of the ivy league university the defendant attends is called "Hanford," a cross between the names of Harvard and Stanford.
Nonetheless, Logan wants to pursue charges against the priest for the abuse charges. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations has run out. Even so, McCoy asserts that the priest engaged in a conspiracy -- with the Catholic church -- to molest the children. McCoy treats the church as an unindicted co-conspirator. Through his investigation, though, McCoy learns that the dead cop served as a sort of pimp for Father Joe, providing other boys for him. Logan is subpoenaed by the defense, and he admits that his childhood friend essentially propositioned him on behalf of Father Joe. The case is saved, deus ex machina, however, when the priest's wife steps forward and says she witnessed him molesting their son. The priest pleas to a 15 year sentence.
The title of the episode refers, of course, to the souring of everyone's Catholic faith in the episode, and also to the legal concept of proceeding in "bad faith."
The episode was directed by Dann Florek, who played Capt. Kragen on the show for several years, and who went on to revive the character on SVU.
The episode begins with some cops eating at a diner. One of the cops catches the eye of a female cop, and soon goes to the back of the diner and kisses here near the restrooms. We learn that they were having a brief affair, but she wants to cut it off. She walks out of the diner, and is shot. Briscoe and Green arrive on scene to investigate, and Briscoe quickly suspects that the male officer knows more than he is saying. Meanwhile, Green learns that the shots came from a moving car, and a witness got a partial plate number. When Green tells him the plate ended with the letters "U V," Briscoe retorts with a brilliant wisecrack: "I don't think the first one was 'L.'"
It doesn't take long to track down the vehicle used in the shooting, and they visit a nurse at a hospital who owns the car. She has a somewhat hostile attitude, and claims the car was stolen, but she didn't report it because she thought it had been towed by the city. When Green asks her if it's possible her son borrowed the car, she says sharply, "My son is dead." The detectives talk to her co-workers and learn that the woman has a bad temper, and has a son after all!
The detectives visit the son at his high school, where he attempts to run away, but only succeeds in participating in the shortest Ed Green Five Second Foot Chase™ ever -- it only lasts about 2 seconds, because as soon as he runs, he bumps into some people and trips in the hallway. Nice try, kid.
The arrest him and bring him in for interrogation. Briscoe is mad at the kid for not talking, and tells him, "My partner here is famous all over the city" for his violent streak. Briscoe leaves, and Green is alone with the kid. Instead of threatening him, though, Green tries to get to him emotionally, and the two have a very well written exchange about how justice differs for white people as opposed to black people. Along the way, Green makes a sarcastic comment about how the dept. gives him a toaster oven everytime he beats up a black kid. Green tries to tell him that he is the kid's only hope, since he's a black kid who shot a white cop, but the kid just calls him "Tom" and refuses to talk, until eventually Green gets him to about his motive: he shot the cop because he was mad at all police for not properly investigating the death of his brother 8 years earlier.
Shortly thereafter, the boy's attorney enters the picture: it's Carl Halpert (Gregory Hines), who talks to Van Buren about the charges and says he thought "the air in here would be more sympathetic" and makes a crack about racism that goes, "When the sheet fits..." He later tells McCoy that the extenuating circumstances merit McCoy's consideration. McCoy isn't biting, though. Meanwhile, Green tries to convince Briscoe they should look into the circumstances surrounding the brother's death, but Briscoe is reluctant. Briscoe relents, though, and they head down to "Dead Files" to find the details on the case. And it's there that they hit a problem: most of the files have been lost. Pretty much all they have is a quick note indicating that the case was closed because it was ruled a suicide. This piques both their interests, and they track down a witness (now in prison) who was spoken to several times by the lead detective (now dead). The witness is serving 3 consecutive life sentences, and so has nothing to lose when he confesses to killing the brother. McCoy, realizing his case is in jeopardy if the death was a homicide and not a suicide, wants to prove it was a suicide. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy 8 years ago, however, had a hostile parting with the city, and essentially stole all her files related to her work. Southerlyn charges her with embezzling property, a charge the judge dislikes, but permits. He convinces the ex-ME to turn over her files, but even these lack sufficient detail for the existing ME, Rogers, to make a determination about cause of death. She wants to exhume the body. The mother doesn't want this to happen, but Lt. Van Buren, after a long talk about motherhood and police corruption, convinces her, and says she will personally go after anyone responsible for a cover-up. But when the body is exhumed, and the coffin is exhumed, Rogers is shocked to discover that the coffin contains no body: it is filled with old tires.
The story begins to strain credibility when it is revealed that the body apparently disappeared because the funeral home director sold it, and hundreds of others, to foreign medical schools, a practice for which he was eventually arrested and charged. So they put the ex-ME on the stand to testify, but she omits certain facts that would have indicated ambiguity as to the cause of death. Southerlyn notes this to McCoy, who then realizes his case is falling apart, because the police work on the brother's murder was so shoddy. He visits Halpert at a chili restaurant, and essentially congratulates him. They have an interesting discussion about the ramifications of allowing any angry young man who has a problem with police to shoot them with impunity, but Hines is convinced he's doing the right thing in this case. The jury decides the young man is not guilty, and there is much rejoicing in the courtroom.
Although the episode is interesting, the plot twists seem improbable at times: too many coincidences are necessary to make it work. Also, the episode is filled with serious dialogue in which the characters discuss various political issues related to the case. This kind of conversation has become a staple of the show in recent years, and although I think it can be interesting, it is also sometimes so formulaic as to feel contrived and tacked-on.
The episode's title refers to the box on the ME's report that must be checked for every suspicious death: homicide or suicide.
The episode is notable for Gregory Hines' fantastic performance as the defense attorney. It is one of the most natural performances I've ever seen on the show, and it's a joy to watch. He was truly gifted.
The episode begins with a homeless man shouting abuse at people waiting at a bus stop because they won't give him money. We then see a businessman stumble in front of an oncoming truck and get run over. Briscoe and Logan track down the homeless man (by a coffee cup he was carrying), but it's clear he didn't actually push the man. Fibers found under the victim's fingernails do not match the homeless guy's coat, and no one actually saw him push the victim. They begin to focus on the victim's private and business life to find another motive. They learn that although he was perceived as a boring and conservative man, he had an affair with a female bookkeeper who had been fired the previous year. It turns out his wife knew about it, but the detectives don't suspect either of them for long.
Eventually, however, they learn that the baby food company was having financial difficulty, and a large loan had been called in by their bank. The DA's auditors can't determine where the money to pay off the loan came from, and the detectives become increasingly suspicious when the "venture capital" firm said to have paid off the loan is a cramped office occupied only by an elderly Russian woman who speaks broken English. Looks like the Russian mob is involved. They also learn that the victim didn't die from being run over by the truck after all: he was shot in the heart first, with a .32 caliber pistol, and then fell or was pushed into the path of the truck.
So what's the connection to the mob? It turns out that the new "partner" at the baby food company, Steven Green, was actually born in Russia under another name, and his family is prominent in the Russian mob. It begins to look like the baby food company took out a large loan from Russian loan sharks (at 25%!), the victim discovered the source of the income and the fact that the baby food was made from cheap, moldy, Russian ingredients, and threatened to tell the government. Via a fingerprint on a shell casing, Briscoe and Logan track down the hitman, search his apartment, and find a .32 caliber gun that is apparently the murder weapon. The hitman comes home in the middle of the search, and Logan has to chase him up to the roof of the apartment building before he tackles him.
Schiff wants McCoy to connect the hitman to Green, and get him to roll on him, but apparently Russian mobsters are reluctant to roll on one another. Stone eventually gets the hitman to roll on Green by moving another Russian hitman to the prison, and telling the original hitman about this.
Meanwhile, the victim's original business partner in the baby food company, tells investigators that she saw the hitman visiting Green in the office the night before the murder. But when she learns he's a Russian mobster, she is reluctant to testify. But this is the evidence Stone needs to connect Green to the mob, so he pressures her. Nonetheless, she changes her story at trial, and says she never saw the hitman before. Stone is furious, and threatens her with felony perjury. She refuses to testify. Eventually, though, she agrees, accepting Stone's promise that he'll get her into witness protection. She testifies, and Green is found guilty of orchestrating the murder.
Shortly thereafter, though, Stone calls Kincaid into his office and tells her what you knew was coming: the witness was killed, shot dead as the marshalls were moving her out of her home. It seems highly unlikely that she would be killed while surrounded by officers, but whatever. It's clear Stone blames himself, since he pressured her so much into testifying, though Kincaid tells him he did what he had to do.
Regardless, a much bigger surprise comes in the closing moments of the show: Stone tells Schiff he's resigning. They share a moment. Stone's last words: "I'm clear as a bell." He affectionately puts his hand up around Schiff's ear -- an odd gesture, but it feels real -- and then exits. Schiff stands in his office doorway and watches him leave.
The episode is obviously notable because it is Stone's last. The episode's title refers both to the Russian mob's inter-connections, and, of course, to Schiff and Stone.
The episode begins with a sanitation worker hearing gun shots and rushing to the scene, where he find the dead officer and another badly injured man. At first, Curtis and Briscoe focus on the injured man, who was shot, as their chief suspect. The investigation is hindered by the fact that he is unconscious and in the hospital during much of this time. But they manage to track down witnesses who saw him follow the officer from a city bus to the park. Eventually, they track down an additional witness, a young woman, who they (improbably) locate via a mix tape a bus passenger had a conversation with her about. They talk to the DJ who made the tape, and he says they can find her at a certain club most nights. They do. When they talk to her, she gives her name as Monica Summers and says she saw the man follow the woman into the park, and then she went shopping at a nearby shoe store.
Meanwhile, a detective from Brooklyn calls Briscoe and tells him that his daughter has been picked up on charges. (Spoiler: This is the episode that initiates the story arc involving the eventual death of Briscoe's daughter.) Briscoe goes to talk to his daughter in jail in Brooklyn. It's clear they haven't spoken in a long time. She says she's in trouble. Briscoe says he'll talk to the DA in Brooklyn, but he later learns that the DA is interested in making a name for himself with drug prosecutions, and he's not interested in making any deals -- unless she goes undercover so she can testify against her boyfriend, who is also a drug dealer. She is very resistant to this idea, but Briscoe reluctantly encourages her to do it.
Back on the murder case, discover some inconsistencies in Summers' statemement and realize that their initial suspect is not only innocent, but he also apparently ran into the park to save the woman from her attacker. They also suspect Summers as the killer. They attempt to track her down, but don't have much luck. They meet two of her ex-boyfriends, one of whom has stitches from being cut up by her. This kid's mother reveals the whereabouts of Summers -- a flophouse occupied by indigent squatters, and Briscoe and Curtis attempt to find her there. When they walk in, they catch her attacking another woman with a knife. As Briscoe attempts to restrain her, she slashes him in the hand, and injury requiring 18 stitches.
When they arrest her and bring her to the interrogation room, she has a very aggressive and bad attitude, and refuses to talk to the detectives. Van Buren attempts to reach her "woman to woman" and get her to drop the tough girl act, but she is contemptuous and practically spits in Van Buren's face as she repeatedly calls her "bitch." That pisses Van Buren off, and with acid in her eyes and voice, she tells the girl that if she's going to be like that, she better "be packing a lot more than a potty mouth."
Away from the murder investigation, McCoy tells Briscoe he can't help him with his daughter's situation, despite his quid-pro-quo offer to the Brooklyn DA. Meanwhile, Carl Anderton, a wealthy and powerful New Yorker (played by Robert Vaugnn) whom we've seen in a few other episodes, endorses Judge Gary Feldman in the campaign for the office of District Attorney. He promised Schiff in an earlier episode that he would bring him down, so this appears to be his method for doing so. Schiff later admits to Anderton that he's having trouble raising money for his campaign, and he attributes this to Anderton's efforts.
Back on the murder case, Cheekbones learns more about Monica Summers through her social services and welfare case files. She discovers that she was frequently abused by her father, and had a very troubled childhood with many foster homes, etc. Cheekbones goes to visit the father at his dingy apartment, and she reluctantly enters it. The father asks if there is a reward for providing evidence against his daughter. When he learns there is, he goes in a back room, slaps around his girlfriend a little, and emerges with a crucifix that belonged to the victim. He says he bought it from his daughter for $20. Briscoe and Curtis had been looking for this crucifix since the beginning of the investigation, and it is considered a crucial piece of evidence. (I should point out that when Briscoe and Curtis first met Monica, she was wearing a crucifix, although not this one.)
After this break in the case, Briscoe visits his daughter again, and encourages her to do what she has to do to avoid jail time. He says the DA might be more willing to cut her a deal if she weren't his daughter, because the DA doesn't want to appear like he's giving favorable treatment to an officer. The daughter responds, "Being your kid just doesn't have an upside." Ouch.
When McCoy puts Summers on trial, she does something unusual for the show: she confesses mid-way through her testimony. Despite her lawyer's objections, she refuses to provide for her own defense, gets convicted, and is sentenced to death. She then refuses to appeal her death sentence. McCoy is continually suspicious that she's doing this to appear insane, but even the appeals court allows her to make her own decision on the matter, and rejects an appeal co-filed on her behalf by an ACLU-like organization and a Christian organization. (The woman has since claimed that she found Jesus in prison after six months, and considers herself born again.) When McCoy interviews her, she is a changed woman: calm and enlightened with the holy spirit, apparently. McCoy remains suspicious, but nothing is to be done, and the march towards her execution is afoot. It's obvious McCoy is troubled by this turn of events: he is in favor of the death penalty, but seems to have envisioned himself applying it to more conventional killers. Cheekbones says she has no such self-doubt, because she opposes the death penalty in all cases. Regardless of everyone's personal feelings, just after McCoy and Schiff watch a tv interview with Summers, we learn that she had been executed days before.
The episode is mainly notable for the extraordinary performance of the actress playing Monica Summers. Although it's a little over the top, she still must show wide range as she goes from a seemingly innocent bystander to an enraged killer to a born-again Christian. It so happens the actress is Isabel Gillies, who went on to play Stabler on Law & Order: SVU. Since this episode was filmed one year before she started on SVU, it would appear that this role impressed the producers of SVU quite a bit.
Briscoe and Green first suspect a small-time drug dealer who was in the prison at the same time, who happened to have also been injured during the incident but was released. They investigate him vigorously, and when they finally track him down, Green and Briscoe rush in on him and another gang member in the back of a restaurant when Green recognizes the other gang member: it's one of his old colleagues from the gang unit, who addresses him as "Detective Green," a gesture that implies that the gang member they were after, who is standing right there, is also a detective. Time to find a new suspect!
Eventually, they come up with the idea that one of the prison's corrections officers was involved. There were some inconsistencies in his statement to the police, and Carmichael eventually is granted access to his personnel file where she uncovers some other interesting data. The scene in which she retrieves and photocopies his file is funny because the corrections dept. was very reluctant to turn it over, and she is surrounded by a bunch of stony-faced corrections officers as she makes her copies. By analyzing the officer's file and that of the victim, they learn that the victim had previously raped a female officer who happens to be...the correction officer's girlfriend. There's your motive.
The investigate the officer, but none of the other officers will testify against him. One of them even confront McCoy at the trial in the elevator, and looks like he is about to spit in his face. McCoy does, however, get the girlfriend to testify about the rape. Shortly before the trial ends, McCoy tells Schiff he thinks he's beat. Spoiler: the verdict, not guilty, confirms his suspicion.
This episode is fairly conventional, but still interesting. Notable, mostly, I guess, because McCoy loses the case. The episode's title refers perhaps to the standoff between the officer and the inmate, and also between the DA's office and the department of corrections.
One interesting casting note: Donna Hanover, Rudy Giuliani's ex-wife, plays the judge. She has appeared on the show many times as the same character.
Don't forget that Mayor Giuliani once appeared in an episode, too, to welcome DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest).
Update: This NY Post article discusses what happened the day of the shoot. They don't know when the episode will air yet.
