The Ledger

9.17 Shield

In this episode (9.17), a relationship between two cops leads to the murder of one of them. After much investigation, it appears a protective and vengeful partner is to blame. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, McCoy and Carmichael prosecute.

The episode begins with a cop inside a deli, picking up some snacks. He walks back out to his car and finds his partner, dead, weapon still holstered. The two were involved in a stakeout of a con named Jerry Mays, and were waiting at his girlfriend's apartment for him. A homeless witness to the crime says he saw someone running away. Briscoe and Curtis raid the girlfriend's apartment. Mays is not there, and he is their chief suspect.

They talk to the girlfriend, Lois Hennick, but she doesn't have much info. They talk to his brother, a dry cleaner, who lent him his car, and find someone who sold a fake if to Mays. The ID used the name "Mark Wainwright." They track down Mays at LaGuardia and arrest him (off-camera). He's innocent, but says he saw the murder. Van Buren says the victim, Officer Pelham, knew his attacker. They canvas nearby hotels and a guard there says someone has been coming around there frequently, and he describes Pelham's partner, Peter. The detectives begin to think this is how the killer knew where to find Pelham: his partner was meeting his wife at the hotel, the wife told someone, and word got around, etc.

They talk to the victim's parents to disocer a motive. They say he has a girlfriend, Marissa Hastings, who is alo a cop. They talk to Hastings who is defensive and has a weak alibi. They talk to her ex-partner, Nash, at the 31st precinct, and learn that Hastings kept tabs on Pelham, often calling in to see where was. Hastings begins to look like a suspect, especially when they learn she made a credit card inquiry on Pelham's partner, to see when he was at the hotel. They arrest Hastings (19').

Internal Affairs (IAB) meets with McCoy and Carmichael to discuss the case. They say they've learned Hastings might have a "problem with men." AC talks to Hastings partner, who reveals that he and another cop brought Pelham to the hospital one time for a stab wound on his back, apparently inflicted by Hastings. The cops say they were covering for their abusive relationship.

Hastings' lady friend on the force says that Pelham beat her. They go out to Rikers to talk things over, and she tells the ADAs that IAB ignored her calls about Pelham's abuse. Skoda interviews her and learns that Pelham once pushed Hastings down some stairs.

At trial (40'), Hastings testifies. Skoda arrives in the middle of her testimony. She describes the first time she was beaten, and again says her complaints were ignored. During this, there are many reaction shots of Skoda, so you know he's going to offer an opinion later. He tells McCoy and AC that Hastings is innocent, because Hastings said she felt "sooner or later" Pelham would kill her, but abused women who kill their husbands/partners only do so when they feel their own death is imminent.

They talk to her partner, Felton, who becomes the new suspect. Felton's wife suspects that Felton may have been having an affair with Hastings. He also doesn't have an alibi. They bring everybody together in the Family Conference Room, and Felton gets sandbagged by McCoy and confesses, so that he doesn't send Hastings to jail. He allocutes and is sentenced to 15-Life. Carmichael says, "After 6 years, I still don't know what cops are about."

Character background: During the "problem with men" conversation, Carmichael reveals she was on the track team at University of Texas.

5.19 Cruel and Unusual

In this episode (5.19), a mentally disturbed boy dies while wrestling with Mike Logan in a jail cell at the precinct, and the investigation into the boy's life leads to a controversial treatment at a psychiatric facility. Eventually, the director of the facility is charged by McCoy and Kincaid for some highly unorthodox techniques that may have led to the boy's death.

The episode begins with a young couple walking down the street, and an obviously disturbed young man walks by them, saying, "What time? What time?" repeatedly. Police take him into custody and bring him to Logan and Briscoe's precinct, where he starts going crazy in the jail cell. Logan rushes in to restrain the kid, and he suddenly dies in his arms.

Logan is investigated by Internal Affairs (called "IAD" here, but usually is called "IAB"), and Van Buren takes him off rotation. Profaci takes a more prominent role than usual here, and the ME talks to him and Briscoe about the death. She says the boy suffered a stroke, but he also had bruises on his body and had been tied down somewhere. Logan and Briscoe go through the boys stuff and find a movie stub and 300 pennies. They track down the manager of the movie theater who has the kid's coat, which contains schedules for various forms of transit. They check missing persons reports, and eventually ID the victim as Kevin Jeffries, an autistic boy.

They talk to his family who says Kevin was living at a place calle the Behavioral Control Clinic, because he used to hurt himself. The clinic is directed by a Dr Colter.

They visit the clinic and learn that Kevin wore a helmet there to keep him from hurting himself. They talk to orderlies who say they often strapped him to a board. They visit the day room of the clinic, and there's all kinds of erratically-behaving kids in there.

Van Buren says that the boy was also receiving electric shocks. They reinterview Dr Colter, who tells them they used shock treatment on the kid to correct his behavior. Colter shows Logan how the device works, and in a funny but foreboding bit, shocks him with the device, which provoke a strong reaction from Logan.

They check in on Colter's clinic at the NYC Dept of Health, where they learn Colter gets a grant from the city of $175,000 for EACH of 83 kids. They also learn that the doc has to apply for permission whenever he wants to increase the amount of voltage he shocks the kid with. He claims that they only shock the patients on the forearm and thigh, but the kid had marks on his body from being shocked all over.

They check with the parents of other patients to learn of any complaints. They learn from angry parents of a device called "the buzz box," a tight fitting red helmet that delivers electric shocks. They learn that one patient had to wear this device for three straight days, and it left marks on the neck similar to those found on Kevin. The "buzz box" may have constricted blood flow to his brain, which would have caused his stroke.

They execute a warrant to find the buzz box, and they walk in on a treatment room where a young orderly is repeatedly zapping another kid. It seems pretty brutal. They arrest the orderly, Joe Garvey, for assault. He is interrogated by the DAs, and gives up enough information to warrant an arrest of Colter.

Colter is represented by recurring character Norman Rothernberg. Judge River, also a recurring character, seems to be swayed by everyone's opinion, but eventually concludes that the parents OK'd the frequent shock treatment. The judge and McCoy squabble over this in a scene marked by some silly acting. The judge frees Colter.

The central issue of the episode then becomes locating the buzz box, and proving that it was used. They talk to an occupational therapist who testifies for the plaintiffs, and to another ex-assistant, Mr Randazzo, who says he saw Kevin wearing the buzz box. They re-arrest Colter (39').

They try to talk to Kevin's roommate, who is mute, to determine whether Kevin wore the buzz box. Predictably, it doesn't go very well, until they use some kind of "facilitated communication" technique where his mom guides his answers by guiding his hand on a keyboard. So McCoy asks him questions and his mom guides his wrist as he types responses. The scene is extremely silly and reminiscent of a similar scene in an awful episode of Criminal Intent where they talk to a woman in a vegetative state in a similar manner. Anyway, he taps out his answers, and mentions that the helmet was red, a clue that no one seems to notice. Olivet indicates that the mom was guiding the son's responses. McCoy tests the credibility of facilitated communication by showing Kevin a picture and having the mom attempt to use the facilitation to describe it, which, of course, fails. Why an assistant district attorney of NYC was able to devise a better method to test this system than the actual doctors who invented it were is beyond me, but whatever.

McCoy finally realizes the significance of the clue of the red helmet, and the roommate's mom finally admits she saw the buzz box on her son, which wasn't supposed to have been used after a certain date. They meet with Colter to make a deal, and he and McCoy have an argument, but he pleads guilty and gets 2-6 years, and the clinic is closed. This angers the roommate's mom, because she know has this very mentally sick son who she can't deal with at home.

3.16 Jurisdiction

In this episode (3.16), some nursing students are brutally attacked in their dormitory, and a man with mild mental retardation eventually is arrested and confesses to the crime. Not everyone is convinced he's guilty, though, and soon enough the Manhattan DAs office gets into a big fight with Brooklyn for jurisdiction over the case.

The episode begins with two nursing students opening the door to a dorm apartment, and finding two badly injured nurses inside, one of whom is dead. They've been stabbed and one of them is missing a finger. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and Robinette and Stone prosecute.

Briscoe and Logan interview the other nurses, and mention Richard Speck, who killed 8 nurses in real life. They find a bloody footprint, and trace the killer's steps to a door to the building which he apparently propped open with a block of wood. Cragen comes down to the scene, Hudson Presbyterian Hospital, to have a look around, too. They talk to the hospital security chief (played by the same actor who would later play Lt. Van Buren's husband, I think), and he says he saw a guy lurking around a few days ago.

The surviving nurse, Aloma, regains consciousness and they talk to her in the hospital. She describes a previous incident in which she was nearly attacked. She used to work at a methadone clinic in Brooklyn, so perhaps there's a connection there. Briscoe mentions a nurse was stabbed in Brooklyn a month ago.

They head out to Brooklyn and interview a Detective Torelli (played by Dan Hedaya), who was working that case. Logan checks on the methadone program's dropouts, and comes up with a few suspects, who they talk to. One of them is played by Paul McCrane, the guy who went on to appear on ER as Robert Romano and on the X-Files as Leonard Betts, the guy who ate people's cancer cells. They hear from Brooklyn that Torelli has picked up a suspect and gotten a confession. The suspect is named Davey, and it's clear that he has a very low IQ. They bring him (improbably) to Aloma's hospital bed, where they shine a lamp in his face so he can't see her and she says she's not sure whether that's him or not. Why not just use a photo array, guys? Anyway, after some hesitation, she changes her mind and says she is sure that's him, after all.

They are suspicious as to whether Davey is actually the perpetrator, so they take him to the crime scene, where he walks them through it and gives them all kinds of details, including the block of wood trick. However, when they offer him a candy bar, he says he doesn't eat them because they're bad for his teeth. But when they initially scoured the crime scene, they found a candy bar rapper and conluded the killer consumed it while waiting for nurses to enter the building. While he's at the crime scene, some nurses walk out, and Davey freaks out and starts yelling.

They check his prior arrest record, and there is some evidence he may have been involved in a sexual assault a long time ago. He also is in possession of a homicide detective textbook that shows a fascination with police work. Briscoe believes Davey is guilty, but Logan doesn't. They find a knife that has blood on it, but they haven't matched that blood to the victims yet.

Davey is arraigned, and his lawyer is recurring character Shambala Green. Olivet examines Davey, who says he went to law school, which isn't true. Davey's IQ is 78, but he wants to appear much smarter. Olivet says he's competent to stand trial.

Davey's confession to Torelli is suppressed, as are his other statements. Schiff is mad at Brooklyn for screwing up their interrogation of him. Stone learns that both nurses were drug users. Aloma tells Robinette that she stole drugs from the hospital and dealt them on the street. This leads to a guy named Marty, who says someone else is responsible, and this someone else has the finger cut from the victim and the cameo ring that was on it. They also learn that Torelli arrested Davey years ago. It begins to look like Torelli is framing Davey. Stone confronts Davey and the Brooklyn DA, Frank Lazar. Lazar says he's bringing Davey to trial in Brooklyn anyway.

Stone is subpoenaed to testify on behalf of Davey at his trial. Lazard cross examines him. Davey is convicted of the nurse attack in Brooklyn, but Stone wants to get to the bottom of the case. To do that, he needs Marty's cooperation, but he's unwilling to give it unless Stone can help him with his current drug charges.

Stone convinces a special narcotics prosecutor to take over the charges against Marty and make a deal with him. Marty IDs the killer as James Lee Pawl, aka Jimmy. Lazar is pissed because his office has already convicted someone of these murders, and he doesn't like Stone arranged for his cases to be poached. The detectives catch up with Pawl: It's Leonard Betts from the X-Files! They had the right guy to begin with. They search him and find lots of evidence.

Then the truth starts coming out: Torelli told Davey to say he killed the nurses. Briscoe, Logan, and IAB show up in Brooklyn and arrest Torelli.

In the epilogue, we learn that Lazar has left for private practice, and Davey remains in jail.

A small bit of character background: Logan mentions he has a niece who is retarded.

Casting notes: Davey played by Michael Badalucco of The Practice, who also appeared as Natalie Portman's father in The Professional. He also played serial killer David Berkowitz in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. Det. Torelli is played by Dan Hedaya, who played Carla's husband, Nick Tortelli, on Cheers, (and on a Cheers spin-off called "The Torelli's" that didn't last very long).

3.11 Extended Family

In this episode (3.11), a toddler girl is kidnapped, and her wealthy father, a Broadway producer, quickly becomes a suspect. But the investigation soon focuses on the girl's mother, who may have kidnapped the girl because she thought her daughter was the victim of sexual abuse. A prominent child psychologist may have gone too far in eliciting the girl's tales of abuse, however, and by the end of the episode, the truth of the situation is murky at best. Briscoe anf Logan do as well as they can on the investigation, and Stone and Robinette are left to make sense of it all.

The episode begins with a young girl, about 5 or 6, walking with a woman who seems to be her mother at the mall. She is clutching a teddy bear. The woman stops at a cosmetics counter, and when she looks down to spot the girl, she is nowhere to be found. She panis, and calls out "Samantha! Samantha!" but the girl cannot be located. Briscoe and Logan respond to the call (an unusual one for them), and we learn that the woman is actually the girl's nanny. The girl's father, Gary Silver, a Broadway producer, arrives and is extremely angry with the nanny.

The detectives review a security videotape from the mall and see a toy store employee speaking to her. They track down the employee, Mr Zorn, who has a a record of sexual abuse. They visit his apartment, and find a doll in a shoe box. They visit him at his place of work, a chocolate factory, and bring him in for interrogation. He says the kidnapped girl was admiring a gorilla in the window, and he was talking to her about it. They learn that the girl left via the store's loading dock with the gorilla, in the company of another person, and they got into a Lincoln car. They find a man, Mr Fisher, who got a parking ticket there at that time and he drives a Lincoln. They bust into his apartment, and find the gorilla and a little girl. The problem is, it's the wrong little girl. It's Mr Fisher's daughter. However, they learn from Profaci that Mrs Fisher has a criminal record for protesting on behalf of children. They track her to the Children's Defense Fund (or some similar organization) which gives a lot of money to a woman named Ramona Stark. They trace Stark to a town house. When they reach the house, they hear the sound of children coming from the basement. They break in and find a bunch of kids in the basement, along with Stark, Samantha, and Samantha's natural mother. It turns out that Stark was co-ordinating some kind of "underground railroad" for abused women and children. They arrest Stark.

Robinette examines Stark's background and learns she is an advocate for children who claim abuse. He also learns that sometimes it seems like Stark's testimony about abuse is improperly elicited and used as a weapon in custody battles. Olivet examines Samantha to determine whether she has been abused by her father. She draws pictures of her family, and she portrays her father as very large and angry. Olivet says the girl's statements and behavior are inconclusive. The girl is not "intact" and suffers some scarring, but apparently that evidence (which is never really explained) is inconclusive, too.

They talk to Silver's adult daughter, who indirectly suggests she was abused. Schiff advises Stone to seek a plea deal for Sex Abuse 2. Silver refuses the deal, and the case against him is weak. They review a tape of Stark interviewing the girl, and she says her father abused her. Unfortunately for Stone, this tape is not allowed at trial: the girl must testify herself.

So Silver goes to trial for Sex Abuse I. At trial (49'), the daughter testifies in chambers. She is nervous during her testimony and appears confused. "I don't know what I'm supposed to say," she says. And then when asked if her father did anything inappropriate, she replies, "Ramona [Stark] said it was bad." It sure looks like Stark coached her testimony. Mrs Silver wants to take Samantha to France, but she doesn't have custody of the child. When the verdict comes back and Silver is found not guilty, we learn that Mrs Silver has abducted her daughter and fled.

5.22 Switch

In this episode (5.22), a woman with multiple-personality disorder kills a psychiatrist in a hospital office. The question is, Which personality killed her. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and McCoy and Kincaid figure out how to prosecute the deeply disturbed murderer, after first considering her father as a suspect.

The episode begins with two janitors walking down a hospital hallway. One janitor is instructing the new janitor about what found object can be kept by them. They then discover a psychiatrist, Lillian Hampton, dead in her office. Briscoe and Logan arrive to investigate, and note that she wacked over the head with a trophy.

They talk to her boss, who says he overheard the victim arguing with someone that night. Her last appointment was with a woman named Megan Nelson, whom they interview. Megan is mousy and polite. They talk to another witness who says he saw a man at the scene in a green Jaguar. This leads them from a parking attendant to the vic's ex-husband. Furthermore, prints in her office point to two felons, one of whom is a crazy guy with a strange relationship with his cat. He says he doesn't like the victim, but he didn't kill her. They listen to the victim's voicemail, which leads them to a gym, and the gym has the same name as one found on a gym bag at teh scene. They visit the apartment of the person who owns the bag, Bobby Walker. But guess who answers the door! It's Megan Nelson! She reluctantly explains that Bobby is one of her personalities. During interrogation, she reveals she has three personalities.

Briscoe and Logan talk to Olivet about multiple personality disorder. They search her apartment, and find computer files and a diary that seem relevant. They also talk to her superintendent who says that her father harassed Megan. They talk to the father, who had a restraining order filed on him by Megan. He admits he was at the appointment with the victim and his daughter.

They do a voice-lineup with the father to see if he was the one the vic's boss overheard arguing. The line-up confirms it was the father, a search of his apartment turns up blood matching the victim's, and he's arrested (28').

McCoy and Kincaid talk to Megan re her alibi. They talk to her previous therapist, Dr Coleman, who suggests that problems with her father was the reason for her many sessions with him. They eventually conclude that Megan was somehow involved in the murder, since she was present. They charge her with conspiracy to commit murder. They want to open her medical records to figure out what was going on with her father, but they can't until she files an insanity defense, which forces her records open.

Olivet examines the records and determines that Megan has some kind of traumatic memory that was close to being revealed before she stopped her treatment with Dr Coleman, and before Dr Hampton, the victim, was killed. Records suggest that Megan's mother's death may have been caused by her father, and Megan may have witnessed it.

McCoy meets with Megan to pressure her to testify against her father, which she is reluctant to do. As he increases the pressure, she predictably switches personalities and re-emerges as Bobby, the masculine, protective, cocky personality. "He" confesses to killing the doctor. But Olivet points out that the male personality of female patients tends to be protective, so perhaps "Bobby" was just covering for Megan. There is a motion hearing to determine whether Megan is competent to testify on her own behalf. As part of this proceeding, a doctor forces Megan to switch personalities on the stand, and her testimony makes McCoy think that she's responsible for the killing. He accuses her and, predictably again, she switches to her third personality, "Nancy," who confesses to the murder. A plea deal is arranged (off camera), and she's hospitalized.

Wow, so it only took 5 seasons for L&O to do a multiple personality episode? These things are the same every time, practically a genre unto themselves, so I guess L&O did a decent job with it. Strangely, this episode was written by a woman named Sybil, which is funny, since "Sybil" is the name of a well-known TV movie and book about a woman with multiple personality disorder.

7.7 Deadbeat

Jerry Stiller guest-stars as a defense attorney in this episode (7.7) in which a man is apparently killed by his ex-wife's aging father because of the victim's refusal to pay child support, but the truth appears to be slightly more complicated than that. Briscoe and Curtis investigate and McCoy and Ross prosecute.

The episode begins with two kid and his tourist parents in a hotel, and the kid discovers a body in the hallway. Briscoe and Curtis responds, and talk to two old ladies who think they saw the shooter. The victim is an Arizona resident named Michael Malone.

While they're investigating the crime scene, the phone in Malone's hotel room rings. One of the dets answers it, and invites the caller up. They wait outside the elevator, and two men arrive. The two are James and Peter Pogosian, and they are sleazy used car dealers who we quickly learn are known for selling stolen vehicles. They were apparently there to make a deal with Malone on some stolen cars, and they are armed. They check Malone's phone records, and then check out the local liquor stores to see if anyone saw him with anyone else. They talk to a hooker there, and then to his girlfriend, Victoria Lewis, who they learn about via (I think) payphone records.

They meet Victoria at the airport, where she tells them that Mike was an FBI informant and a CIA agent. It is clear to the detectives that Malone gave her this false information: in fact he was a bit of a conman and a fence for stolen goods. They also learn that Malone is also known as Michael Weber, and he is wanted for failing to pay child support and alimony. The child he was supposed to be supporting is in the hospital with cancer.

They talk to his ex-wife's father, an old guy who drives a delivery truck from a linen/laundry company. His ex-wife becomes a suspect, but soon the focus shifts back to her father. Jerry Stiller plays the father's attorney, but he's not a criminal attorney, and it's clear immediately that he's in over his head. The father argues that he encountered Malone by coincidence, they got into an argument, and he killed him in self-defense. It later turns out that the used car salesmen, the Pogosians, had notified a middle man private investigator that Malone was in town, and the PI told the father. Then, the investigators learn through blood tests, that Malone wasn't even the father of the young boy, and if this fact was known, the mother's years-long mission to wrangle support payments from her ex-husband would be for nothing. Apparently, she couldn't deal with this, and this led to her ex's murder.

The episode is notable in part because of Stiller's appearance, and also because it's one of a handful of episodes in which two future members of the cast of The Sopranos appear. Vincent Pastore (Big Pussy on The Sopranos) appears as one of the used car dealers, and Sharon Angela (Rosalie Aprile on The Sopranos) plays the hooker they encounter in the liquor store. You can see more members of the Sopranos appearing on L&O in this screenshot gallery.

14.10 Ill-Conceived

In this episode (14.10), a garment factory owner is killed in his office. The paternity of one of his worker's baby appears to be a motive in his death, as those closest to him seem to turn against him. Briscoe and Green uncover as much as they can, and McCoy and Southerlyn figure it all out in the end.

The episode begins with some cleaning ladies working in the garment factory. They come across the badly beaten body of the plant's owner, Arnold Zachary. He is found with cooking flour on his jacket, and there is an unclear videotape of someone entering the building.

They talk to his workers, who say he was nice. They also meet his wife, 26, who is a little stuck up. They view the security tape, but can't make out a clear image of the person. The forensics lab works with the tape and they notice a logo that says "BB" on his hat, which leads them to a chain called "Bagel Baker."

They enter Bagel Baker and find their suspect: Migues Camacho. He runs, and the Ed Green Five-Second Foot Chase™ that follows is actually one of the longest in history: Camacho runs for a full 20 seconds before Green catches him. (13')

But Camacho has an alibi, which holds up. They talk to Camacho's wife, Maria, who had a close relationship with the victim, and perhaps they were having an affair: they note that Maria's baby, present during the interview, has blue eyes. The baby also drooled on Green while he was holding it, so he got a DNA sample. They walk down the street and discuss the case. (Cafe La Palette is visible in the background, so they're down on MacDougal Street.) They learn from forensics that Zachary is the father of the baby! Hm. Perhaps Camacho killed Zachary because Z. was sleeping with his wife, Maria?

They talk to Maria, who again insists her husband is innocent, as does Camacho. But when they prepare to charge Maria with being an accomplice, Camacho confesses to protect her. Camacho gets himself a shrill and annoying defense attorney, Vanessa Galliano (played by Roma Maffia), who challenges his confession, arguing that he wasn't properly Mirandized because he speaks Spanish. The judge suppresses it. (Later his English turns out to be more than passable, so this makes no sense.) They have to rebuild their case, so Southerlyn reviews the family's financial records. It appears that the victim was paying off Maria, perhaps because Maria was blackmailing Zachary over the affair. Then they learn the secret that explains everything -- or almost everything: Maria was acting as a surrogate mother for Zachary's young wife. Southerlyn presents this idea to McCoy and Branch, who support it.

Miguel is put on trial for Murder 2 (41'). They present the theory that Maria was forced to give up the baby she had for the Zachary's, she didn't want to, so Miguel killed Mr Zachary. The wife testifies that she didn't want to have the baby because she was too vain -- she didn't want to mess up her young figure! She is a real ice queen on the stand, too. And she also makes an error in her testimony that jeopardizes McCoy's case. McCoy confronts her, and they discover that due to some imaginary legal BS, Mrs Zachary will get the baby is Camacho is acquitted. What??? That makes no sense whatsoever. The wife finally shows some emotion and breaks down. Finally, Miguel admits that he killed Zachary and makes a deal for Manslaughter I.

Typical of Season 14's episodes, this one is fairly preposterous at points. The Zachary's are wealthy people, and yet they chose to arrange a surrogate birth under the table with one of their plant workers? They don't want to give up the baby so they have to kill Zachary? Wouldn't the wife just pursue the baby through other means if she really wanted it, etc. Whatever. I wish they would get some decent writers for this show again.

First and Last Episodes

Here are the first and last episodes of various characters that I have documented so far. I will update this post as I am able.

These links are broken right now...sorry. But go to the Notable Episodes category, and you should be able to find them all.

First Episodes

• First Episode Ever. (Greevey/Logan/Cragen/Stone/Brooks/Schiff)
• Paul Sorvino/Phil Cerreta's first episode.
• Jerry Orbach/Lennie Briscoe's first episode.
• Sam Waterston/Jack McCoy's first episode.
• Angie Harmon/Abbie Carmichael's first episode.
• Carey Lowell/Jamie Ross's first episode.
• Benjamin Bratt/Rey Curtis' first episode.
• Dianne Wiest/Nora Lewin's first episode.
• Jesse L. Martin/Ed Green's first episode.
• Fred Thompson/Arthur Branch's first episode.
• Dennis Farina/Joe Fontana's first episode.

Last Episodes

• George Dzundza/Max Greevey's last episode. (A body double appears for him in the next episode, in which he's killed.)
• Paul Sorvino/Phil Cerreta's last episode.
• Richard Brooks/Paul Robinette's last episode. [coming soon]
• Michael Moriarty/Ben Stone's last episode.
• Chris Noth/Mike Logan's last episode.
• Jill Hennessy/Claire Kincaid's last episode.
• Carey Lowell/Jamie Ross's last episode.
• Benjamin Bratt/Rey Curtis's last episode.
• Steven Hill/Adam Schiff's last episode.
• Angie Harmon/Abbie Carmichael's last episode.
• Dianne Wiest/Nora Lewin's last episode.
• Jerry Orbach/Lennie Briscoe's last episode.

5.23 Pride: Mike Logan's Last Episode

In this episode (5.23), a conservative city councilor apparently murders another city councilor, get acquited, and then is punched in the face by Mike Logan during a fracas on the courthouse steps immediately after the trial.

The episode begins with a heated debate at a public meeting. A man is shouting down an official calling for compromise. They seem to be debating gay rights and benefits for domestic partners. The meeting ends, and the man who was shouting exits with another man amidst a bit of commotion. They hear gun shots and run to see what happens: the man he was yelling at, who we learn is a city councilor named Richard Durban, is dead. Witnesses say they saw a man in a green rain coat run off. Briscoe and Logan arrive and are lead to the green raincoat, which has been dumped in a trash can along with the murder weapon.

A member of the NYPD brass tells Van Buren and the detectives he wants this case solved soon. They talk to the victim's co-workers and then to his chief political opponent, Councilor Kevin Crossley. Crossley scoffs at the idea that he murdered Durban, and says he liked him, even if he didn't agree with his politics. They talk to his ex-wife, who suggests he had a younger boyfriend living with him. They go to Durban's apartment (why didn't they go there before?) and can't find the boyfriend, and many things, such as paintings and clothes, are missing. They have to track down this person, who they learn from the super is named Joe. They check his phone records and call the same pager numbers he called, but everytime someone calls back, they hang up as soon as the dets mention Joe Gibbs. Finally, they get lucky, and a kid who is a male prostitute arranges a meeting with Briscoe. They meet at a restaurant, as Logan watches. The kid and Briscoe talk for a minute, close a deal, and Logan moves in. They learn that Joe is staying at a place called the Royale on Lexington, which appears to be a cheap hotel. They bust in on him, guns drawn, and take him into custody. He denies murdering Durban, and there is some tension between him and Logan. Logan calls him "pretty boy," etc. Gibbs says Crossley came to the apartment the night of the murder, but he didn't let him in. Durban was at that meeting at the time. He says Crossley looked angry and stalked off. Gibbs' alibit is a guy named Leo Burnett, with whom he was having an interlude at the time. (It seems that Gibbs is a pimp/hooker and had people in and out of the apartment all the time, without Durban's knowledge, which seems unlikely).

They talk to Burnett who works for the city's transportation department. He nervously confirms Gibbs' alibi, but the detectives are still considering Gibbs a suspect at this time. The coat doesn't fit Gibbs, though, and the hairs found in it are inconsistent with his.

Van Buren shows the detectives a videotape of a heated debate between Crossley and Durban, and Durban says some gay-baiting stuff that is pretty offensive. Perhaps he needs to be looked at more closely. They talk to the Brooklyn Democratic Party leader, who says that Crossley came in due to a conservative sweep the previous year, but due to redistricting, he was likely to be dumped from city council. Durban was semi-responsible for this redistricting, so there's a motive. Then they learn that the gun was reported stolen in Canarsie, Brooklyn in 1985 -- in the same area was Crossley used to be a cop.

They talk to Crossley, and tell him that he busted the guy responsible for stealing the gun, and suggest that he didn't turn it into the evidence room and instead kept it as a "drop piece." (A "drop piece" is a gun that corrupt police officers would carry with them and drop on someone they shot, so they could justify the shooting. See this episode.) Crossley denies all this and is stern with Logan.

Van Buren and the DAs discuss the evidence and strategy. Schiff says he'll arrange to have Crossley turn himself in. He does, and he's represented by recurring character Mr Powell (played by Homicide: Life on the Street's Peter Gerety). Kincaid goes to talk to a gay Republican staffer, who says that Crossley and Durban had a relationship that was mainly for show: they helped each other appeal to the other's constituents.

At Crossley's trial (34'), Powell does a good job and makes Gibbs look like the suspect. During a break, the DAs eat Chinese food and stretegize. Back at trial, Barnett (the closeted gay guy who Logan and Briscoe tried to get to say what time he left Burnett's apartment) testifies that he is unsure of what time he left Gibb's apartment, but he does so only after Powell implies, very indirectly, that he has evidence that Burnett cruised gay strips looking for male prostitutes. Sensing the revelation that Powell is about to make, Burnett backs off his assertion he left Gibb after 10 pm. McCoy realizes what Powell did to Burnett, and berates him outside the courtroom. McC also realizes that Logan and Briscoe must have done the same thing to Burnett, and he calls them in and scolds them, since they're behavior has put the case in jeopardy. They had initially co-erced Burnett by making it look like they were going to tell his wife he was gay if he didn't tell them he couldn't cover for Gibb, who at that time was their suspect. McCoy makes Logan take the stand and explain all this. Logan remains calm despite a difficult cross-examination by Powell, even when Powell implies Logan should be charged with Coercion, a class A misdemeanor.

Crossley testifies on his own behalf, but his gay-baiting commentary is interrupted by the same activist from the episode's opening scene who starts screaming at him. Pandemonium erupts in the courttroom, and Crossley starts yelling about "people like that" and "scum."

Despite all this, closing arguments are made, but after a long time, the jury is unable to reach a verdict and tells the judge they are deadlocked. Crossley is excited, and the camera follows everyone outside the courthouse, where there is more pandemonium, and gay activists are screaming, and people are getting shoved. Logan jumps into the fray and starts pushing back. We see Powell and Crossley's wife enter their car, but can't see Crossley. The shaky camera picks up Logan pushing some people, and then -- apparently -- he comes across Crossley is about to punch him. Unfortunately, my Tivo stopped recording at this exact moment, and so I didn't actually see the punch. However, I know from other reports that this is what happens.

This incident, it seems, leads to Logan's demotion, and we learn in the Law & Order TV movie Exiled that Logan gets re-assigned to walking a beat in Staten Island. Ironically, Crossley had said on the stand that he was considering moving to Staten Island because of all the "scum" in the other boroughs.

The episode is notable, of course, because it is Logan's last. I think Logan is many, many people's favorite or second-favorite detective of all time, so this is a major event for them. I guess those who love Logan also love that he went out by punching an obnoxious city councilor.

This is one of three episodes that I am aware of in which a city councilman is killed. (See also the episodes City Hall and "Silence.") "City Hall" is based on a real-life incident, and this one isn't. In fact, this one greatly pre-dates the incident that "City Hall" is based on, but that incident in some ways closely mirrors this episode: it comes down to a political rivalry.

5.17 Act of God

In this episode (5.17), a young boy is killed when the building he is trespassing in is blown up by dynamite placed by an arsonist. Many people have a motive for destroying the building, and dogged investigation from Briscoe and Logan yield a couple of suspects. Unfortunately, McCoy and Kincaid get the wrong man convicted, and then have to figure out how to prosecute the real perpetrator.

The episode begins with a boy, who looks about 11, throwing a grappling hook up into a building's window. He begins climbing the building, and is not spotted by a man who comes by walking his dog. As the man cleans up after his dog, the building explodes, and we soon learn that the man is ok, the dog has disappeared, and the boy is nearly dead. Briscoe and the FDNY get into a little tiff over the integrity of the scene, but the detectives are soon able to begin their investigation.

Soon afterwards, they are talking to the boy's mother when they learn he has died during surgery. They also learn that the explosion was purposeful and was caused by dynamite strapped to the building support beams, in an apparent attempt to bring down the whole building. They know they're in for a complicated investigation, so they start with the building's owner, who stands to gain $4.8 million in insurance money. However, he explains some rather complicated things indicating why he wouldn't want the building destroyed, and points them to his general contactor, Buzz Palley, who was heading up renovation of the site. Palley says he wouldn't really gain anything from seeing the building destroyed either, and points them to the unions, who have been getting angry with him for failing to hire union workers on his jobs. He also directs them to Calvin Tiller, a black activist who seeks jobs for minorities in the city and who protests outside construction sites. Logan has a face-off with Tiller, who stands his ground, and is more calm when the detectives visit him at his office later. They discount him as a suspect, and take a look at union activists. Everybody keeps mentioning that Palley is confrontational, almost to the point that it seems like he was trying to get himself fired from the job. But why? They talk to his former customer, who says Pally was stealing from him so he could pay for other jobs. The building's owner says that Palley was operating at a loss on the project, but would be let off the hook if the building were destroyed through crime or an "act of God."

Palley is questioned again, and denies he is financial trouble. He says he has a deal big investor, Mr Kee. They talk to Mr Kee, just in from Hong Kong, who says the truth is, he took one look at Palley's financial ledger and decided not to invest. He said he told Palley's "wife" this in a phone message. They talk to the woman at the address Palley gave them, and learn it is not his wife, but his sister. He's been staying with her because he's so poor. He also had no wife. She says he had a new contract that he was getting ready to work on.

They talk to Palley yet again, who says that Kee spoke to his girlfriend, Chris Chappel, whom he described to Kee as his wife. They talk to Chappel, who says she didn't give Palley the message about the non-investment. They learn he was living on the construction site, and so should have been there the night of the explosion. They talk to the bomb squad, who has rendered a basic 3-D computer model of the scene, and it appears like the bomb was designed to make the building fall on top of the trailer Palley was staying in. But the squad examined the trailer and found no personal effects in it. It appears that Palley picked up and left before the bomb went off.

They talk to Palley AGAIN and he has nothing but excuses based on coincidences. He says he was out for a walk when the bomb went off. Kincaid tells them to arrest him. (27') At Riker's, his lawyer tells the ADAs they should question Chappel's husband, a person the cops did not know existed. They assumed she was single. Kincaid goes off to talk to Ms. Chappel, also a construction worker, at a job site, where Kincaid wears a construction helmet that makes her look silly (or cute). She says that Hank, her husband, was out drinking that night, per usual. CK goes down to the bar to check it out, where she is treated with polite bemusement. She learns that everyone at the bar, including Hank, knew about the affair, and he said he was going to kill the guy. CK also learns that Hank is a licensed demolition expert, whose license has been taken away because of drinking on the job. Looks like a suspect! They search his apartment and find bomb-making materials and a gun matching one used to shoot at Palley one night prior to the bombing They arrest him for arson and the murder of the boy. (33')

At trial, Chappel's wife testifies about the affair, and faintly smiles while doing so, which indicates to me that she is quite malicious, since her actual husband is sitting 20 feet away from her, on trial for his life. Briscoe testifies, and is cross-examined about the fact that Palley was such a good suspect, he was arrested. McCoy has to make Briscoe look somewhat incompetent in order to cleanse that idea from the jury's mind, and he says to Briscoe, "So would you say in retrospect that the arrest of Mr Palley was somewhat premature?" To which Briscoe reluctantly answers Yes. Hank Chappel takes the stand and is credible as he asserts his innocence. Nonetheless, he is found guilty of Murder 2 and arson. (44')

Now you know with a verdict coming in at 44 minutes, there are going to be some further plot twists. Briscoe visits McC and CK as they prepare to celebrate and tells them that something has been bothering him: Palley said he went for a walk the night of the explosion, so why did he never return? This is such an obvious point, it is merely a testament to the weakness of the script that no one noticed it previously. McCoy and CK act somewhat alarmed, and this bit seems to suddenly convince them that they've convicted the wrong man, and that Palley is guilty after all, causing Briscoe to offer the rejoinder to McCoy, "Wouldn't you say in retrospect that the prosecution of Mr Chappel was somewhat premature?"

The DAs come up with the theory that Chris Chappel and Palley blew up the building. This seems obvious, but leaves open the question as to why Hank Chappel didn't accuse his wife of the bombing, since all evidence pointed to one of the two of them. They get a wiretap to listen to Chappel and Palley, and hear them talking about the bombing. They question Chappel again to get her nervous, and get a tape of her saying to Palley something like, "What if they find out," and him saying, "They don't know anything," etc. They re both arrested off camera (51'), but a judge suppresses the tape, due to the defense counsels' argument that the fact that another man was already convicted of the crime was not on the warrant application.

That's a serious setback, and Schiff is upset about the way things are going. He says to McCoy, "In the future, if we ever go to trial again, maybe we ought to know what we're doing." He orders McC to get the convicted Hank Chappel set free, but a judge refuses to do so until McCoy shows reversible error in the trial, or gets the others convicted (which he has trouble doing without freeing Chappel first, get it?).

McC comes up with the brilliant idea of changing their theory of the crime, and arguing that they misinterpreted the tape, and what they really "believe" is that Chappel *and* his wife are responsible for the bombing. This makes her seem like an accomplice in the crime her husband has already been convicted of.

They have a big meeting with everyone in the Family Conference Room, and the defense lawyer rightly accuses McCoy of suborning perjury if he gets Hank to testify against his wife. McCoy plays fast and loose with the truth, brings in Hank to cry in his wife's face and swear he'll testify against her, and then Chris Chappel breaks down and rolls on Palley. She makes a deal: Arson 2, Man I, 10 years.

In the epilogue, McC is down on himself for convicting the wrong man, but Schiff perks him up by giving him a funny face and saying it could have been worse: they could have had the death penalty to contend with.

Yes!! Elisabeth Rohm, aka Serena Southerlyn, Leaving Law & Order

I think there will be a lot of happy fans out there: Elisabeth Rohm is leaving L&O midway through next season, to explore other opportunities. No word on a replacement yet, but this means that there will be two major cast changes for the 15th season.

Update: According to Reuters, Rohm is committed to the first 13 episodes of Season 15. The article also reveals/reminds us that Dennis Farina's character will be named Joe Fontana.

L&O Sound Files

I made some MP3s of the Law & Order theme songs. So far I've done::

• Original Series, Season 1
• Original Series, Season 13
• Criminal Intent, Season 3

I also made a couple of the voice-over greetings ("these are their stories...").

I don't watch SVU, so I haven't done those yet, but I will soon.

4.9 Born Bad

In this episode (4.9), a teenager brutally beats to death another teenager, and his murderours tendencies are blamed on a genetic predisposition to violence. Briscoe and Logan investigate the case, and Stone and Kincaid refute the defense counsel's argument.

The episode begins with a priest named Father Jack walking the streets in a seedy part of town (pre-redeveloped Times Square?), handing out fliers for a soup kitchen and trying to get people off the street. He comes across a teenager who isn't moving. He's dead. He's been badly beaten, and has no ID on him, but he's wearing expensive sneakers, so if he's a street kid, he hasn't been out for long.

Briscoe and Logan talk to a couple of hookers at the soup kitchen, one of whom is a transvestite, to see if they saw anything. They theorize the kid may have been prostituting himself, and got roughed up. They want to talk to a pimp named Mr Clyde, and find him in a sex club, where Logan comments some of the kids don't look old enough to be there. Briscoe says, "I'm not old enough to be in here." Mr Clyde, though, is a dead end.

They talk to an Asian female ME, who says there is no evidence of sexual abuse, but he had string beans for dinner. They canvas the schools in the neighborhood to try to ID him. They finally track down a guidance counselor who knew him. His name was Johnny. They talk to his mom's ex-boyfriend, Zach, and Zach's new girlfriend, both of whom are pretty sketchy characters. This leads them to the mom, who was strung out and is now in rehab. They visit her, and she's mad because the state took her son away from her. This leads to a social worker, and then to Johnny's foster mom, Flo Bishop, who has a bunch of foster kids. She points them to Johnny's friends, who say he just disappeared that day. They requestion Zach, who has a solid alibi, but talk to his girlfriend and learn that Johnny had stopped by the apartment and tried to rob it (for a second time) but was thwarted by new locks. Zach, she says, was unaware of this, but she saw him runaway from the scene, along with his friends. Her friends were lying.

They check out the friends, one of whom, Chris, has a criminal record. They take Chris in for questioning, and he's a cocky son-of-a-gun. During interrogation, he turns to Briscoe and says, "Yo Brill Cream, why don't you and Captain America [Logan] go blow it out your butt." Nice.

Van Buren works on the other friend, and gets him to roll on Chris. He says Chris and the victim fought.

Chris gets represented by recurring character Helen Brolin [pic]. Kincaid investigates Chris's past, and learns that his mom pimped him to men. Kincaid talks to Chris's mom, who is pregnant and is smoking and drinking while talking to Kincaid, which earns Kincaid's disdain.

The prosecutors discuss Chris's childhood problems and figure out what to do. Schiff tells them to get the kid's childhood record opened. Kincaid sweet talks a family court lawyer who is apparently an old friend, and learns that family court will open previous cases to determine whether the current case should also be held in family court.

During the hearing to determine whether he should be tried as a juvenile, Chris talks to the judge about the fight, and says he doesn't remember it: he was in a blind rage. Stone discusses a violent incidenct Chris had at Spofford, where he attacked someone in the caferia. He was at Spofford to begin with because of an armed robbery, during which he shot a store owner with a .22. All this leads to a decision to try him as an adult.

Brolin launches a mental defent case, saying that Chris is genetically predisposed to violence because he has an XYY chromosome, which some scientists supposedly believe leads him prone to violence. (They mention in passing Richard Speck tried this defense, but it turned out he didn't have the XYY chromosome.) The judge allows it.

Chris talks to Olivet and expresses anger as a response when provoked. Olivet tells the DAs that the chromosome argument is fake and not scientifically established. Schiff tells the ADAs that the "White America Caucus" is using the case to show that genetic "inferiorities" lead to problems.

At trial, Chris's mom testifies about how violent her son was and what a bad mom she was. Brolin and Stone meet at a bar to discuss a deal. They meet with Chris, whose very angry and doesn't want a deal: he just wants to go to jail because he feels like his life is already wasted. He's listened to the testimony at trial, and determined his future is worthless. "I'm screw up," he says. "I want to go to jail...I'm a freak." Stone resists, but Schiff tells him, as ever, to take the plea and move on, which he does. Chris allocutes.

7.6 Double Blind

In this episode (7.6), a young man on an experimental schizophrenia treatment slays a janitor from the building where he works. After Briscoe and Curtis solve the murder, McCoy goes after the psychiatrist who is treating the killer.

The episode begins with a janitor and a locksmith approaching a door that has been glued shut, They open the door and enter the apartment: the lights don't work, and there is blood spattered on the wall and everywhere else. The victim is Mr Frank, a dead janitor. He's been shot multiple times. Curtis uses his crime scene investigation skills and conclude that the killer used a pillow to muffle the sound of the shot, and killed the victim on a drop cloth, which he took wit him to minimize evidence. Looks like a professional hit, but who would want to kill a janitor?

They talk to the victim's boss, who says the victim worked, among other places, at a dental office where the dentists made porn films after hours. That turns out to be a dead end, though. They check in with OCCB to see if they have a record of a hitman who used a similar MO. They find someone, but he was convicted in the 1950s. They go talk to this old hitman (fun!), and he says that the writer's of an assassin's technical manual published all his secrets in their book, without giving him credit for developing them. It appears this is where the killer got the ideas from.

They visit the publisher of the book, and attempt to get the company's mailing list. The head of the company is racist towards Curtis. They won't give up the list, but Ross threatens them with criminal facilitation, and they get the list.

They learn that the victim got the book himself at Hudson University, or at least that it was stolen from a box in the mailroom that he had access to. They track down a kid who had access to the mail room (to steal the book) and to the chemistry lab (mercury was used in the commission of the crime). This leads to Alan Sawyer, a history major, who spends time in the chem lab. He is a fast and nervous talker. The lab where he works studies psychotropic drugs.

This leads to the head of the lab, Dr Varick, who tells them Sawyer is unstable. They bring Sawyer in for questioning, and he is brassier than expected, though still superficially polite. As they late out their case for him, explaining that the technique used in the killing points to him since he had the manual and there was little left behind at the crime scene, he retorts, "I'm guilty because you don't have any evidence?" They find mercury missing from thermostats in the lab, and arrest him (27'). As they do so, he insists on speaking to his parents, which they don't allow, because he's over 18.

He confesses, but the detectives forget something he mentioned in passing during a previous interview: his dad is an attorney. His request to talk to his parents, therefore, constituted a request to have an attorney. There's another problem: during his confession, he says that the victim, Mr Frank, was 600 years old. The pope told him so.

Varick says he was treating Sawyer as a schizophrenic, but he's been asymptomatic since taking an experimental medication, T-489.

The confession gets suppressed, and the charges are dismissed. They have to rebuild the case. Ross reports that Sawyer's father owns a .32, the same kind of gun used in the crime. They visit Baltimore (no "Homicide" cross-over, though), and talk to his parents, who says he's crazy. They want to commit him. They have a hearing in a Bellevue hearing room on whether to commit him. Judge Rebecca Steinman, a recurring character, hears the motion. He doesn't get committed, because Varick's research assistant says he's ok on the meds.

Ross and McCoy meet a restaurant, and discuss the fact that a previous Varick patient died. They talk to the research assistant, Ms Perry. McCoy believes Varick is fudging his resource data and says Perry is being set up by Varick. She admits she told Varick that Sawyer was relapsing, and the medication wasn't working. She also said that Sawyer said he was going to kill the victim, and indication that they knew the meds weren't abating his violent behavior.

Sawyer winds up in Bellevue, but McCoy wants to charge Varick with Manslaughter 2. The judge allows it. McCoy learns that Varick didn't perform certain PET scans that were ordered for the research. This shows intent to cover up inadequacies in his research. Ross gets ahold of Sawyer's PET scans, which show brain abnormalities: it turns out he wasn't even schizophrenic. He suffers from a terminal brain tumor that would have been detected in Varick had done what he was supposed to do. Looks like Sawyer will be dead in a year or two. He confronts Varick and calls him a bastard. McCoy tells Varick he's indicting him for Murder 2. But Ross defends Varick for not doing his job, saying, "Everyone cuts corners, Jack." McCoy responds, "Maybe where you come from. I'll check your briefs more carefully from now on."

The title of the episode refers to a kind of experiment, in which neither the researcher nor the patient knows which medication is being used on a particular patient. I guess this figuratively refers to the way in which Varick was "blind" to Sawyer's true condition, but that's only "single" blind. I don't know what the other blind is.

12.3 For Love or Money

In this episode (12.3), a man is killed in a parking lot, and virtually anyone could be responsible. Eventually, it appears that a woman and her daughter are to blame, but even they are not wholly loyal to each other. Briscoe and Green unravel the complicated case, and McCoy and SS use their prosecutorial wiles to find out the truth.

The episode begins with a couple of teenagers walking in a parking lot. It appears that they are stoned. They stumble over a dead guy, and one of them says, "Talk about a total buzz kill." CSU arrives and determines that the man has been shot to death, and has been dead about 3-4 hours. He has many drivers licenses and other forms of ID, with different names on them. Looking around at the parking lot, Briscoe says, "Parking in this city will kill ya."

The victim's name is Ronald Buck. They talk to his parole officer who points them to his sister in Queens, who points them to his place of work, who says he got into a fight on his first day at the job. They visit a bar he was known to frequent, and talk to his bookie, who they think may have been motivated to kill him. Briscoe says, "It's The Sopranos...It makes 'em think they can get away with anything."

They visit OCCB to check out Buck's association with organized crime, and they learn that the Politi and Ribisi families are at war, and Buck might be a casualty. They check in with the head of the Polito family, who is in prison. He says he'll give them some info on the killing if they can arrange for the FBI to back off his son a little. They take him out of the federal prison, and lead him through the crime scene. He points out some things the killer did wrong, but doesn't give them any solid data. Van Buren is mad at them for taking Polito out of federal prison, and they review the evidence they have so far, which isn't much.

They go back to the victim's sister who points them to Estaban Cruz, who once stabbed him, and this leads to a prison log, which reveals the sister's brother visited him 3 times in jail, which leads to a storage locker, which leads to a thief named Paul who is connected to an unsolved murder/robbery of a man named Cobin.

They talk to Cobin's wife and stepdaughter (who seems unnecessarily present during an interview scene). They talk to a detective from the Cobin case, and find a connection between Ronnie Buck's carpet cleaning business and Cobin. The wife denies knowing Buck, but she signed the invoice for his company to provide services to her husband's store. Perhaps she hired Buck to kill her husband, Mr Cobin?

They talk to Buck's partner, Mr Karpinksy. He's at Rikers, and says Buck is in fact a hitman and he killed Cobin, and that he arranged the hit in a parking lot with a lady. A lawyer named Dimmick is the connection between Buck and Corbin's wife.

The ADAs review the evidence with Lewin. They talk to Mr Cobin's first husband, who said she was merciless during their divorce and accused him of abusing their daughter. They search Mrs Cobin's house, and find a stub from the parking lot where Buck was killed. they arrest her for the murder of Buck and her husband. (33')

A judge splits the two cases, and she stands trial for the Buck murder (43'). During the mom's testimony, it appears she is covering for her daughter. Her lawyer, recurring character Mr Axtell, picks up on this. Mrs Cobin rolls on her daughter and says the daughter killed Buck, avenging Mr Cobin's death. The verdict comes back: Mrs Cobin is not guilty of Murder 1.

The daughter hasn't been charged, however, and the closing scene of the episode is the mom and the daughter meeting on a boat, alone. Long time viewers will note that this is quite strange, because on the original series, there is never a scene where one of the main characters -- a detective, lawyer, or psychologist -- is not present. This might be a clue as to what is coming next: the mom admits to her daughter her role in Cobin's death (her daughter slept with Cobin), but they are being tape-recorded from the doc. The daughter set up her mom, whom they re-arrest. (59')

I think this is the 250th L&O episode I have summarized since I began this site in December 2003.

13.14 Star Crossed

In this episode (13.14), a manipulative Latina vamp is behind a dim-witted young man's crime spree, which ends in the death of a car salesman during a carjacking. Briscoe and Green investigate and McCoy and Southerlyn and prosecute the femme fatale.

The episode begins with a couple of cops in a car who see three men running away. They come up on a badly beaten man who is dad. The victim is a middle-aged man named Hal Garber, who is a car salesman at a Manhattan Jaguar dealer. He's discovered in Harlem, a bit out of the way for him.

They visit his work place and find he took a Jaguar out with a man named Mr Martinez, and the Jag has not been returned. They talk to Martines: his license was stolen 3 months ago. It looks like the perpetrator stole the car, and killed Garber.

They get some prints from the car, which match those from the perpetrator of a 2nd Avenue bar robbery a while back. They talk to the bartender, and Detective Spivak, who investigated the robbery. He says the witnesses all reported a "Spanish kid" was responsible for the robbery.

They talk to a witness named Tarlow. He called 911 during the robbery, and says he was hitting on a "Spanish girl" at the bar, who left after the robbery. The detectives suspect this girl might be connected to their unknown suspect. They trace her down: her name is Rosalita, aka Tina. They find her at Max Mara, and she immediately starts flirting with Det. Green. She says she doesn't know anything, but they remain suspicious. They also learn that an art gallery was robbed by the same perpetrator as the other two cases. The painting stolen was worth $80,0000.

Briscoe makes it clear he thinks Tina is an accomplice in the crimes. They talk to her ex-boyfriend, a painter named Manuel Lopez, but he's not a suspect. They learn that she's been walking around with a $20K leather bag that was stolen during delivery to a store. They trace the courier for that package, and it's a young Latino guy named Roberto Delgado. They enter his apartment and find the missing painting and Garber's wallet. Looks like he's the suspect! They track him down at the restaurant where he works and arrest him. (18')

They have Tina in for questioning at the precinct, and she acts like she doesn't know anything. They listen in on her conversation with Delgado, and she tells Delgado not to say anything. Tina comes out, and continues flirting with Green, even touching his hand. Green tells her he wants her. In jail.

Del Gado gets a defense attorney, Mr Conners (played by Peter Gerety, who was "Stu Gharty" on Homicide: Life on the Streets). Delgado refuses to speak at his arraigment. Conners admits that there is plenty of evidence against his client and, true to his reputation, he wants a deal. At the deal meeting, it's clear that Delgado is mentally a little slower than most, and he's still not said a word in the entire episode. Olivet interviews him, and he finally utters his first word: "Tina." Finally, he starts talking. He says he doesn't like doctors, who tried to "fix" him. He says he's known Tina since he was in the second grade.

Olivet says his IQ is around 80, and that Tina pushed him to commit these crimes. McCoy tells Branch he wants to go after Tina as an accomplice. They arrest her (39') for conspiracy to commit murder.

McCoy and Southerlyn question Tina, and she actually starts flirting with McCoy. McCoy meets Conners at a restaurant, and he tries to make a new deal: put Delgado away on Murder 2, as long as Tina isn't charged. That seems strange -- he's making a deal that harms his client.

At his allocution, Delgado says he hid the gun used in the Garber killing at the "restaurant," but they can't find the restaurant where he works. Then SS develops the theory that Tina was in the back seat of the Jaguar, and she killed Garber. They learn that her dad -- who she said owned a restaurant in Midtown -- is actually a dishwasher. Guess what restaurant the gun is hid at? Her dad doesn't like Tina -- so maybe that's why she's always seeking the approval of men. McCoy, in deciding whether to charge Tina as an accomplice, has Olivet watch him as he talk to Tina, and then asks her, "Could she kill?" It is very stupid, because (a) how is Olivet supposed to know, really, and (b) can't everybody kill someone if they're so motivated? Anyway, it turns out the the mushy-spined Conners is being played by Tina, and Delgado says that Conners told him to confess, to protect Tina. She calls Conners "sweetie" as McCoy gets him right where he wants him. Conners is upset because he's "measured [his] life in coffee spoons" and Tina represented his first taste of excitement in a long time. Overwhelmed by McCoy's ability to suppress his human nature in pursuit of justice, he turns to McCoy and asks, "Who are you?", a rare metaphysical moment for the series.

The actress who plays Tina is Vanessa Ferlito, best known perhaps as Claudia on Season 3 of 24, and as Adrianna's friend (also named Tina) on The Sopranos.

11.2 Turnstile Justice

In this episode (11.2), a woman is found dead, lying on a bench on a subway platform. She's been bludgeoned to death. Briscoe and Green's investigation leads to an emotionally disturbed person, but McCoy isn't content to prosecute just him: he goes after the health management organization that released him without medication from Rikers the day before the murder, even though they knew he was crazy and violent.

The episode begins with a woman seeking help from some transit cops in a subway station: she says that a homeless woman is lying on a bench and being eyed by some ruffians. The cops respond, and soon determine the woman is dead. Briscoe and Green arrive to investigate, and learn that the woman has been hit over the head, and has been dead less than two hours. Back at the precinct, they read a report that indicates the murder weapon was a paving stone, present at the crime scene because the area was under construction. They canvas the neighborhood around the station, looking for anyone who can identify the victim based on their photo of her corpse. Their search takes them from the station, to a newspaper stand, to a coffee shop, to a photo processing shop. At the photo shop, they flip through some pictures that haven't been picked up. They belong to a woman named Donatelli, and show her with her kids. They check for Donatelli's in the phone book, and eventually land at the home of a man who says he is her ex-husband. He is extremely distraught to learn of her death. (This becomes important later on.) He says she determined a few years ago that she was gay, and so even though they loved each other, they had to stop living as husband and wife.

At the precinct, Van Buren says the case reminds her of "that Konshalovsky woman" (sp?) from last year. (Apparently, someone else was hit with a brick.) They get a call that Mrs Donnatelli's AmEx card has been used. They review a security tape at the store, so they know what the purchasers -- a couple of teenage girls look like. They get another call: it's been used at a movie theater. They go to the movie theater, and take the two girls in for questioning. One of them rolls on the person who gave them the credit card, the other girl's boyfriend, Trey. They visit Trey at his place of work, and Green intimidates him until he says he bought the card from a "street dude" named Raffi. They track Raffi down at a shelter, and he says he saw the murder take place. He says he saw a guy beat the woman with a rock, and he (Raffi) just stripped the body of its valuables. He says Raffi took the victim's glasses. He describes Raffi as "buggy." They track down reports of EDPs (emotionally disturbed persons) in the area from around the time of the murder, and talk to a couple of beat cops who ran into Raffi pre-murder, but didn't book him. One of the cops says he dropped him off at an SRO (an SRO is like a very crappy, cheap hotel where people live when they don't have a lot of money). They go to the SRO, and find Raffi's room. They enter, and Raffi is ruffling through a pile of papers, and is quite obviously emotionally disturbed. Green makes nice with him, and they take him into custody.

Carmichael comes down to the precinct because Raffi refuses to be fingerprinted. He spazzes on her when she tries to talk to him, and then she calms him down. He wants to go outside. He says he took the victim's glasses because "I couldn't see who was talking to me." You get the impression he means the voices in his head. When AC asks him his name, he pauses and says, "Regis Philbin," prompting Briscoe to ask, "Is that your final answer?" Carmichael says, fine, if you let us fingerprint you, then everybody will know it's true. He apparently agrees, and through the fingerprints they learn his real name is Brian Gallant. Off camera, he confesses to the attack, and to the attack on Konshalavsky, too. The ADAs meet with his defense attorney, and McCoy reluctantly agrees that he can plead to Man I, and they can make proper arrangements for his care.

At his plea hearing, Gallant is under medication, and appears sleepy and dazed. His eyes are three-quarters closed as the judge asks him whether he killed the two women (he says yes) and if he understands the plea deal, which will end in his incarceration for 10-20 years. He says yes, and the judge says that concludes the preceedings. Well, that emotional ex-husband of the victim doesn't like the sound of that: he stands up and tells the judge other people are responsible for the murder of his ex-wife, such as whoever put Gallant back out on the street even though he was crazy. The judge tells him this is neither the time nor the place, and he emotionally replies that if they tell him the time and the place, he will be there. Although I think he over-acted slightly in his first scene, in this one, the actor playing the husband does a good job, and it sort of pays off his emotion from the earlier scene.

The DAs meet, and describe how Gallant was released from Rikers and dropped at a subway station in Queens with a token and a $1.25 and no medication and left to fend for himself. They try to determine whether anyone else shares criminal liability for the death of Donnatelli. They review medical records from Rikers and see that the number of hospital referrals began dropping drastically six months ago -- when a private HMO took over management of the prison's health care system.

They visit the offices of the HMO, SMJ Medical, and talk to the chief executive, who is represented by recurring character Mr Axtel(l). They confirm that Gallant was released with no meds. AC talks to Gallant's medical case officer at the prison, who has a new job now. AC wants to know who authorized Gallant's release. The ADAs talk to a doctor at Rikers, who says he worked with Gallant when he visited Rikers, and says he was threatened by the CEO not to refer patients to the hospital. He says another doctor was fired for continuing to issue referrals.

They arrest the CEO in a meeting (41') and his trial starts immediately. The doctor testifies, as does Gallant, who talks about how his "bad uncle" tells him to do things when he's on drugs, but the bad uncle "stays in Yonkers" when he takes his meds. The CEO testifies and accidentally admits that he occasionally reviewed Gallant's medical records. McCoy takes advantage of this admission, since it shows that the CEO had awareness of the consequences of not having him go to a hospital or be on meds. After some closing statements, the verdict comes back: not guilty on Manslaughter 2, but guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Way to go, McCoy!

In the epilogue, McCoy rather cheesily states that Dateline called and they want to interview her. When AC cheesily asks who's going to interview her, Jane Pauley or Stone Phillips, she says -- in school girl crush sort of way -- Stone Phillips. WHO WRITES THIS CRAP??

Casting note: one of the jurors is played by Lance Reddick [pic], who appears in two other episodes, but with speaking parts: once as a Sierre Leonean soldier, and once as an FBI agent. The actor playing the victim's husband does a decent job, but the best performance in the ep is from Ray Anthony Thomas as the emotionally disturbed Brian Gallant. He appears in a bunch of other L&O eps, but is hardly recognizable here.

The episode's title refers to the term for a justice system that values expediency more than true justice, and also refers to the (approximate) scene of the crime.

8.13 Castoff

In this memorable episode (8.13), an attractive blonde social worker is gunned down outside her place of work. It turns out she was engaged in a kinky sex life that ultimately leads to her death at the hands of a sociopath she was sexually involved with. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and McCoy and Ross prosecute.

The episode begins with some kids miming their basketball moves outside a community center. They say hi to "Ms G.," a woman who walks by them, turns the corner, and is promptly shot. Briscoe and Curtis arrive and the victim is identified as Jennifer Galen, a social worker.

They talk to her rich father, who says he warned his daughter about working uptown, and he thinks the crime is racially motivated, or at least that she was killed by non-white assailant. They learn that Galen had a client, Randy Johnson, who had an unrequited crush on her. He says he was sort of stalking Galen, but he didn't kill her. He says he saw her get into an Audi with an older man. They learn that she did codeine, apparently in the context of sex.

The talk to her father's driver, who says he stopped at the daughter's house on the day of the murder. They confront her father, who admits he went over her apartment to remove embarrassing things like drugs, sex toys, and Polaroids of her doing the nasty. They visit the sex store where some of the items were purchased, to see if they can figure out who her sex partners might be. They learn that one of them is Stu Steiner, a local newscaster. They visit Steiner's apartment and learns he own an Audi. But they also learn something else much more important: he's been murdered, and his corpse is right in front of them, in the bedroom.

They enter Steiner's bedroom and find him, covered in blood, and wearing ladies' underwear, apparently killed in the midst of a kinky sex act, a situation that inspires Briscoe to make the best wisecrack in the history of the show:

Briscoe: "Always wear clean underwear. You never know when you might be in an accident."

They recover a videotape of a threesome involving Steiner, Galen, and an unidentified brunette to be named later. The video forensics team uses trigonometry to determine the location of where the video was shot. They visit the apartment where it must have been shot, and meet Debbie, who is the third person in the video. She says Stu liked other men.

They check the "VICAP" database to see if there were other crimes with a similiar MO, find some from all over the country, and they make a detailed grid on a chalkboard showing all the properties of all the cases. They go through the victims' address books to see if they have anyone in common. This leads to Charles Thatcher. They visit Thatcher's apartment, and he's hiding in his closet, wielding a golf club (I think) and shaking. He's gay, and says he's hiding from Eddie Chandler, who -- based on the other murders -- he believes is coming to kill him, to round out his mu.

Chandler calls Thatcher: he's downstairs and wants to come up. They go down to meet him and arrest him after a brief chase (21'). They find a gun on him, which turns out to be the murder weapon.

During interrogation, he is cocky and flirts with Ross and Curtis. Their case suffers a set back when, rather unbelievably, a judge suppresses the gun. (This is one of the most foolishly written evidence-suppressions ever. Chandler was a suspect at the time they arrested him, and he had his gun on his person. I mean give me a break.) Ross talks to Chandler's ex-lover, who also flirts with Ross and tells her that he's dating someone else, Professor Stevenson of Hudson University. They talk to the professor, who says he let Chandler borrow his car. They check his car, and find female clothes in the trunk, and a brown wig. This explains the mystery brunette seen at one of the crime scenes.

Chandler gets a new lawyer, Mr Pressman, who is supposedly a high-profile attorney at Harvard (but is played by Dennis Boutsikaris, the same guy who plays attorney Al Archer in a million other episodes -- What, they didn't think anyone would notice?).

Chandler talks to McCoy about old movies that were set in NYC, and says this influenced his opinion of the city. They go back to Prof. Stevenson and despite his reluctance, convince him to testify about Chandler's murderous past. This is allowable because of some hearsay rule. They also argue inevitable discovery (leveraging "People vs. Puffin") and get the gun admitted at trial.

At trial (42'), Pressman comes up with a ridiculous and novel defense: prolonged exposure to violent TV programming caused Chandler to kill people. He corners a congressman who opposed violent TV to testify on his client's behalf. The congressman tries to get Schiff to get him out of it somehow, but he can't, and he reluctantly testifies.

McCoy cross-examines Chandler, who eventually admits that TV didn't influence his method of killing people. At a restaurant, McCoy reads Pressman's book, and Pressman enters. Apparently, Pressman's book argues the exact opposite of what he's arguing in court. Doesn't matter: the verdict comes back, and Chandler is guilty of Murder 2.

I believe some elements of this episode are borrowed from the case of Andrew Cunanan, who killed Versace.

13.12 Under God

In this episode (13.12), a priest confesses to the murder of a drug dealer (cutting short Briscoe and Green's investigation), and McCoy and Southerlyn figure out how to prosecute a man who says God made him do it.

The episode begins with an older guy trying to pick up a hooker for "half-and-half." They start doing it, when they look over and see a dead body. Briscoe and Green note that the victim was shot, has a wad of cash on him, and was probably a drug dealer.

They determine the vic's name is Scott Giddens. They try to track down his apartment. They go through some housing projects, and come across an overdosed girl in his apartment. A girl named Gina tells them that a guy had come by earlier looking for Giddens. This man had a big birthmark. They check with a undercover narcotics detective to learn more about Giddens. He says Giddens was involved in selling something called "Yaba" drugs. They learn the guy with the birthmark is named Juan. They talk to Juan who says the locals disliked Giddens, particularly a man named Bill Parker, a member of the neighborhood watch. They talk to the organizer of the neighborhood watch, a priest named Father Hogan, and Briscoe goes to a local bar, where he finds Parker. Parker had a son killed by a drug dealer, so Briscoe connects with him emotionally, since Briscoe himself lost a daughter to a dealer. Briscoe is a little emotional as he talks to him, and says he kicks self for not killing her killer.

AVB scolds Briscoe for using this method to attempt to coerce a confession out of a suspect, and Green scolds him a little, too.

They talk to some kids at a park who saw Parker walking with Father Hogan the night of the murder. They suspect that the murder weapon is a gun that went missing from the Port Authority lock-up of confiscated weapons. Since Parker has access to this area, they search his house, and find it buried behind a wall. They arrest him (21'). Now, we know from experience that anytime a suspect is arrested at 21 minutes into the episode (instead of 31 minutes), there is more to the story.

While they're questioning Parker, Father Hogan enters and confesses to the murder of Giddens. The DA's are skeptical. They talk to Mrs Parker who confirms that the priest killed him. Hogan insists that "killing is not a crime when it's God's will." Olivet examines the priest to determine whether he is competent to stand trial. Hogan tells her God wants us to explore our faith.

McCoy is uncertain how to proceed on such a religiously-charged case. He says "This is our Inherit the Wind," referring to the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial. Southerlyn thinks McCoy is bitter about his Catholic upbringing.

At trial (42'), McCoy says he's upset by anyone who claims to know what got wants. The priest (I think) refers to Exodus 21:12. McCoy is confrontational with the priest, challenging the notion that God told him to kill someone. McCoy says something unintentionally funny when he suggests the God erred in choosing Hogan to kill Giddens: "Well, God screwed the pooch on this one." Whoever wrote that line should be fired.

Parker tries to confess to the crime, but the ruse is a failure, and the priest makes a deal, which is usually how these episodes that really test legal and moral boundaries go: everyone gets all worked up about the giant issues at stake, and then before anyone has to deal with the consequences, the guy pleas out.

Overall, the episode is awkwardly written, and the trial scene is extraordinarily tedious. As far as character background goes, McCoy discusses a childhood friend named Tommy, and he recalls Tommy sustaining severe injuries in Vietnam and refusing to have his soul prepared for death by a priest. Tommy told the priest, "God forgive me if I'm wrong."

Casting note: the priest is played by Denis O'Hare, an actor who has appeared on the show several times, usually in memorable roles.

12.6 Formerly Famous

Gary Busey and Joe Piscopo guest star in this episode (12.6) that is somewhat of a take on the actor Robert Blake's apparent killing of his wife. Briscoe and Green investigate the crime, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute.

The episode begins with Busey's character, Tommy Vega, entering a restaurant, all out of sorts. He says he need help because his wife, Beth Ann, has been shot. Briscoe and Green arrive, and Briscoe says that Vega was a famous singer with a Vegas act (think Tom Jones) until "he took up with a guy named Jack Daniels."

They interview Vega and he says he and his wife had dinner at the restaurant, they walked to the car, and he went back to the restaurant to place a bet with his bookie. When he went back to his wife, she was shot dead. As they talk, in comes Art Cahill (Joe Piscopo), his manager. His sons, Peter and Jason, also arrive. One son, Peter, has already hired an attorney for his father. Van Buren talks to the victim's sister, who says that a divorce had been planned. Green looks at the bet Vega was making, and says it was a sucker's bet. (We know from previous episodes that Green is/was a heavy gambler.)

Vega's attorney, Mr Feldman, begins to play a prominent role in the handling of the case. The detectives run into him at the crime scene, where he's accumulating his own evidence. He tells them for clues to the murder, they should look into Beth Ann's past. They talk to Cahill, who is very close to Vega and his family, and says he's been Vega's manager for 25 years. He says that Beth Ann got pregnant, and Vega married her just so the baby could have a father. Cahill and Green get a call at the same moment: the murder weapon has been found. When they get to where the gun is, Feldman is already holding a small press conference, and he says that the New York Ledger, the tabloid newspaper that is the namesake of this website, received the first call that Feldman's investigators had found the gun. He says of the newspaper, "The Ledger has a track record in the field of investigative journalism." Feldman turns to a journalist after talking to the detectives and says, "What would you like me to say?" It's clear he wants this case tried in the media.

The location of where the gun was found messes up the detectives' theory of the crime: if Vega really was the trigger man, he couldn't have gotten the gun to this far away location in time. They look into Vega's financial records and find that he wrote a check for $60,000 to someone named Rick Jordan. The memo said "re: Beth Ann." They track down Beth Ann's mailbox at a mailbox store, and learn that Cahill has already cleaned it out. Cahill tells them that Beth Ann wrote letters to lonely men all over the country, trying to wrangle money out of them. One such letter points them to Davey Reynolds, a hall of fame pitcher who used to be called "Psycho." They talk to Reynolds at a baseball camp, and he says Beth Ann was like a stalker, but he didn't kill her.

They trace the gun to Dwayne Hawthorne, who they learn is dead. They learn that his grandson works for Cahill, however, and the grandson, Mr Jackson, admits he sold the gun to Cahill. Looks like Cahill is the new suspect.

They take Cahill into custody while he's in the middle of a meeting with "the next N'Sync." Cahill has no alibi, and says the gun was in an unlocked drawer in his office where anybody could've gotten it. His secretary tell them that Cahill paid Beth Ann $750,000.

Beth Ann's attorney seems to have more information than is immediately apparent, and McCoy wants to know what the attorney knows. They file a motion with a judge, who decides partially in McCoy's favor, saying, "I wouldn't be Solomon if I didn't occasionally split the baby." He orders Beth Ann's attorney to break privilege and testify.

A grandy jury is called to seek an indictment against Cahill. At the grand jury, Beth Ann's attorney testifies that Vega paid Beth Ann all that money for custody of their child, but then Cahill testifies the baby wasn't even biologically Vega's. Beth Ann's cell phone records show that Vega's son, Peter, received a call after the murder. All the Vegas get together in the family conference room to talk things over. Back at the grand jury, Vega testifies about his love for his daughter, even though she wasn't really his, and he couldn't imagine parting with her, and Beth Ann used the custody issue to extort things from him. At this point, the episode becomes rather tedious. Eventually, Vega jumps out of the witness box while testifying, and gets all emotional. He pleads to killing his wife.

The episode is notable because of it's two formerly-big-time celebrity guest stars, and because it "rips from the headlines" the story of another washed-up celeb, Robert Blake, who apparently killed his wife under similar circumstances.

4.11 Golden Years

In this episode (4.11), an elderly woman is essentially starved to death by her bitter granddaughter. It takes a while for Briscoe and Logan to figure this out, and Stone and Kincaid work to assemble a prosecution appropriate for the crime.

The episode begins with an elderly woman approaching an apartment door that has been busted open. She calls out "Mildred? Mildred?" (because all old ladies are named Mildred). But Mildred doesn't reply: she is found dead in her ransacked apartment. The Asian male ME tells the detectives their victim is Mildred Bauer, 82. Her daughter-in-law shows up and wonders where the live-in caretaker is. They talk to other maids in the park and learn that Maria Gonzalez has been hanging out with her new boyfriend, Felix Ortega. They track him down and find Maria. Not much help, but Mildred's granddaughter Laura says she fired Maria because Maria has been stealing.

Briscoe wonders how Laura got along with Mildred and says his own dad was hard to handle when he got older, and that he thought Briscoe's mom was poisoning him. The detectives find Mildred's missing candlesticks at Maria's apartment, but she says that Mildred gave them to her. She also says that Laura complained she was feeding her grandmother too much. They think Felix may have killed Mildred but he says he merely broke the door in (the locks were changed), saw Mildred dead, and panicked.

They learn from the ME who tells them she didn't die from injuries sustained during a robbery. Logan says, "She was found dead during a break in....What were we supposed to think?" The ME responds, "She was found dead during the war in Bosnia, too, but that didn't kill her either." Ha! He says what did kill her is that she was starved to death.

They check out Mildred's video will, which leaves her entire estate to charity. They also learn that Laura lied to her grandmother about what she was using grandma's money for. She said she was in law school, but she wasn't. Laura is starting to look like a suspect, especially after they learn the apartment was signed over to Laura, and Laura recently invested $70K in a restaurant. Furthermore, they learn that Laura was in the apartment on Thursday, even though she said the last time she was there was Tuesday. They arrest her outside her church, where she's making funeral arrangements. (29')

Recurring character Danielle Melnick is her defense attorney. Melnick argues Mildred was going to die anyway, but Stone quizzes her about basic law and asks, "If a woman falls off the Empire State Building and is shot on the way down, is the man who shot her guilty?" His answer to his own question: "Yes."

At voir dire (36'), Melnick excludes all the old people, which recurring character Judge Margaret Barry allows. Meanwhile, they learn the INS is trying to deport the maid/caregiver before she can testify. Her lawyer wants Stone to fix her immigration status in exchange for her testimony. He sort of doesm, and she testifies, and they learn that an anonymous call got her fingered by the IND...the LUDs ("local usage details," aka phone records) show that Laura placed the call.

Laura testifies that her grandmother begged her to die. But the maid doesn't corroborate this, so it seems unlikely. Laura brings up her feelings about Catholicism and assisted suicide, which ends up being a major theme for the last quarter of the episode. Schiff gives Stone the OK to make a deal, which he does: she gets 2 years in jail.

8.3 Navy Blues

In this episode (8.3), a female Navy fighter pilot is suspected of killing her married boyfriend, who was under her command on her ship. Briscoe and Curtis get stonewalled by the Navy as they try to investigate her, and McCoy and Ross have trouble getting the jurisdiction and the information they need to prosecute.

The episode begins with two officers responding to an old lady's call for help finding her runaway chihuahua. While searching a wooded area, they come across the body of Robert Stroud, a member of the US Navy. His watch and wallet are missing, but his dogtags identify him. Briscoe and Curtis arrive, and learn that the chihuahua was found and bit one of the officers. They say something about Stroud being "number 5," apparently referring to a serial murderer.

Back at the precinct, they call around to pawn shops to see if any of the merchandise stolen by this suspect has shown up. Apparently, the suspect is a mugger who kills his targets. They get a hit on an item from victim #3. The pawn shop owner, whom Briscoe knows, reviews books of mugshots and identifies Lennie Travers. They assemble a big team and raid Travers apartment. In an extremely rare bit of action for L&O, there is a shoot-out and Travers is killed. All the officers involved celebrate back at the precinct, but it turns out Travers was responsible for only 4 of the murders, not Stroud. Back on the case!

They talk to Stroud's commander on the ship. He says his wife is also in the Navy. They talk to her, and ask whether he was having an affair. Oddly cold, she says she wouldn't know, they should ask someone who is closer to him. They talk to his boss on the ship, a pilot named Lt Blair. She's apparently the poster child for "the new Navy," because she is one of only a handful of pilots cleared for night landings on a carrier. She doesn't give much info, but you get the sense she's hiding something.

Back at the precinct, they talk to Van Buren, who has just learned her son got picked up in Manhattan South for tagging a truck with graffiti. They review Stroud's criminal record and learn he got in a bar fight with his wife a few months ago, and she cracked one of his ribs. They talk to his wife again, who says she saw her husband and Blair all over each other. She says she reported the affair, and the Navy buried evidence of it. Blair says she had another civilian boyfriend. They talk to him, and he says Blair asked him to lie about how long their affair extended. They question Blair again, but a JAG officer comes in to represent her and ends the questioning.

They continue to gather evidence against her. They learn she has a car -- a BMW Z3 -- parked in a midtown garage. They can't search the car, but they can look at it. Curtis notices the tint on one window doesn't match the tint of the other windows. They get the name of the dealer from her license plate frame, and visit. They learn the window had indeed been replaced. They get the bits of shattered glass from the dealer, and take it to the forensics people, who determine that it was shot out, but there is no blood on it. Also, Blair's alibi for the night of the death is not holding up.

McCoy gets an arrest warrant. The dets go down to arrest her (20') but the Navy asserts jurisdiction and doesn't produce Blair. The DAs seek an indictment for Murder 2. They meet with the Navy's prosecution team who says that she has confesses to the affair and the shooting and says it was accidental. She reads this statement to Schiff, McCoy, and Ross, in the presence of the Navy investigators, on the condition that no questions will be asked of her. She says that she broke up with Stroud, he was upset, he tried to rape her at gunpoint, there was a struggle, the gun went off twice, he was killed, and his body rolled down the embankment. As McCoy explains, this doesn't really explain why his watch and wallet were missing. Her lawyer says bums must be responsible for that. After the Navy people leave, Schiff backs McCoy and tells the team to keep investigating.

They talk to a man who saw them in a restaurant who says that it seemed like he was breaking up with her. The man, a restaurant employee, is gay and flirts with Curtis. Curtis responds he's married. They talk to a parking lot employee who says that Stroud, not Blair, drove the car, a fact at odds with Blair's story. They use this info to get an indictment for Murder 2.

They have to win jurisdiction, so they take it to Judge Ari Waxman, a recurring character. He allows McCoy to get jurisdiction. At arraignment, Blair gets herself a civilian attorney, recurring character Ruth Miller (played by Patti LuPone). Miller gets Blair's Navy statement suppressed, since she wasn't properly Mirandized. McCoy, meanwhile, gets upset because he thinks Ross is too "starry eyed" over Blair and her Navy career. Schiff also makes reference to the way "every little girl" esteems Blair as if she were Sally Ride. (This aspect of the script doesn't seem believable.)

Schiff, per usual, tells them "make a deal," and they try: McCoy offers Murder 2, and then Ross, without McCoy's permission, says they might consider Man I, which gets her a stiff look from McCoy. Blair refuses both deals, and McCoy and Ross get in a wicked big fight about Ross's behavior and the case. Schiff walks in on them fighting and says they better stop fighting and get to work on the trial which starts in 11 hours. He tells them to remember it's a trial and not "a debate between George Patton and Gloria Steinem." Heh.

At trial (40'), everybody testifies. At night, Blair goes on a Larry King-like show (the Chuck Baxter Show) with her attorney, and talks about patriotism and being cool under pressure. McCoy gets a gag order, which the trial judge, recurring character Judge McNeil, allows.

They want to get more info about Blair, and they finally get her service record from the military, but her training records are excluded. They talk to a former Navy man who worked with Blair, and he says he had no confidence in her because she was a bad pilot. He turns over an audio tape he made, and this tape will soon be entered at trial.

Back at trial, Blair says she never loses control of her emotions, which prompts McCoy to play the tape, in which she is heard attempting to land an F-14 on a carrier at night. She panics, asks to be diverted to land (instead of sea), and then threatens to tear her trainer "a new one" and calls him a moron. When the tape ends, everybody in the courtroom has an expression like something serious has happened, but I was thinking, SO WHAT? So the woman has a temper? That means she killed her boyfriend? What about EVIDENCE.

Anyway, in light of this evidence, she accepts a plea deal: Man I (just like Ross wanted), 12.5 to 25 years. She allocutes off camera, and she, McCoy, and the Navy prosecutors all have little press gaggles on the steps of the courthouse. Ross tells McCoy she is upset because Blair came out looking bad, and she compares the experience to learning that Amelia Earhardt was not everything she thought she was.

The story of this episode was written by Dick Wolf, and it has the earmarks of a person who hasn't written a script in a while. All the stuff about Blair being the poster child for the Navy and having little girls in America admire her just seems very forced, and her motive for killing Stroud remains unclear, even at the end of the episode.

On character background, we learn that Curtis is married (in case we didn't already know, which we did) and that AVB's son has gotten in trouble for graffiti.

The episode's treatment of Blair -- female pilot gets special treatment even though she's untalented and then sleeps around with inferior crewmen -- smacks a bit of misogyny, a trait Wolf has been accused of before. Also, Ross is portrayed as "starry eyed" about this female hero, and goes around McCoy's back to make a deal, which leads to the big fight. McCoy and Ross always fight. I wish they would stop -- it makes me uncomfortable.

5.21 Purple Heart

In this episode (5.21), a cabbie is found slain outside an Irish bar. It looks like his ambitious wife arranged his murder, and then killed the hitman, too. It takes Briscoe and Logan a while to figure it all out, and even longer for McCoy and Kincaid to determine a motive.

The episode begins with a young couple walking out of a bar, squabbling over the man's apparently crude friends, with whom he grew up. They go to get a gypsy cab, and find the driver shot in the head, dead. Briscoe and Logan arrive to investigate, and discover that he is a veteran of the first Gulf War and earned a Purple Heart.

They talk at the precinct, where they say he is the 43rd cabbie killed in the last 12 months. (That seems awfully high.) They visit his wife, who tells them they needed money. They visit his boss, who tells them the victim needed money. They talk to the bartender at the bar to ask whether he saw anything. They figure that because his keys were in his pocket, he was there to meet someone. The bartender is reluctantly, but then tells them a guy named Steve Breck was there, waiting for someone. They talk to Breck. He's a loan shark, and is non-cooperative at first, but ultimately reveals that the victim, Mr Johnson, owed him $15,000. He says he was at the bar to receive the payment, saw that he was dead, and left. They get a call that somone is trying to use the victim's credit card. They find that a crazy homeless guy was using it buy shoes. He says he saw a big bald guy throw it away, a man with a snake on his shirt. He says he can't remember if the shirt said "Snake" or had a picture of a snake. They search the dumpster (actually, they have a uniform search the dumpster) and find a shirt that has grease, putty, and Johnson's dried blood on it. They conclude the shirt belongs to a plumber, and that the snake on the shirt represented a plumber's snake. They visit a plumbing company called "Snaked City" (a pun on "Naked City," get it?) and talk to the boss who says the guy they're looking for is Charlie Kovak. They search Kovak's apartment -- he's not around -- and find $15,000 hidden in a cereal box in a freezer. They talk to the victim's wife, who they now suspect is somehow involved, or at least knows more than she's saying. They ask her if she knew Kovac and tell her about the $15K. She is non-responsive.

The detectives meet with Van Buren, who uses a computer (rare for her) to find info about Kovac's record. They determine he frequents a drug hangout in East Harlem. They go up there and roust a bunch of users, one of whom says he knows that Kovac spends time at his girlfriend's house, and he directs them there. They raid the apartment, and no one is there, at least no one who is alive: they find Kovac shot dead, lying on the floor behind the couch. They are happy they don't have to put him on trial for Johnson's murder, but -- as AVB reminds them -- they have no idea who killed him. During this conversation, they are explaining the whole plot to AVB and she asks who Kovac. This is ridiculous, since she just looked him up on the computer earlier that day! The detectives figure Breck may have killed Kovac, if Breck saw Kovac running away with the $15K that Johnson had on him (and owed to Breck).

They talk to Breck again (they find him shaking down a client) and he says that he loaned money to Johnson, but Johnson said he would get the money to repay the loan from his wife. Well, Mrs Johnson certainly didn't say anything about that. They visit the wife's bank, where the banker says Mr Johnson was in a few days before his death, and got a loan. He used a forged check with his wife's name on it as collateral, an act which wiped out her account. Later, Mrs Johnson tried to withdraw money, but there wasn't any left, which means she realized her husband wiped her out.

They talk to the plumbing company again, to draw a connection between Kovac and Mrs Johnson. They learn that Kovac worked a job at Contini's, a restaurant that Mrs Johnson used to be a hostess at. They talk to the owner, who reveals he has a gun there. That gun is the same caliber as the murder weapon.

They talk to the wife at the precinct, but she walks out. Soon after, they match the Contini's gun to the murder weapon, and they go down to a park and arrest her, and hand her son over to child services. They charge her with the murder of Kovac and Mr Johnson. (31')

The ADAs meet with her and her attorney, Mr Elliott, at Rikers. Elliott ridicules their case. The DAs are still trying to figure out motive for the murders. Kincaid talks to the victim's brother, who describes Mrs Johnson's ambition, and they talk to a co-worker of Mrs Johnson, who says that Mr Johnson once ran up a $1500 tab in the nice restaurant his wife owned, and that his boisterous behavior led an NYT reviewer to leave the restaurant. She also says that Johnson lost some of his wife's money in a pyramid scheme. More motive.

At trial (37'), Contini testifies about the gun, and Breck testifies about the loan money. Elliott tries to make each witness look like a suspect. The DAs regroup, and Schiff is skeptical about their chances. He tells McCoy that at least McCoy saved the taxpayers some money -- he's "losing two cases for the price of one." When the prosecution witnesses, the defense moves to have the case dismissed, which the judge, in a surprise to McCoy, considers, and then almost allows, as he dismisses the charges related to the murder of Mr Johnson. He tells McCoy he can make the case against Mrs Johnson for the death of Kovac, but he can't suggest that Mrs Johnson killed Mr Johnson as part of that case. That means they need more evidence. Kincaid and the dets go over everything again, and learn that a few months before his death, Johnson was the victim of an armed robbery, in which the robber, Lattimer, pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. He was later caught. They think he might have been a hired killer. McCoy and Kincaid talk to him in prison, where he makes a deal with McCoy: he'll roll on Mrs Johnson in exchange for freedom. Pretty generous deal, as Schiff points out, given that he's admitting a more serious crime.

Schiff is still skeptical, and thinks the case is not going to work out because they've already rested their case and put Lattimer on the stand. McCoy theorizes that if he can Elliott to put Mrs Johnson on the stand and say something about not wanting her husband dead, then he can legally call Lattimer as a rebuttal witness. He bluffs Elliot and says they are going to argue that Mrs Johnson killed Kovac out of revenge for killing her husband. Elliott says, well, he'll put Johnson on the stand and say she didn't want revenge because she was indifferent about her husband's death. That's exactly what he does, and McCoy seizes the opportunity, and moves to call Lattimer. Elliott panics, and they get a recess and make a deal: Mrs Johnson pleads to Murder 2, 15 to life.

Casting notes: Mrs Johnson is played by Lisa Gay Hamilton, who appeared for seven seasons on The Practice, a show I don't watch. This episode is one of a handful which feature two actors who later appeared on The Sopranos. Dominic Chianese ("Uncle Junior") plays the trial judge Paul Kaylin, and Frank Pellegrino (the head of the FBI office) plays Mr Contini. It's worth noting that Pellegrino, in real life, is co-owner of Rao's, the famous Italian restaurant in East Harlem which was fictionalized in the L&O episode Everybody Loves Raimondo's.

Beginning with this episode, I have started assembling a gallery of Sopranos actors who have also appeared on L&O.

7.12 Barter

In this episode (7.12), w woman is shot dead from behind in her building's parking garage, but it looks like the killer was aiming for a different, similar-looking woman who usually parked there. So who ordered the hit-gone-bad? Isn't it always the husband? Yep. But this time, there's a conspiracy behind the hit, and figuring out how the conspiracy is connected to a corrupt loan company is difficult. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, McCoy and Ross build a prosecution.

The episode begins as a wealthy couple, the Tashjians, find a dead body in their parking spot. The victim is Shelley Ganz, and she's been shot in the back with a shotgun. Briscoe and Curtis show up, and Briscoe delivers the second-best* wisecrack in the history of the show, so pay attention: At the same time they're talking about the circumstances of the shooting (which make it look like a contract hit), there's a little bit of banter with a worker about how permanent spaces in the parking garaage are hard to come by:

Curtis: One shot to the back, no robbery, no sexual asault. You know what this looks like...
Briscoe: Yeah, it looks like somebody gets a parking space.

They talk to the parents of the victim, who have no idea why anyone would want to kill her. They talk to her cocky boyfriend, who gives them attitude but no leads. They learn that she was threatened because she was treasurer of her condo's co-op board and finally got things in order, which required alienating some people. They go to a loan company to determine who might have had a grudge against her, and Curtis flirts with the secretary a little to get some information. And guess who he learns has been having some financial problems: The Tashjians. And it was the Tashjians parking space in which Ganz was killed. Looks like this might be one of those "hit gone wrong" episodesm and Mrs Tashjian was supposed to be the victim.

This looks increasingly likely as they learn from the Tashjians bookkeeper that the Tashjians have been having financial trouble lately, and they have been having marital problems as well. A recurring and funny character, the observant superintendent of the building, talks to a sketch artist about a man he saw in the garage just prior to the shooting, and he describes a car he saw leaving the scene. The doorman's description points them to some body shops, since the cars described as casing the area and fleeing the scene at the time of the murder all had dents and primer on them. They head out to Hunt's Point and find a mechanic named Henrique Flores, who matches the description of the superintendent. They arrest him (25'), and around this time Curtis reveals that he may be re-uniting with his wife.

They have a line-up with the super and Flores, but there's no match. Briscoe gets a phone call while he's at McCoy's office: Mrs Tashjian has been shot dead outside her gym. Mr Tashjian is questioned, but he's too sad to say much.

McCoy tells the detectives they have to connect Flores to Tashian, which ends up taking a while. Ross asks Curtis who would you ask to perform a hit if you needed one, and Curtis glances at Briscoe and jokes, "an ex-cop with a lot of alimony."

They see that Tashjian and Flores had a common thread: the Beachwood Loan Company. They visit the boss there, Bunny Russo. They learn that Mrs Tashjian had a life insurance policy and the beneficiary was not Mr Tashjian, but Beechwood Loan Company! They also learn that 4 people with similar policies which benefitted Beechwood died last year. It looks like Russo is running a violent scam where he loans money, takes out life insurance as collateral, and then kills his customers to get the insurance money. They learn Russo has a criminal record.

Schiff orders McCoy to open the old cases of these dead people connected to Beechwood. They learn that a previous victim was a private investigator who kept the license plate numbers of people following him. They try to get Flores to roll and reveal what's going on, but he's extremely scared and won't say anything, apparently because of the conspiracy's connection to the Russian mob. He gets so stressed out he has a heart attack and they take him to the hospital. At the hospital, he's talking to the doctor while Curtis is standing over the doctor's shoulder and he says he's sick because he did all these bad things, including killing someone. Will this confession be admissible? Let's see what happens.

They arrest Russo (42'), and he is unfazed. And no wonder: Flores's confession is suppressed. No case is left against either him or Russo, thanks to a decision by a judge the ADAs call "Judge Meathead." McCoy and Ross look for new connections between Russo and his dead clients. They are exhausted from checking the files, and Ross starts talking about her kids and childcare. (She says she has a live-in nanny to take care of them.) Eventually, they conclude that Tashjian referred other victims to Russo, and was rewarded, and that Tashjian actually killed one of the other victims.

McCoy, over Ross's objections, offers immunity to Tashjian so he will testify about Russo. (Even though this is exactly the sort of thing over which he gets in a huge fight with the US Atty General's office in another episode.) McCoy explains that Tashian must give him Russo or there's no deal, but Ross says Tashjian's alibi for the murder is no good, and he probably is just a much a killer as Russo. McCoy tells Ross, in yet another one of their fights, that if she's not comfortable with it, then someone else can be second chair on the case.

At trial (55'), they only have circumstantial evidence against Tashjian, but he confesses on the stand that he killed a previous victim as a way of paying Russo so that his own wife wouldn't be killed. Russo, confronted with this testimony, makes a full statement on tape regarding all the hits he arranged. Ross tells McCoy, you owe me one for overlooking your ethical lapse here.

The episode ends with something unusual: a title card that tells what happened after the action of the story: Russo got a life sentence, and Tashjian was killed, apparently because he crossed the Russian mob.

So, on character background, we learn that Ross has a live-in nanny and that Curtis might re-unite with his wife, from whom he is separated.

*The best is in an episode I haven't written about yet, where Briscoe and his partner come across a man killed during a kinky sex encounter. They find the middle-guy in bed, covered with blood, and wearing women's lingerie. Briscoe looks at the corpse and says, "Always wear clean underwear. You never know when you might have an accident."

10.3 DNR

In this episode (10.3), a civil court judge is shot and badly injured in her building's garage, and her Jaguar is stolen. It looks like a botched murder-for-hire, but it's unclear who did the hiring. After Briscoe and Green's investigation, it appears that the husband set up the hit, but McCoy and Carmichael have trouble building a prosecution because the victim refuses to testify against her husband. On top of all this, the victim tries to get legal permission to end her own life, a move which McCoy resists.

The episode begins with Mr Grobman returning from a trip to Long Island, talking to his doorman. They hear gun shots coming from the garage, and they run down there, only to discover his badly injured wife. She's taken to the hospital, and Briscoe and Green arrive. They hear that her Jaguar was stolen, and an APB went out for the car. They also discover that the victim, Judge Grobman, returned fire, and may have hit her assailant twice.

They talk to Mr Grobman at the hospital. Not much info there. They continue the investigation by trying to track down the car. They go over to the auto theft squad and get a list of known fences for stolen, high-end cars. They track down newly-registered Jaguars, some of which they figure have been registered with the wrong VINs to conceal their origin. They find the Jaguar. It's owned by a young doctor, who under pressure, admits he bought it from a shady car dealer for $20K. (He identifies the dealer from a photo array.) They visit the car dealer, and he identifies the person who sold him the car, Bobby Ward. He says he paid Ward $3K for it. Not a bad profit.

They raid Ward's apartment, and find a man on his couch, shot twice in the gut and barely breathing. It's Ward's cousin -- he apparently committed the murder attempt and got shot by the judge in the process. They find a receipt in the apartment that points them to Arlene Polaski, Ward's girlfriend. They raid her apartment and find $17K on Ward, as well as a weapon. Under pressure, Ward reveals that his cousin told him about the deal: steal the car, and do something else, and get $30K. He didn't know what the something else was, however, just that it was "big." They want to confirm this story with cousin Danny, but AVB informs them that Danny died on the operating table.

They review the judge's records to determine whether someone would have had a grudge against her. They learn that the judge/victim recently received a promotion and was going to become the assistant attorney general for civil rights. But they still can't figure out the connection between her and Ward/Danny. They talk to the judge in the hospital. She picks the shooter out a line-up. They suggest to her that perhaps her husband could be responsible, since he was one of only two people who knew what time they would be returning from Long Island. She vehemently denies this could be possible, and complains about the pain she is in.

They talk to her court clerk, who also knew they were coming back from LI. They reveal that the judge was personally involved in a civil litigation case against a real estate developer named Torrino, who wasn't a nice guy. They learn that Ward worked for him on a mini-mall project. Then they learn that the doorman knew about the victim's return from LI, and that he may have notified Torrino, whose company did maintenance work on the building. As they investigate Torrino, the find another connection: Mr Grobman (an architect) worked on the mini-mall project with cousin Danny Ward. Grobman had previously denied knowing Ward.

They requestion him about this, and then -- somewhat unexpectedly -- arrest him. (21 mins) At arraignment, he presents an alibi statement...from his wife, the victim. Carmichael talks to the victim and her adult daughter and tries to get her to roll on her husband, but she gets very angry and refuses to co-operate and asks to be left alone. McCoy, Carmichael, and AVB discuss the alibi statement, and McCoy wants to know why the police didn't discover it sooner, and he takes out the weakness of his case on AVB. She tells him it's his job to work it out, and he says bring me a better a case.

The detectives talk to Carmichael. They have found a record of a phone call from the Grobman's LI home to Dee Van Horn the morning of the murder, after the judge had received a call from her clerk indicating she had to come back to the city. They talk to Ms Van Horn who says there was some tension in the Grobman's marriage because the judge was so successful and Mr Grobman was less so (recently) and that he had taken a back seat to his wife's career. This is buttressed by AC's conversation with Mr Grobman's soon-to-be-former business partner, who says Grobman was a promising architect but has falled out of favor in recent years and was very stubborn. He also says Grobman was designing a new dream home in the country, but the judge's promotion ended the possibility of that home. They develop a new theory: Grobman, upset at always taking a back seat to his wife, killed her.

McCoy still can't understand why Judge Grobman is in denial about the apparent fact that her husband tried to kill her. He visits her in the hospital and tells her that evidence suggests that Grobman made a call to her killers from a pay phone near their LI cottage after getting the call about returning to the city. She gets upset again and refuses to believe her husband was involved. Furthermore, she soon after files an request to stop her dialysis treatment, a move which would result in her death. Since this would take away her ability to be an alibi witness for her husband, her husband objects and seeks something called a TRO to stop it.

They have a hearing about the TRO, and McCoy says he will agree to having Mrs Grobman testify on video tape in the hospital, so he can cross-examine her. She testifies (40'), and McCoy presents her with evidence of her husband's involvement, but she still refuses to acknowledge it. MCoy still can't figure out why. AC talks to her daughter, and her daughter somewhat surprisingly acknowledges that "we both know" that the dad was involved in the murder, but Judge Grobman feels guilty because she always put her career in front of her husband, and ignored his feelings. She says her mom is so depressed "she can't think straight." McCoy asks her to swear to this, so perhaps he can get her to lose standing in her ability to testify as an alibi witness for her husband.

Skoda talks to her and establishes that she's so depressed, she's not competent. They have a hearing about the motion to declare her incompetent, which could also affect her ability to legally stop her own dialysis treatment. Skoda testifies at the hearing, which is overseen by recurring character Judge Lisa Pongracic, who admits she is friends with Judge Grobman but for some inexplicable reason does not recuse herself. Anyway, McCoy once again cross-examines Grobman, and she still insists her husband didn't do it, pretty much, but then she says, "It's my fault," because she treated her husband without care. She feels guilty. She then turns to her friend Judge Pongracic and says, "Let me die."

Judge Pongracic decides that her friend is not competent to give testimony, though. McCoy has a meeting with Grobman and his attorney, at which the attorney seeks a deal. ("Toss us a bone," he says.) McCoy's idea of a deal is that the DA's office won't oppose parole in 25 years. Grobman, who spontaneously confesses to McCoy over his lawyer's objections, says he "wants it over" and accepts the deal. As the episode ends, Schiff tells McCoy and AC that Judge Grobman "died an hour ago." McCoy learns that Mr Grobman was there, and says he hopes that image haunts him in prison.

The episode has a lot of improbabilities: why didn't Grobman simply divorce his wife? McCoy's explanation -- that his ego was "damaged" doesn't wash. Why did the killers complicate matters by stealing the Jaguar? For $3K on top of a $30K hit? Doesn't make sense. Why does Grobman really decide to die? Why not just divorce her husband and live with her loving daughter? I guess she's upset, but c'mon!

Casting notes: Lindsay Crouse (the werewolf hunting professor on Buffy) plays Judge Grobman, and John Heard, best known for his work on The Sopranos, plays Mr Grobman.

The episode is interesting for the first 30 minutes or so, but eventually descends into the maudlin as the victim refuses to accept her husband's involvement and keeps begging to die.

7.3 Good Girl

In this episode (7.3), a young black man is killed in his apartment, apparently by a young white woman whose family was very uncomfortable with their relationship. Briscoe and Curtis solve the case, and McCoy and Ross assemble the prosecution.

The episode begins with two men discussing the graffiti and other maintenance problems is a low-rent apartment building. They hear loud music coming from an apartment, and the super enters the apartment and finds the victim, Charles Monroe, dead on the bed. He's been stabbed to death.

They find his girlfriend, Arlene Williams, who is black and concerned about being implicated in his death: "You're not going to do a Fuhrman on me," she says, referring to the detective in the OJ case who allegedly framed him. They learn that the victim had a sealed juvenile record from when he was 12. They determine that it involved a whirlpooling incident at the YMCA. (Whirlpooling is also discussed in the episode Performance.) They search his apartment and find a phone number belonging to Anna in the trash can, but it's a false lead: some girl just have him a random number. They find a library book about Greek art, checked out from Manhattan University library. They head down there and learn the girl who checked it out is Gina Tucci. Gina's alibi doesn't hold up very well. She says she was with a friend, but her details are out of order. They talk to the alibi witness, Danielle, and they begin to think that Danielle is a suspect and that Gina was covering for her. Danielle's fingerprints match those found in the apartment of the victim.

Gina says that Danielle wouldn't hang out with "a guy like that," meaning a black guy. Danielle makes a statement and says the victim approached her in the library, she went to his apartment, and was drugged and raped. When she woke up, she says, he wanted to do it again so she stabbed him. But she never went to see a doctor and she never told anyone. Van Buren is suspicious of her claim of being drugged with Rohypnol, since Danielle remembers the rape. They arrest her (23 mins).

At her arraignment, she is defended by recurring character Al Archer. He meets with the media and says she's innocent. Schiff holds up a copy of The Ledger (the tabloid newspaper that is the namesake of this website) and is unhappy with the way the case is proceeding. Forensics determines there was no rohypnol in the wine, or anywhere else in the apartment. Schiff wonders why she would kill him if she slept with him willingly. But Ross figures out that Danielle, contrary to what she said in her statement, had been in the neighborhood before: she knew where to go to find a cab. Ross talks to Gina to get her to say more about her friend, but Gina backs Danielle as says racist things about black people: "[They] will do anything," she says.

They learn that the victim worked for a magazine sales company in Queens and went door to door. Danielle is from Queens. He sold magazines in her neighborhood, so perhaps they met that way.

Ross, for some reason, assumes that Danielle confided in elderly patients at the nursing home she worked at. She talks to an old lady there about Danielle, and learns that Danielle dated a black kid in high school.

They meet with the victim's parents, who are very upset. They feel that their son is being treated like a criminal, even though he is the victim. They are represented by an aggressive laywer Mr Baylor (played by Giancarlo Esposito) who wants justice and tries to force McCoy to bring an indictment against Danielle. The judge allows it, and the case goes to trial (42') before McCoy is really prepared.

Archer almost immediately plays the race card, and goes after Van Buren because she is black, arguing that her race clouds her judgment. In the middle of the trial, Judge Rebecca Stein receives a letter from a co-worker of a juror saying that the juror was heard using a racist slur. McCoy is convinced that Baylor wrote the letter. McCoy and Ross debate ethics, fighting as always. Ross tries to get Danielle to admit that her dad is abusive and would flip out if she dated a black man. McCoy confronts everyone in the courtroom before the trial begins for the day, arguing that an accident report from the hospital establishes that Danielle's dad previously beat her for a relationship with a black kid when she was in high school. This emotional turmoil causes Danielle to describe what really happened: the victim was her boyfriend, she went to see him, he broke up with her because she treated him like a second-class person, she got mad about the rejection since she risked so much to be with him, so she flipped out and killed him.

8.16 Divorce

In this episode (8.16), a lady psychologist caught between a couple in a heated divorce battle ends up dead. Who wanted her dead? A divorcing couple and possibly their attorneys, to name a few. Briscoe and Curtis try to figure it out, while McCoy and Ross assemble a prosecution.

The episode begins with the discovery of the dead female psychologist in her office at the hospital. Her husband, Mr Burke, arrives, and is quite upset to hear his wife is dead. He says he called a security guard at the hospital to check up on her when she was late, and the guard told him she was fine. Well, the boss of the security guards, when pressured, admits to the detectives that he lied to the husband: because he was busy, he never sent anyone to check up on Dr Burke.

They learn from the security personnel that a crazy guy has been roaming the hospital lately. His name is Leonard, and he had been seen wearing a red hat similar to the one found at the scene. They explore the hospital, and come across an out of the way area where Leonard had assembled a little home for himself. They track him down elsewhere in the hopistal and arrest him (7'). He thinks he's a pope. Leonard is delusional, but says something about a woman with a "crown of fire" screaming at the victim. They eventually rule him out as a suspect.

They talk to people the victim worked with, and a priest tells them that she advised on annulments: depending on her evaluation of a couple's marriage, the church would grant or not grant an annulment. One couple, the Kilpatricks, seemed especially intent on getting an anullment. They talk to Mr Kilpatrick and his laywer, Mr Redfield (played by Tony Robbins). Forensics determines that Burke's office computer was messed with around the time of her death: someone deleted a file and the defragmented the drive to erase traces of it. Molly Kilpatrick, familiar with computers and fearful of Burke's evaluation, seems like a good suspect.

She is represented in the divorce by Sheila Atkins, who excercises privilege when asked about whether Kilpatrick might have had a reason to kill Burke. They bring Kilpatrick in for interrogation. She's breaking down, but the interrogation is legally questionable, since Briscoe says to her, "We could arrest you if you leave." She's obviously not a stable person, and this only makes her more nervous.

Mr Kilpatrick appears to have been hiding financial assets from his wife, and the detectives theorize that the victim may have discovered this, so Kilpatrick killed her. They talk to Mr Redfield again who says that Atkins is an overly aggressive lawyer who skirts the rules and she has it in for both Mr Kilpatrick and him. Cheekbones talks to the couple's young son who is staying with a family friend, and he just says that he saw his parents fighting. Meanwhile, Ms Kilpatrick hires a criminal lawyer.

McCoy becomes increasingly suspicious of Atkins' involvement in this whole thing, especially when they get a subpoena from the bar association's ethics committee asking for everything related to Atkins' role in the case. Ross finds out from a friend it has to do with a request Atkins made of the ethics committee about the case. But what specifically was her question? No one knows.

A judge decides that Atkins must reveal what this issue was, but she refuses. She just wants to go after Mr Kilpatrick. At Rikers, Atkins rolls on Molly Kilpatrick, saying she confessed to her. Molly looks confused, but doesn't really object. But then they learn that Atkins has had problems with the ethics committee and it becomes clear that she and Refield are essentially at war with each other.

McCoy comes to the conclusion that Atkins herself murdered Dr Burke because she was afraid the evaluation might cause her to lose the case to Redfield. She framed her own client.

Figuring she's likely to gloat, they send Redfield, wired, out to lunch with her. They bicker, and then she essentially confesses to him, because he claims to have notices some inconsistency in her story, and he pretends to extort her. Atkins has a plea hearing at which she confesses and gets Murder 2, 15 to life. Redfield doesn't get off for free, either, though: he hid Kilpatrick's assets, and so he gets his law license pulled for 3 years.

7.19 Double Down

In this episode (7.19), an armed robbery leads to a kidnapping, and McCoy has to decide whether to make a deal with one of the robbers to learn the location of the abductee before he's killed. Briscoe gets the strong impression that McCoy is being manipulated, but McCoy has to come to a decision anyway.

The episode begins at the scene of an armed robbery, where a getaway driver (we don't know he's the getaway driver yet) is blocked in by another truck. As the robber runs out, another man emerges from the building, shooting. They can't enter the getaway vehicle so they run off. Briscoe and Curtis arrive at the scene to investigate, and learn that $1200 has been stolen, and witnesses saw the men jump into a luxury car and speed off. The dead guy is an off duty cop, Russell Schaffer, who apparently tried to intervene in the robbery. The car that was blocked in is traced to Mr Rodolfo, a man with burglary convictions.

This episode makes an unusual (but not unique) change to the title cards that announce time and place: they feature the time, down to the second. So it's February 13, at 2:12:44 pm. They learn that the driver of the luxry car, Mitchell Titus, is missing. His wife shows up at the precinct, upset. At 3:27, they head down to the port authority bus terminal: a bloody shirt has been found. They come across one of the suspects from the robbery. He's been shot, and collapses.

They interview him at the hospital, now 9.28 pm. His name is Henry Harp, and he has $612 on him, half the proceeds from the robbery. He's a convicted armed robber, and won't help them. He lawyers up and gets recurring character Sally Bell (played by Edie Falco) to represent him. Ross and Falco to try to come up with a deal for Harp, and Bell wants it in writing. Here's the deal: he'll tell them where Mitchell Titus is. If Titus is dead, he gets 15 years for all crimes related to this robbery. If he's alive, he goes to jail for almost no time at all. (Sorry -- I didn't make a note of the specifics of that part of the deal.) Ross has to ask Mccoy to approve the deal.

The detectives visit MCCOY'S APARTMENT, which is loaded with books and which I don't believe we've ever seen before. Briscoe and Curtis tell McCoy they think Titus is probably dead, and he shouldn't make the deal. McCoy wonders what to do. He decides that if they don't find Titus by noon (Wednesday), he'll make the deal -- that's 10 hours away. They search Harp's apartment, but don't really come up with much.

At 4.31 am, Briscoe gets the probation report about Harp via an old friend of his in the department. This is a violation of the rules, but it's an emergency. At 5.15 am, they visit Harp's family home, and encounter his brother and mom. Mom gives them the address where Henry has been saying.

6.25 am they visit his Cuban girlfriend's apartment. She says Henry borrowed the car, and then returned it later. She says all this trouble he's in is because of his friend Novak. It sure looks like Novak is the other suspect in that robbery.

They raid Novak's apartment en masse and find 9mm bullets just like those used in the robbery. It's 11 am, but they still don't know where Titus is. Titus's wife shows up again, and is still upset, but everbody (except McCoy) thinks her husband is dead already. Schiff and McCoy talk over the deal at 12.15 pm. The cops get a call they found Titus's car, but not Titus himself. McCoy, with Schiff's blessing, decides to make the deal.

At 2.31.51 pm, McCoy agrees to the deal with Harp, and Harp tells him what he wants to know: he rolls on Novak, and says where Titus is. They go to the abandoned building on Avenue A he identified, and they find Titus's body. He's been dead for at least 24 hours. Briscoe is upset with McCoy for making the deal.

The prosecutors meet and discuss whether they have to follow through on the terms of the agreement. They think legally they might be able to get out of it, but it would irreparably damage the reputation of the office, and make it difficult for them to achieve deals in the future.

Harp's arraignment takes place in the hospital, and McCoy surprises everyone by announcing he's going to seek the death penalty against Harp. That certainly wasn't part of the deal.

Nine days later (2/22) there is a lineup. (The timestamp has disappeared from the title cards.) The lineup is a voice lineup, but no positive ID can be made. They discover in the course of their investigation that a worker at the liquor store was also taking money -- he had stolen $600, so it looks like Harp had gotten the entire proceeds of the robbery, which raises a question that has yet to be addressed: where is Novak, the accomplice? I bet you can guess.

Novak is found half-buried by a little league field. It looks like Harp is a triple murderer: the off-duty cop, Mitchell Titus, and his partner Novak. McCoy makes his arguments to Judge Santos about why McCoy feels he can back out of the agreement. The judge tells McCoy he can junk the deal and go to trial without Harp's statement, or he can just accept the deal and skip the trial. During this, Curtis and Briscoe enter to tell McCoy about the discovery of Novak's body, but McCoy strangely cuts him off and says, "Don't tell me." What is he up to?

McCoy tells the judge he will keep the deal but -- listen to this -- he also decides (without telling the judge) to prosecute Harp for the murder of Novak, since this was not included in the list of crimes he couldn't be prosecuted for, according to the deal. McCoy tells the cops he can prosecute Harp for the murder as long as he didn't know that the murder had taken place at the time he made the deal. He basically asks Curtis and Briscoe to fudge the truth a little so that it looks like he didn't know about the circimstances of Novak's death when he made the deal. Briscoe immediately says ok, Curtis is more troubled.

They have a hearing about this issue. McCoy is on the stand, and Ross questions him. McCoy mentions he's been a prosecutor for 22 years. Bell calls Curtis, and Curtis explains that he doesn't know that McCoy knew Harp killed Novak and says that "prosecutors aren't too bright" sometimes, and he says it meaningfully, as a sort of barb directed at McCoy. Decision: the indictment against Harp for the murder of Novak is not dismissed.

Harp says Novak killed the cop and Titus, and he wants a deal, but McCoy replies: "He serves hard time in a maximum security prison until hell freezes over. How's that for a deal?"

Curtis confronts McCoy for almost making him lie, but they somewhat resolve their differences.

The episode's title comes from term from card games. Double down, one site says, is when you're playing blackjack and you request a card in addition to the two that you've already been dealt.

Law & Order and Sci-Fi

Here's a page which chronicles which L&O guest stars have also appeared in science fiction television series. In fact, if you go to this directory, you will find files showing guest stars and their appearances in all sorts of other genres. (Go to the files that begin with the letters "law".)

6.12 Trophy: Battle of McCoy's Lovers!

In this terrific, densely packed episode (6.12), a serial killer is killing black boys and leaving behind ominous notes. The crimes closely parallel the work of a previous serial killer who was caught and convicted 5 years eaerli...or was he? Evidence begins to suggest that McCoy convicted the wrong man, and his assistant and girlfriend from that time period, Diana Hawthorne, may be to blame for the miscarriage of justice. Briscoe and Curtis investigate the killings, and McCoy and Kincaid figure out to do with their suspects and Hawthorne

The episode begins with two city workers picking up garbage in the park, discussing the Mets. One of them discovers the body of a young black boy, found alongside his school books. They find a note on his body, in block letters: "They must be destroyed." The note is immediately recognized by Briscoe: 5 years ago, a serial killer named Andrew Dillar used a similar MO to kill several black boys.

Now they think they have a copycat on their hands. They talk to the victim's mom, who has no information. She says her son was a good boy. The detectives visit McCoy to get details about the original case, to help give them some ideas of what to look for this time around. They trace the boy's steps to a grocery store, where they are told by a cashier the boy talked only to a security guard inside the store. They visit the security guard at home, a kind, quiet man with a crucifix displayed in his doorway. He says he saw him leave and head north. They talk to the victim's basketball teammate, Carlos, who says that the victim may have visited a guy named Ernie who is an unofficial basketball scout.

They talk to Ernie, and for a while he seems like a pretty good suspect. He had the victim in his apartment that afternoon, and his alibi seems inconsistent. They get a call, though, that the harbor unit has found another kid. They go to the crime scene. The knew victim is Sean Monroe. They talk to his parents, who tell them that Sean was a bit of a handful, and got into trouble sometimes. The mom indicates that the boy should have been wearing a crucific when he was found -- but he wasn't. Hm. Back at the precinct, they look at a chalkboard containing the details of the crimes. They talk to the headmaster of Sean's private school, and learn that he cut classes on the last day with a girl named Vanessa. They talk to Vanessa, a mousy little thing who admits under pressure that she and Sean parted ways when Sean went to hang out with his bad-kid friends, Felix and Damien. Felix and Damien are brought in for questioning. They have a bad attitude and are wise-asses. They finally admit that at the time of the killing, they were over on Broadway and 96th shoplifting. They say that Sean got caught shoplifting, and last they knew, he was talking to a police officer.

Now they're getting somewhere. They head over to that neighborhood and talk to the police man who walks the beat there. He recognizes Sean, but says he did not question him that day, and no other cop probably would have, either. They theorize that perhaps from a distance, and given the situation, the kids may have mistaken a store security guard as a real cop. Where have we seen a security guard before? That's right -- they head back over to that nice guy's apartment, and question him. Curtis gets a little aggressive with him, and he refuses to swear on a bible that he didn't kill the kids. Looks like they got themselves a suspect.

We come back from the commercial break, and the suspect, Simon, is being videotaped as he confesses. He says he did it because they were sinners wearing signs of the lord (a crucifix and an image of St Justin on a ball cap) and that God put them in his way. He says, "They had to be destroyed." That's what the notes said, remember? They ask him if he got the idea from the note from Andrew Dillard, the convicted serial killer. He says Dillard had nothing to do with it. And then, get ready for this: He says Dillard had nothing to do with any of the killings....Simon says committed all the murders himself! Uh-oh.

Curtis and Briscoe investigate his claims (off camera) and meet with McCoy, telling him it all adds up. Simon has trophies from each victim, and knows the details of each crime. They say that after Dillard was arrested, Simon confessed to his mom, who didn't turn him in but hooked him up with therapy and medication, so the killings stopped. But his mom died recently, and that's why the killings started again. McCoy is stunned as he realizes he convicted the wrong man.

McCoy tries to figure out what went wrong. Schiff can't believe it either and mentions that he and Diana Hawthorne -- McCoy's assistant -- were "two of his best" people and they somehow managed to convict the wrong man. Dillard calls a meeting with McCoy, and informs him of his intention to sue him for wrongful prosecution, and he's seeking $50 million. Dillard's lawyer hands a piece of paper to McCoy and says McCoy intentionally buried exculpatory evidence. The paper is a statement from a witness to a detective saying she saw one of the victims talking to a man in the park after the victim was seen with Dillard. The man she saw? Simon. McCoy says he never saw the statement, but Dillard and his lawyer don't believe him.

McCoy and Kincaid sit at a formal restaurant -- it looks a little like a date -- and discuss the case. Kincaid doesn't seem to be backing McCoy as strongly as he wants her to/ They wonder if maybe the detective who took the statement never turned it over. Kincaid talks to the original detective -- who dialogue indicates is very detail oriented -- and he says he didn't give the statement to McCoy, he gave it to the other DA, "the pretty one -- like you," by which he means Hawthorne. Hm! Did Hawthorne bury it on purpose?

Kincaid goes to talk to Hawthorne, now in private practive. Both of them are smiling at each other, almost inexplicably, but the scene is quite tense. Kincaid is implicitly blaming Hawthorne for burying the statement, and Hawthorne is implicitly blaming McCoy, saying things like, "You know how Jack operates." Hawthorne says of McCoy she "worked with him for 4 years, and slept with him for 3." Kincaid says she knows this, and she wonders if perhaps it's clouding Hawthorne's judgement. Hawthorne blithely retorts that perhaps it's affecting Kincaid's judgement, and adds, "You are sleeping with him, aren't you?" Spicy! Kincaid's look is priceless (and brilliantly acted) -- she does not answer verbally, but sort of tilts her head and slight tweaks her half-smile. A non-denial denial!

But enough cat fighting: back at the office, Schiff is pissed with McCoy and takes dramatic action: he suspends McCoy pending resolution of the matter. But he allows McCoy to continue working on his own defense in the building.

Kincaid and McCoy meet and they discuss Kincaid's upcoming deposition for Dillard. Her testimony is considered important because it could establish McCoy's pattern of behavior. They rehearse her deposition, during which McCoy asks her mock questions, such as "Have you ever seen Jack McCoy withhold exculpatory evidence?" Kincaid hesitates, and McCoy is again peeved with her for not supporting him unquestioningly. They discuss "the Roland case" in which McCoy suppressed a statement from a "retarded girl." McCoy explains that the statement went to motive, which is not an element of the crime. He says he didn't believe he had an obligation to turn over the case.

Then they discuss an inconsistency in a handwriting expert's report from the original Dillard case: initially, his report said he couldn't make a determination as to whether the notes left behind were in Dillard's handwriting, but later, his report said it was an exact match. This triggers something in McCoy's memory: the expert was "Diana's witness." It looks like Hawthorne may have been so eager to get Dillard convicted, she suppressed the witness statement and told the handwriting expert to lie! Kincaid talks to the handwriting expert, and he says Hawthorne told him Dillard might go free if he didn't change his report to reflect more certainty.

McCoy confronts Hawthorne outside. She looks at that green coat he always wears and says, "I begged you to get rid of that coat 8 years ago." He tells her he can't figure out why she did what she did, and she says (a) you do that kind of stuff all the time, and (b) I did what you wanted me to do. And then she marches off. It's not a very friendly meeting.

The prosecutors all meet. Schiff says the city settled with Dillard for $3 million, and that Hawthorne is catching all the blame. McCoy is reinstated, but he's not done yet: he wants to prosecute Hawthorne, his ex-girlfriend, for deliberately convicting Dillard falsely. He says she created the opportunity for Simon to remain free and kill again. Schiff says he's crazy if he wants to get involved in that "put of snakes and scorpions." But McCoy is insistent, and he has Hawthorne arrested (47').

Hawthorne retains a defense lawyer, Mr Fox, and they discuss the merits of the case before a judge. McCoy will be called as a witness, which means Kincaid has to prosecute the case.

At trial (52'), McCoy takes the stand. He is asked by the Mr Fox if he remembers a man named Hank Chapel (sp?). McCoy convicted Chapel, even though it turned out Chapel was innocent. He also is asked about his relationship with Hawthorne, and he confirms they were lovers. He also has to read a note he wrote to Hawthorne in which he says, "Thanks for a wonderful evening...it's time to nail Andrew Dillard." (There appears to be a pun/parallelism suggested with his use of the word "nail," and the lawyer brings that up, too.) We also learn that McCoy was promoted 3 weeks after he got Dillard convicted. (Promoted to what? If he was Hawthorne's boss, wasn't he already an Executive District Attorney? And if he was prosecuting a serial killer, wasn't he already working Major Felonies?) Anyway, yes, he got promoted, but he denies it was because of the Dillard case. He also says he took Hawthorne to Ireland to celebrate their victory on the case and his promotion.

Hawthorne testifies and says she got her job in the private sector a year after the Dillard conviction, saying she wasn't comfortable working with McCoy after they broke up. Kincaid cross-examines Hawthorne and cleverly gets her to essentially admit that she consciously or sub-consciously wanted to please McCoy and get his gratitude, as both his employee and his lover.

Break in the trial, and Hawthorne shows up in McCoy's office. She tries to bait him into admitting that Kincaid is his lover, but he doesn't bite, and instead excoriates her for breaking the law. She says Kincaid is smart and she didn't realize until Kincaid said it that indeed she had been aiming to please McCoy when she suppressed/tainted the evidence. Off camera, Kincaid makes a deal with her: criminal facilitation in the 4th degree, 6 months in jail, and she loses her license to practice law.

McCoy tells Kincaid she didn't have to offer the deal, that she would have won the case. She jokingly replies, "I know...but I thought that's what you wanted." Very funny.

This episode features a ton of background information on the characters. First off, it is strongly and repeatedly suggested that Kincaid and McCoy are lovers. Her non-denial, the dinner at the restaurant, her ability to identify with Hawthorne, and her joke at the end are all indicators. (The writers of the show confirmed in interviews after Kincaid left that in their minds, Kincaid and McCoy were romantically involved.) We also learn about some prior McCoy cases (though I think both the "retarded girl" case and the Chapel case are shown in other eps), and we learn a bit about his career trajectory. So here's your timeline, if I have my math right:

This episode takes place in Season 6. That means the Dillard case occurred in Season 1, McCoy got that promotion in Season 1, Hawthorne left in Season 2, they started dating in Season -1, and she started working there in season -2.

The episode's title seems to refer both to the trophies the killer took from the boys, and also conviction of Dillard, which was essentially a trophy for McCoy, delivered to him by Hawthorne.

Here are some screen caps from the episode, including McCoy on the stand, Kincaid's reaction to being asked whether she's sleeping with McCoy, and Laila Robins as Diana Hawthorne. Hawthorne looks somewhat mannish (Robins looked much better in the episode Venom and in real life), but Kincaid looks fantastic throughout the ep.

As far as "ripped from the headlines" goes, the serial killer story line is drawn from the Atlanta child killings a while back.

5.14 Performance

In this episode (5.14), some men at a bachelor party watch a pornographic videotape that, to their surprise, might be a snuff film: a young women is pictured being raped and shot in the head through a pillow. Briscoe and Logan try to identify the girl on the tape and the man seen shooting here, while McCoy and Kincaid try to get the victim to reveal everything about what happened.

The episode begins at the bachelor party. They see a young girl strapped to a bed, screaming, and a man straddling her pulls out a pistol, puts a pillow over her face, and pulls the trigger. One of them men at the party brings the tape to Briscoe and Logan and they watch it together. Logan says it looks real to him. They learn it came from Riga Video, and they prepare to head down there.

They take the video -- "Home Cooked Pies" -- to the video store. The manager there says he hasn't received any prior complaints about the video and directs them to the company he got the video from: L&B Entertainment. The producer there says he just buys tapes from people who come in or see his solicitation in the back of swinger magazines. They try tracking people down via a swinger magazine, but with no luck. They turn to the video forensics guy, who notes an unusual window in the background of the scene, and he can make out audio of a radio, which confirms the video was shot in the city. He also gets them a good image of a tattoo on the girl's leg. They trace the tattoo via various tattoo artists (we've seen this strategy before), and it leads them to a band, which leads them to an ex-drummer, who used to date the girl. Remember, this whole time, the detectives are assuming that the girl is dead. The ex-boyfriend identifies the image of the girl, and tells them where she lives. They go to tell her mom about the demise of their daughter Corey, and guess who answers the door at the mom's house....Corey!

They bring the mom and the daughter to help sort it all out. Corey and her mom bicker about slightly-more-antagonistic-than-usual mother/daughter stuff, and AVB helps get the story out of Corey. Corey eventually says "they raped me," with "they" being a group of guys she met at a random party. She says she doesn't know where she was, and she doesn't know their names.

Since it's a rape, Briscoe and Logan continue to work the case. They re-visit the porno producer, and Logan roughs him up a little trying to get a name out of him. They go to video forensics again, who noticed a bit of static on the tape -- he freezes it and see it's a frame from a previously taped event: a birthday party at a restaurant. They are able to see a nametag on the waiter in the scene, and that leads them to a restaurant. They go to the restaurant, get pushy with the maitre d', and he goes through the reservation books and gets them the names of people who had a b-day party within a certain timeframe. This leads them to Mr Sutter. They interview him at work, and denies knowing the young man seen on the videotape. They go to his apartment and interview his mom, and they learn they have a son, Shane. They go to Shane's school, and confront him. He tells them that (a) Corey asked for it, and (b) Corey is one of his classmates, not a stranger he met at a party. Looks like Corey lied!

They try to get Corey to tell the truth but she is non-cooperative. AVB pressures her, and she finally admits that there is a group of kids at school called "the Mack(?) Rangers" who shoot videos of themselves having sex with girls: it's like a game. She insists, however, that she did not consent to sex. They arrest Shane Sutter (29').

The ADAs meet with Shane and his attorney, but they refuse to make a deal. Kincaid, as always, figures that rape victims are rarely the first or only victims of the accused, so she looks into Sutter's background and that of the other Rangers. She learns from another girl that the Rangers kept score of how many girls they had sex with: 1 girl = 1 point. One girl says she liked the attention, but she tells of another girl, Beth Richie, who refused to have sex with them and was made a pariah. Kincaid talks to Richie who says she was "whirlpooled" and sexually assaulted. (Whirlpooling is when people gather around you in a pool and get the water going in such a way that you are helpless to get out. Kincaid talks to the VP of the school, but he's dismissive about incidents.

Shane goes on trial for rape (39'). Richie testfies about the previous incident and the Rangers "game" of sleeping with girls. Corey testifies, and the video is played, which is quite chilling. Sutter testifies on his own behalf. The verdict comes back: guilty of Rape 1.

But on appeal, the verdict is overturned because the judge rules the evidence about the Rangers' activities never should have been introduced. A new trial is ordered, and McCoy must prove his case without discussing the Rangers -- not as easy for some reason, even though they have a tape of Corey screaming her lungs out during the incident.

Corey meets with the DAs, the DAs meet with each other, and McCoy decides to go after all the Rangers for conspiracy to commit rape, saying the whole game basically amounted to a scheme to pressure its members to rape people. Briscoe and Logan head to the school gym and call out a bunch of names, and arrest everybody (56). One of the boys, who has an aggressive father, rolls on the others and says that Sutter told him he should get double points for raping Corey. Sutter takes a deal: 2 years, and he allocutes to McCoy.

The episodes title refers both to the apparent performance on the videotape, and to Sutter and the other Rangers performance in the "game," I think.

Here is a picture of Monica Keena as Corey.

7.23 Terminal: Schiff Takes on the Governor

In this intricately structured episode (7.23), the finale of season 7, a gunman shoots at a crowd of Jewish people as they exit a social cruise. The state Attorney General's office wants Schiff to seek Murder 1 and the death penalty against the defendant, but he refuses, so they take the case away from him. He fights the decision in court, even as he's dealing with another difficulty in his life: his wife suffers a stroke and dies at the end of the episode. Briscoe and Curtis investigate the shooting, and McCoy and Ross have to choose between ambition and loyalty.

The episode begins with a crowd of people disembarking a small ship. Two women are discussing their social prospects, which they hope improved as a result of the cruise. They are interrupted by a burst of gunfire, and panic ensues. When the bullets stop, Briscoe and Curtis arrive and learn that 3 people were injured and one person was killed. Moments later, they learn of a second death: a woman fell off the pier and drowned. A technician also points out the someone, apparently the killer, wrote "kill zionists" in the dust on a car window. It appears that this was anti-Semitic act, but we'll see the truth is more complicated.

At the hospital, the victims don't really remember seeing much. One witness says a man her friend was talking to took off right before the shooting started, to catch a limo. They track down the limo driver, who tells them all he saw was cab drivers. They talk to a cab driver with a record, and start working the terrorism angle. This cabbie was Yemeni, and he directs them to the Egyptian cabbies, who hang out at the port. The Egyptians squabble over peace vs. violence as Briscoe and Curtis attempt to question them about that night. One of them confirms he saw a man in a trench coat. This fits the description given by the other witnesses.

They consult a map of the crime scene and note that there were two groups of people -- the small crowd and the big crowd. The pattern of shots suggests that he wasn't actually trying to kill as many people as possible. It seems more like he was aiming at someone in the first group, and then fired randomly as he approached the second group.

The investigate various motives, starting with the dead guy, Larry Rice. They go through his wallet and find a business card belonging to a Mr Wexman. They visit Wexman's office looking for leads. His co-worker says he hasn't been in for two days. Strange. They ask to see a picture and guess what? It turns out that Rice and Wexman are the same person! Van Buren talks to Wexman's wife at the precinct and tries to tell her that her husband was apparently leading a double life, but she's in denial. They search his "secret" apartment which he kept under the name of Rice, but they can't determine why he kept it, except to watch porno movies. His reasons for keeping the apartment, living the double life, etc., are never explained.

They visit the the head of the Jewish social group that organized the cruise. They ask about Beckner, who is a travel agent. She says that Beckner gave her a donation check from a fellow travel agent and it bounced.

Forensics takes a look at the ballistics evidence and determines that the bullet went through Beckner and killed Wexman. This indicates that Beckner was the target. They talk to her and ask her whether anyone would want to kill her. They ask her who knew she would be there that night. She indicates that she mentioned it to that other travel agent.

They visit Hank Coburn, the travel agent. He says he purchased 40 tickets to Bulgaria from Beckner at a cost of $32,000. Strangely, that check cleared, but the donation check he wrote for $50 bounced. They review this information back at the financials and find it strange. They realize that if Beckner hadn't been shot, she would have deposited the $32K on Monday and it would have bounced. Instead she waited 4 days and it cleared, b/c Coburn had received a payment from another agent in the meantime. It sounds like Coburn has a motive: shoot Beckner so she can't cash the check.

They talk to Coburn's alibi witness, his girlfriend, who is very funny. She's stuck up and says she only dates rich men. She thinks Coburn was very rich, when in fact he was living check to check. Curtis gets a call while he's in her apartment saying that Trang owns a 9mm gun. They ask her for it, but she can't produce it. They question her at the precinct. At first she stonewalls them, but when she learns that Coburn was actually poor and only had $47 in his checking account, she rolls on him and says she loaned the gun to him. She's very upset and she calls him on behalf of the detectives and arranges a meeting with him that night (so they can arrest him).

Coburn shows up at her apartment, and instead of finding Trang, he finds Curtis and Briscoe, who arrest him (21 mins).

At the DA's office, McCoy and Ross walk into Schiff's office and find the deputy attorney general for New York, Mr Panatti, talking to Schiff. He wants to seek the death penalty against Coburn. Schiff says thanks for coming but is non-committal. Panatti leaves. As they discuss what to do, Schiff receives a phone call and arranges for his driver to get ready. He leaves abruptly.

In order to charge Coburn with Murder 1, they have to prove that Coburn had intent. So they look at the details of the case and re-interview the witnesses and check with ballistics. It sure looks like he was just firing randomly when the drowning victim got pushed into the water. Ross and McCoy can't figure out how to make it work, though Ross comes up with the idea of saying he killed them in furtherance of a robbery, the robbery being his knowledge that the check was no good when he paid for those tickets. McCoy likes this idea. He also tells Ross that Schiff's wife had a stroke.

In running down the details of the case, Ross talks to Ms Trang to see if he expresed intent to "rob" or shoot Beckner. She says he didn't, but she points Ross to another travel agent, who Coburn sought money from earlier than he should have. For some reason, this is important to proving intent, but it's not completely clear how.

Ross asks McCoy how Mrs Schiff is doing, and McCoy says she hasn't regained consciousness yet. They discuss with Schiff how to proceed on the case. McCoy and Ross both want to pursue murder one, but Schiff rebuts, very sharply, every point of law that they make (he finishes their quotations of the laws for them), and then orders them to go for Murder 2.

Schiff then meets in one of those wood-paneled bars he always goes to when wants to meet with someone important. He meets with the attorney general of New York, who tells him very strongly that he wants Schiff to seek Murder 1 and the death penalty. Schiff doesn't want to and says it doesn't add up legally unless "you turn the penal law into a bag of pretzels." The AG tells him he wants Schiff's decision by the next afternoon, and Schiff says, "I don't like ultimatums," and "I'm doing criminal justice. I'm not doing politics." The answer is no.

This causes the Attorney General to hold a press conference at which he announces that the governor has removed the case from Schiff's prosecutorial jurisdiction and will use the AG's office to try it. The AG announces that Mr Panatti will lead the prosecution. They watch this on TV back at the DA's office and McCoy gets a phone call immediately afterwards: Panatti wants him to help prosecute the case.

Panatti and McCoy meet the next morning. Panatti says Schiff is always opposed to the death penalty, but McCoy counters that Schiff signed off on three executions since the statute went into effect. (Presumably one of them was featured in Aftershock). Panatti says Schiff's situation with his wife is interfering with his judgment.

McCoy goes back to the office where he talks to Schiff. McCoy asks Schiff whether the rumor that Schiff wrote a letter of resignation was true. Schiff says the rumor is true, but he tore up the letter. McCoy asks him what he's going to do, and he says "I'm going to take the governor to court." This means he will challenge the governor's attempt to poach his case.

McCoy and Ross discuss what McCoy will do. She asks him, whether he's "going to charge up Hamburger Hill with Adam." He indicates that he is...he won't work with Panatti. She seems to disagree with this decision. McCoy says Panatti will call her next. She says he already has, and she's going to start working on it tomorrow. Traitor!

Ross, Panatti, and Coburn's lawyer, recurring character Mr Axtell, meet. Axtell's looking for a deal, but Panatti refuses. Axtell: "Well...pleasure not doing business with you."

Schiff and McCoy strategize on how to win their case against the governor. They go over a lot of decisions that have ex-governors' names in them. Schiff says he's going to give the governor a history lesson, since the statute says the governor has "virtually" total authority over such decisions. The case hangs on the word "virtually," as McCoy says.

Meanwhile, McCoy steps out to order dinner and has a tense conversation with Ross. Her case starts the next morning. He tells her Schiff's wife is still on life support.

The criminal trial starts first (43'). Ross examines one of the victims re the check issue. Cut to Schiff talking to a gaggle of reporters on the courthouse steps about his reasons for taking the governor to court. Cut to the civil trial (45') where McCoy argues the case for Scguff. He does well. Back at the murder trial, Axtell does a good job cross-examining a witness. Ross tells Panatti she can read the jury, and they're in trouble. He refuses to budge, blames her for the problems, and says he's going to take over the case the next day, even though he previously admitted to McCoy he's been out of the courttroom for a long time.

Back at Schiff's case, McCoy continues to do well, and then Schiff stands up in the middle of the proceedings and tells the judge that the governor's decision is arrogant. At the criminal trial, Coburn testifies and admits to the shooting, but says he didn't intend to kill anyone. Panatti cross-examines him, and Coburn says of his lack of intent, "You have to believe me," and then Panatti makes a fatal error: he asks Coburn whether he can think of a "reasonable person who would" believe him. Ross and Axtell realize Panatti's blunder immediately: SCHIFF HIMSELF BELIEVES HIM. Panatti doesn't realize his error until moments later when -- over Ross' vociferous objections -- Axtell manages to get an affidavit from Schiff entered into the record. The affidavit describes why Schiff felt the defendant did not have intent. Oops! Arrogant Panatti has egg on his face.

Back at the office, McCoy tells Schiff the verdict in their case against the governor: they lost. Schiff is disappointed, but happy they "made waves."

Immediately thereafter, we see the verdict rendered in Coburn's murder trial: not guilty on Murder 1, but guilty of 2 counts of Murder 2. It's considered a defeat for Panatti.

Schiff meets Ross and McCoy at the hospital and tells them, "You did good...both of you." They leave to wait for him outside.

Schiff meets with a doctor briefly and signs a form. He enters his wife's room, and touches her wrist affectionately (pictured ) and listens to the beep-beep of the monitors. Then the beeping tone goes steady: she's dead. He looks very sad, on the verge of tears which don't come.

The episode is notable mainly for the plot and the wittier-than-usual script, and because of the prominent role Schiff plays in it, both professionally and personally. The episode also underscores the consistent tension between Ross and McCoy. Ross is arguably the strongest-willed of the junior ADAs, and the most likely to disagree with McCoy. They never seem to have the close connection that the other ADAs had with their bosses. (The one exception being Serena Southerlyn, who is so vapid as to be incapable of a connection with anyone besides her Barbie collection.) Some of these episodes where Ross fights with McCoy make me nervous. I much prefer the camaraderie of Stone and Robinette or McCoy and Kincaid.

Interestingly, the deputy AG Panatti is played by Roy Thinnes, who played the District Attorney in the pilot episode of Law & Order (which later aired as "Everybody's Favorite Bagman"). This role, of course, was taken over by Schiff/Steven Hill in future episodes. Liana Pai, who plays Ms Trang, has appeared in several eps.

The Return of Cheekbones? Carey Lowell to Appear on Trial By Jury?

Check out her page on IMDB: the first listing is for Trial By Jury. (I got this info from a post on a TWoP bulletin board.)

6.17 Deceit

In this episode (6.17), a lawyer is killed because he was gay and had an affair with a closeted senior partner. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and McCoy and Kincaid prosecute.

The episode begins with cleaning lady entering an apartment, discovering Mr Wells, who has been shot 3 times. As the detectives go through his things, they discover dresses in his closet. An old lady neighbor says Mr Wells had a girlfriend named Liza, and she noticed that Wells was being watched by someone. She even wrote down the license plate of the car she noticed watching him.

It turns out he was being watched by a law firm, which kept an eye on him because he litigated critical cases, including one regarding an environmental activist group. When they visit his law firm, his boss tells the dets that the previous Friday was his lady day on the job. They talk to a radical environmentalist named Larry, but he's got a good alibi. They talk to the security firm watching him, and the man they had on Wells says he saw him fighting with his girlfriend, Liza, in front of the apartment. They visit the girlfriend's apartment, where they encounter a man -- not a woman -- named Tony Conneca. It turns out that Tony is Liza! As in Liza Minelli, whom he performs as at a local club. He says that he and Wells were lovers, but they broke up.

They take a look at the victim's phone records and see that he made a phone call to the firm, and was threatening to take some action regarding sexual harassment. (During this conversation, Curtis reveals that he was sexually harassed by his female superior at his last assignment, and so he asked to be transferred to this precinct. This prompts Briscoe to joke, "Can I transfer there?"

They visit the law firm again, without gaining more info, except that they were concerned that if clients knew Wells was gay, they might be upset. They talk to Tony again, who tells them that Wells had another boyfriend. They talk to a client identified by the firm, and they say they didn't complain about Wells' being gay or about anything else. They then talk to the senior partner who sent them down this path, Mr Dixon, who found out he was gay. Tony says that Wells had some kind of British lover who used to send flowers to Wells. They trace the orders from the flower store to an apartment belonging to Mr Stewart. They engage in a legally questionable search of that apartment, and discover that Mr Stewart and Mr Dixon are the same person! Hmm, there is definitely more to this story than met the eye.

The detectives get Tony to call Dixon and pretend to extort him by threatening to reveal his involvement in the murder. They set up a meeting, which is bugged. It's staticky at a critical moment however. They meet again in a restaurant, money changes hands, and Dixon is arrested (29').

The case falls into jeopardy, however, when it's revealed that Tony, already sort of a marginal character, essentially entrapped Dixon by threatening to reveal that he was gay. That was not part of the game plan, and so it makes it look like Dixon's confession was essentially co-erced. A judge dismisses the charges.

Schiff doesn't like the status of the case or the sorry state of the evidence. He says of the existing evidence, "Wonderful...you can use it to train puppies." I have no idea what that means, but it sure was funny.

They talk to various rich lady friends of the Dixons, who say he was a philanderer. But his wife stands by him, and says he came from a family of so many lawyers, she "thought esquire was our last name." They give Dixon a polygraph test, but the results are inconclusive. Can you see where this is going?

McCoy comes up with a new theory: Dixon's wife shot Wells while Dixon was there. McCoy manipulates Dixon into rolling on his wife. At a grand jury, Dixon says he told his wife that he was gay, she flipped out, and killed Wells. He saw her do it.

They go to arrest Dixon's wife for Wells' death. But when they show up at their house -- in a nicely executed scene -- she's in the bedroom, and Dixon is dead: she stabbed him to death, and is sitting stone still on the bed.

List of Briscoe's Wisecracks

This article features a list of Briscoe's wisecracks over the years.

5.8 Virtue

In this memorable episode (5.8), a drunk driving accident leads to an investigation of an ambitious city councilman's history of rape, but with a lack of reliable witnesses, it's hard to prove the case. Briscoe and Logan do their best to sort it out, and McCoy and Kincaid try to get witnesses to bolster their prosecution.

The episode begins with cops on patrol coming across a traffic accident, late at night. But there's something strange about it: the female victim is in the driver's seat, but her feet don't reach the petal, and whiplash doesn't explain the discrepancy. It appears that she was placed into the driver's seat after the crash, and the actual driver fled the scene. The victim, Melissa Wesley, appears to have been beaten up before the crash, too, and very likely raped. They use a valet parking stub to trace her footsteps, and find that she was at a fundraiser for city councilman Talbert, who is planning a run for congress. They talk to a campaign worker who says that the victim had a fiance, and was seen leaving the fundraiser with a man. They show the valet pictures of the event that the NY Times took, and he identifies Todd Locke, an assistant to Talbert. They talk to Locke, who reluctantly admits that the victim told him that Talbert raped her. They talk to Talbert who says he was with her, but denies he raped her. They talk to Mrs Talbert, who stands by her man.

They then visit Talbert's law firm, and a female attorney, Sarah Maslin, says that an office manager there accused Talbert of sexual harassment, but they settled with her and she left the firm. When they talk to the office manager, she says that Maslin pushed her to sue. Interesting.

The ADAs meet with Schiff, who says they need more evidence. They go back to Maslin and she reluctantly tells Kincaid that Talbert raped her. She says she didn't report it because she had to protect her career (the firm hates scandals, and she didn't want to be tainted by status as a "victim.") She didn't report it, but she did go to a doctor. The doctor says there was no physical evidence of rape, but that if Maslin says she was raped, then she was. (Her going to the doctor opens up a plot problem I will get to later.)

McCoy wants to prosecute Talbert for the Maslin rape, because he doesn't have enough evidence for the Wesley rape. McCoy tells Schiff they have to prosecute or Schiff will be held politically accountable. But as they dig deeper into the case, some problems arise: Talbert admits he had sex with Maslin but says it was consensual, and at this point, Maslin herself refuses to cooperate with the investigation. It's beginning to look like Maslin made the whole thing up. McCoy, flustered, now wants to charge her with conspiracy for accusing Talbert of rape. Finally, Maslin admits the truth: she had sex with Talbert, but did so because he said if she didn't, her career would go nowhere and she would never make partner at the firm. McCoy chews on this, and comes up with a novel charge: larceny by extortion, reasoning that Talbert forced her to give him "property" of value, namely her body.

At trial (46 mins), Maslin gives some very powerful testimony, and the defense calls no witnesses, figuring that McCoy has not made his case. But, the verdict comes back in McCoy's favor: Talbert is guilty of grand larceny in the 1st degree.

There are a few problems with this episode: Why did Talbert's aide leave the scene of the accident. So they had an accident? Big deal. He was a co-worker giving her a ride home because she was drunk. There's nothing worth covering up in that. Here's another one: if Maslin had consensual sex with Talbert, then why would she go to the doctor the next day? Especially since she wasn't physically injured? That doesn't make sense either.

Casting note: the CSU technician at the original accident scene is Paul Schulze, aka Father Intintola from The Sopranos and Ryan Chappelle from 24.

10.8 Blood Money

In this interesting episode (10.8), an old insurance salesman is found stabbed and shot in the back of a cab. When it's discovered he reneged on life insurance policies sold to Polish Jews during World War II, everyone realizes the list of people with a motive to kill him is almost infinite, but it turns out the real killer has more than just a business relationship with him. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Carmichael orchestrate difficult prosecutions against some unlikely defendants.

The episode begins with the discovery of the old man, Peter Grimaldi, in the back of his cab, stabbed to death. The cabbie, Mr Singh, was talking on his cell phone and didn't notice anything amiss till the end of the ride. All he noticed was a young black man helping him into the cab at the start of the trip.

The detectives trace a stamp on his shirt to a dry cleaner, who has records based on the stamp. They are able to identify him as Peter Grimaldi. The talk to his doorman, who says he was a grumpy old traditional man who used to sell insurance. They talk to his bank, which is located right next to where the cab ride originated. The bank says he had a safe deposit box there, which he emptied the day he was killed. Partial prints on the taxi cab lead to a young man named Roland Dell who fits the description the cabbie gave. They track him down to his brother-in-law's apartment, and after a brief chase through the apartment, they take him into custody. As Green draws his gun and corners Dell, Green looks at the metal bar in Dell's hand and says, "Rock, paper, scissors...gun."

Back at the precinct, Dell lawyers up and refuses to say anything, and Van Buren makes a crack to Green about being in "hot pursuit" today. She says she's surprised Green didn't push Dell out the window. Green says he's surprised too. This is AVB needling Green about his history of excessive force.

Carmichael tells the detectives they need more evidence. They go to the ME and get some surprising information: he was not merely stabbed; he was also shot. Either injury could have killed him.

The detectives wonder, What could be in the briefcase. They talk to the victim's daughter and his son, Jordan. Neither have much to say. They mention the victim's lady friend, Gail Bartlett, who tells the detectives that a man came to Grimaldi's door recently and Grimaldi was upset after the exchange. They talk to the doorman who says it was a process server. AC checks for lawsuits involving Grimaldi, but can't find any, but figures he could be involved even if he wasn't a plaintiff or defendant.

They talk to his former employer, All Atlantic Insurance, who also doesn't have much to say. They check to see if Grimaldi was still practicing insurance, so they visit the licensing bureau where they learn that Grimaldi's original first name was Pietro, and they learn of an angry letter from a Mrs Wolcoff. They track Wolcoff to a nursing home, but she's dead. A nurse there remembers hearing Grimaldi's name a alot. Wolcoff was angry because, she said, Grimaldi sold her family some insurance a long time ago but never paid up. They talk to Wolcoff's daughter, who explains: Grimaldi sold life insurance to Jews during the war in Poland, but then refused to pay the policies when they died. The DAs meet to discuss this case, and have at least 59 people who were similarly ripped off. That number is about to grow, however.

AC visits the Italian consulate to learn more about Grimaldi's insurance company from the old days, Federale Insurance. They theorize that perhaps Federale arranged Grimaldi's death so he wouldn't testify against them in a case that was being brought against them. AC also learns some interesting stuff about Federale: she gleefully (for her) reports to McCoy that Federale is owned by...All Atlantic Insurance.

McCoy visits the board chairman and an executive of All Atlantic and grills them about their connection to Grimaldi. They are quite defensive. McCoy talks to Grimaldi's children again, and reveals that the case could involve hundreds of millions of dollars. He asks what they know, and the son finally admits that he's seen a book containing records of all these policies. The book was kept secretly by his father, and he said it might be worth money some day.

They talk to Roland Dell again to see what he knows about the part of the murder he wasn't involved in. He won't talk, but his brother-in-law says he hooked Dell up with the boss of a security company. That boss, Mr Burton, acted on behalf of All Atlantic and apparently hired Dell to rob the briefcase (containing the ledger book), but the robbery went bad and Dell stabbed him. Dell eventually rolls on Burton, and Burton says he saw a man (who fits Jordan Grimaldi's description) at the scene, arguing with Grimaldi right before the robbery. They arrest Grimaldi (33') and then decide to go after the executives of All Atlantic for grand larceny for defrauding the Jews during the war, and continuing to defraud them by not paying now. They arrest the execs (off camera) and charge them with 1136 counts of grand larceny, which makes for an interesting arraignment. The execs are representing by recurring character Arthur Gold (George Grizzard). Gold tells AC she better come up with that book: no book, no case.

The judge tells the ADAs the same thing, but lets the case proceed. McCoy talks to the son to see what else he knows. Grimaldi says he didn't want the book to sell it, he wanted it to make things right for the victims of his father's fraudulent activity. McCoy asks him to testify without making a plea deal, and he does.

At the execs' trial (41') an eldery victim of the fraud testifies about how Grimaldi sold insurance to his father, and how his father was later killed and he had to carry his ill sister to Italy to claim the money, and then Grimaldi refused to acknowledge the policy. Jordan Grimaldi then takes the stand and, in a moment of courage and self-rectification, I suppose, admits that he shot his father to keep him from selling the book to All Atlantic, a sale which would have kept secret these policies forever. Bressler, the lower executive of the company, wants to make a deal. He rolls on his chairman, Hamilton Stewart, and says he gave the ledger book to Stewart. Schiff is present during this session, which is extremely unusual. Stewart testifies, and McCoy makes him look like a bad man. Not wanting to face the jury's verdict, he makes a deal: he'll give up the book in exchange for 4-12 years, and he won't be able to fight extradition if Italy wants him to atone for his crimes.

As the episode ends, McCoy looks at the ledger book, and Schiff says it wasn't the book that made the crimes real.

Casting note: Jordan Grimaldi is played by Matt Servito [pic], who plays Dwight Harris, the recurring FBI agent on The Sopranos.

13.24 Smoke

In this episode (13.24), a famous comedian/movie star is investigated after his adopted baby falls to his death after being dangled out a hotel window during a fire. The investigation leads to evidence of a conspiracy by the comedian to commit child abuse, abuse which in one case occurred at least 5 years ago. Briscoe and Green uncover the conspiracy, and McCoy and Southerlyn figure out how to prosecute it.

The episode begins at the scene of the fire, out on the street looking up at it. A crowd has gathered, and a woman says audibly, "I heard he fell out of Monty's window." Briscoe and Green show up to learn the details, and find that the victim in the case is a baby, DOA, who apparently fell from the winow during the fire. Dialogue between Green and others indicates that "Monty" is Monty Bender, a rich and famous comic who also has a film career.

The detectives visit the scene, and there is some evidence that it was arson: the fire alarms were turned off, some things just don't add up, and the cause seems to be a cigarette tossed into a wastepaper basket. They learn that Monty was dangling the kid out the window, supposedly to keep him away from the smoke. They learn that Monty's nutritionist and stylist were also in the room at the time of the fire.

The talk to the Fred the nutrionist and Birgit, the stylist. Both of them have very similar stories, even down to the words they use to describe it. They both mention that the smoke was like a "fog." This catches the detectives' attention, and they figure there is more to this than meets the eye.

They visit Monty in the hospital, who doesn't reveal much beside the fact that the baby was adopted a year ago. They talk to the manager of the hotel, who is much more informative. He says Monty moved in a year ago and is a good tenant. He says that Monty gets frequent visits from his masseur, Harvey, and that Harvey is gay, so maybe Monty is, too. They bring Harvey in for questioning at the precinct, and he is nervous. While they're questioning, he says something like "I never did anything...I never touched those kids," which is the first indication the detectives have that Monty was involved in something beside this fire.

Green gets Harvey to explain everything from the beginning. Harvey says Monty bought an ice cream truck which Harvey would drive around while Monty would peer out through holes in the side. When he saw kids he liked, he would signal Harvey who would get out and talk to the kids parents and invite the parents and the kid up to Monty's estate in the Berkshires. At the estate, Harvey says, Monty would "play" with the kids.

The detectives talk over the case, and AVB says something dumb like, "They say to know a comedian you have to be a comedian." So they go and talk to Larry Miller, another comedian, who says he only knows Monty distantly -- they shared a few drinks many, many years ago. SO WHY ARE THEY TALKING TO HIM?? God, this is terrible writing. At least Larry is funny. Anyway, Larry says he heard rumors that Monty was involved in a sex abuse case a few years back and he settled it for "seven figures."

They check out Monty's financial records and find payments to a Mr Mireles for $1 million, and subsequent payments for $500K each. They visit Mr Mireles, who says he gets paid because he wrote Monty's second picture, "The Wicked Stepson." They learn that Mr Mireles has two kids: one who is young and ill, and another, Sammy, who is 17 and a freshman at Hudson University.

They talk to Sammy, and he is evasive, even though Green tries to win him over (or something) by accessing the internet wirelessly on Sammy's laptop. (More wasted dialogue and action!) Sammy says he rarely talks to his parents, prompting Briscoe to say that his daughter "calls me all the time to tell me how much I screwed up her life."

The ME calls and says she wants to talk about the baby. They visit her and she says the baby had no smoke in its lungs: it was dead before the fire. (This sounds awfully significant, except the writer of the episode never bothered to tie up this thread later on: Monty is not held accountable for the death of this baby.)

They talk to the stylist again to find out how the baby died, but she doesn't roll on Monty, apparently b/c he's paying her a lot of money. Meanwhile, Green says he Googled "Sammy Mineles" and found a deposition from Sammy on a site called upyourbutt.net, which is very similar to The Smoking Gun, which publishes various legal documents. The deposition says that Monty abused him by performing oral sex on him. They use this evidence to arrest Monty (27 mins).

Bail is set at $1 million by the growly judge, who tells him that "ten of those dollars are mine," meaning that he went to see one of Monty's movies. The ADAs discuss the case with Monty's lawyer, recurring character James Granick, who moves for dismissal because the deposition is not admissible, since it should have been sealed. The judge agrees and the case is dismissed.

They decide to charge the Mireles's with conspiracy to commit sex abuse since they continue to accept payments from Monty. The detectives arrest the Mireles's (37 mins) -- I don't know how they expect to make this stick, given that the only evidence they have is still that deposition, which had just been tossed. McCoy says that since the civil case the deposition didn't involve the Mireles's directly.

So guess who the Mireles's get to represent them? That's right! Monty's lawyer, Granick. Mrs Mireles explains that she took the money from Monty because they're younger son was sick (deformed heart) and they couldn't afford to pay for his operations. Well, MAYBE IF THEY HAD GONE THROUGH WITH THEIR LAWSUIT they could have gotten that money, too. The DAs confer, during which Southerlyn says she's the only one in the room who doesn't have kids.

The Mireles's go on trial for conspiracy to commit sex abuse, which wasn't really supposed to happen: McCoy was just trying to pressure them to testify against Monty. Regardless, Harvey testifies about the ice cream truck, and says that Sammy was one of the kids recruited through that operation. Mrs Mireles testifies and says that her son told her that Monty touched him and that he didn't like Monty anmore. Sammy testifies and says he made up the whole story, though McCoy thinks he's just saying this b/c he doesn't want his parents to go to jail. Sammy mentions that the abuse occurred on Labor Day weekend, which makes McCoy stop and think, and then ask for a recess. He reviews the evidence, and realizes that Monty's first $1M check to Mireles was written on August 27 -- the week before Labor Day. This suggests that the Mireles's pimped their son to Monty, since they received payment in advance of the visit. Yuck.

McCoy calls everyone into the Family Conference Room, and tells Sammy what he's discovered. Sammy realizes that his parents pimped him and freaks out. He says, "You sold me," and then asks to "testify again," although he means he wants to merely continue his testimony. Back at trial, he does, and says that Monty "did oral sex to me. After that, we had ice cream." He also says of his mom, who -- let's not forget -- is the defendant: "She knew! She knew!" and yet Granick doesn't object, although this sort of statement is not really allowed, ssince he is both testifying that his mom is guilty of something that hasn't been proved, and also he is stating what's going in her mind.

The verdict comes back: Guilty of conspiracy to commit sex abuse.

Back at the DAs office, Serena tells everyone that Monty has been arrested and was remanded. She gives Jack a strange look, and their subsequent dialogue reveals that SS thinks they went too hard on the Mireles's. GIVE ME A BREAK, SERENA. What are you, the new Nora Lewin?? She's sympathetic, she says, because they were just trying to save their younger, ill son. For crying out loud, aren't there better ways to do that than pimping your other son?

The episode holds your interest, because you keep waiting to find out the rest of the story, but it suffers from several major flaws, including the fact that you never see Monty on trial, and the case with which the episode opened -- the dead baby -- is never adequately resolved. On top of these problems, there are several other smaller ones, such as Serena's inexplicable sympathy, several wasted scenes, and a lot of improbabilities (famous movie star gazes at kids while crouched in custom-fitted ice cream truck? Come on!).

As far as character background goes, we get confirmation of some things that we may have heard before: Briscoe must have two daughters, since one of them was killed a few seasons earlier; McCoy has a daughter (also discussed in a previous episode); Southerlyn has no kids (we could have guessed that one); and Branch has at least one kid.

As is obvious from this summary, the episode contains many parallels to the Michael Jackson case, who also dangled his child out the window of a hotel, apparently abused kids, and had a deposition about such abuse leaked to the internet.

The most interesting thing about the episode is that the comedian Larry Miller appears as himself! What makes this particularly odd is that he has appeared in two other episodes (Coma and Encore) as a character named Michael Dobson. There have been tons of times when L&O gets the same actor to play different characters, but I believe Larry is the only one who has played himself and another character.

7.13 Matrimony

In this episode (7.13) an old man is dead, and it looks like his young trophy wife is responsible. But the case gets more complicated when it is revealed that the trophy wife has an even more conniving and villainous mother. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and McCoy and Ross ultimately solve the case by setting up a sting against the perpetrator.

The episode begins with a young couple looking at their neighbors through a telescope. As they survey the cityscape, they spot a dead man on the floor. The police investigate, and learn the victim is a wealthy man named Peter Triandos. They talk to his young Southern wife, Kim, who shows up. She says she was out socializing at a charity ball, while he was hosting a party for students he was sending to college on scholarship. They talk to his personal assistant Robert who lives in the home and his holed up in his room, drunk out of his mind. They practically have to break the door down to talk to him, but he didn't hear anything.

They talk to Triandos's lawyer, Oliver, who says that at the party, the father of one of the student's gave Triandos a hard time. They talk to the son, who has a bruise on his hands that he doesn't explain very well ("I was changing a tire.") They talk to his father, a drunk, who says that Triandos accused him of stealing. The kid eventually admits that he got the bruise on his hands from punching his father, who stole a mink jacket belonging to Kim. They talk to Kim's driver to figure out her alibi, and he says that maybe she did to it.

They talk to Kim's friend Cassie, a stripper, who reveals that Kim used to strip, too, even though she told Triandos that she was an interior decorator.

They confront Kim about how a coat she was supposedly wearing at the charity ball ended up in the hands of a guy who stole it from her house. She says she snuck back to the house without her driver because she thought her mother and Treandos might be having an affair. They learn that Oliver and Kim were friends before she met Triandos, and that he set them up, knowing she was a stripper.

During all this Curtis reveals that he and his wife are separated and he's staying on his sister's couch for the time being.

They bring Kim in for questioning, and Oliver shows up to represent her. But while he's outside, she says that he set her up to scam Triandos for both of them. Kim is arrested. (31 mins)

The investigation continues. We learn that Peter was 74 and Kim is only 22. They want to charge Oliver, but they can't figure out what to charge him with. Kim gets a new lawyer, recurring character Arthur Gold (George Grizzard) who gets Kim's statement about Oliver suppressed, since Oliver was technically representing her.

At trial (39 mins), Gold tries to accuse the drunk personal assistant, without much luck. But, it's enough to create reasonable doubt, apparently, and Kim is acquitted (47 mins) of Murder 2. Now, when a verdict comes in at 47 minutes in to the episode, you know you haven't seen all the twists and turns yet. And so it is.

Triandos's heirs want to file a civil suit against Kim, and in the course of their investigation, they uncover some discrepancies in the scholarship payments. It turns out that Oliver was creating "phantom students" and writing checks out of the scholarship fund for these imaginary students and keeping the money himself. In short, he was embezzling. In trying to connect Kim to Oliver, they talk to a waiter at a restaurant who says he saw Kim's MOM, not Kim, with Oliver. They get Kim to wear a wire to lunch with her mom, while the detectives and ADAs listen from the kitchen and a van. The mom admits that she killed Triandos and is arrested.

14.23 Caviar Emptor

In this rather bad episode (14.23) a family feud over a caviar business turns violent, and a various members of two Persian-Americans are suspects. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute. But what's the point.

The episode begins in a home where it's clear a wedding has just taken place. The patriarch of the family is found dead. The son wants an autopsy, but the new wife doesn't. Southerlyn has to go to a judge's house -- in the episode's opening moments -- to settle it. The judge allows the autopsy because the marriage papers haven't officially been filed yet (it's a weekend). The ME determines the case was a homicide. They talk to the new wife, who is a little antagonistic and snotty, and learn that she is the niece of the victim's chief competitor in the caviar business. The talk to this competitor, who says the victim's son, Ben, is too ambitious and was spreading the business too thin, so to speak. They conduct this interview at a caviar shop, and both detectives try the caviar. There responses are predictable.

Ben is now a suspect. The murder weapon is determined to be a pillow: the victim was smothered to death. The pillow is found in the victim's daughter's room, so it looks like she did it. Van Buren interviews her, and she breaks down. Southerlyn talks to the family lawer, who was jogging during his first meeting with the detectives earlier in the ep and is now riding his bike while talking to Southerlyn.

So what about a motive? Well, the victim's daughter and son-in-law wanted to adopt a Chinese baby, but the victim didn't want that adoption to happen. They arrest the victim's daughter, Roys. (33 mins) Roya is represented by recurring lawyer Professor Norman Rothenberg, who is great. Apparently, Roya confessed to her rabbi, but this confession is considered privileged. Skoda talks to Roya, and she breaks down when discussing her dad's opposition to the adoption. She is also angry because prior to his marrying the new wife, she was more like the wife around the house, and she's no longer the favored female. But, at trial, Roya's husband takes the stand and confesses, and Roya is found not guilty as the husband is carried away.

This episode is a stupid waste of time. The writers pretty much just phoned this one in, and it seems like a missed opportunity, given that it is Briscoe's second-to-last episode.

The episode's title is a play on the phrase "Caveat Emptor," which is Latin for "let the buyer beware."

5.18 Privileged

In this episode (5.18), a troubled young man kills an elderly couple who he thinks are his own adoptive parents. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and Kincaid and McCoy figure out how to prosecute this man who had violence in his heart, but was psychotic and molested as a child.

The episode begins with with the discovery of a very bloody crime scene: an elderly couple stabbed to death in their bed. Each victim has been stabbed a dozen times. Their names are David and Arlene Lerner, and they were married for 25 years.

At the precinct, they learn the murder weapon was a knife taken from the house. They talk to the couple's daughter, who is clueless. They check out the couple's work situation (small ad agency) but nothing there either, except for an old partner who blames David for his bankruptcy, and now works at a coffee shop. He didn't kill them, though.

The detectives do a walk-through of the crime scene, and try to figure out why the killer used the windows. A former tenant tells them that the famous divorce lawyer, Mr Barlett, used to live there. This leads them to believe that perhaps the Lerners were the wrong victims.

They talk to Mr Barlett and his associates, one of whom, a music executive, reveals that Bartlett's son has a big drug problem and was a foster child. The learn that this son, Steven Smith, had wrecked his car by the victim's house on the same night as the murder. Briscoe says that one time he went into "the wrong wife's house" after a "bender" and that the incident led him to join a 12-step program. They theorize that Smith may have gone to his old home, being confused.

They talk to Steven's AA sponsor, who leads them to his girlfriend, Sally. She says that Steven told her he dreamed he killed an elderly couple. Steven's prints match those at the scene, and they arrest him. (27 mins). But the fingerprint is almost suppressed because it was fruit of a confession Steven made in group therapy. However, a judge leaves it in.

Steven, predictably, pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect. Olivet talks to him to determine whether Steven wanted to kill his own foster parents. McCoy and Kincaid have differing opinions as to whether he deserves sympathy.

To find out what happened, they seek to hypnotize him, even though whatever he says is not admissible. Under hypnotism, he remembers and describes abuse by his foster mother, who was an alcoholic. He also remembers stabbing her. His defense lawyer argues that it's justifiable homicide, therefore, since he believed he was killing someone who harmed him. Whatever.

At trial (43 mins), his foster mom admits abuse of alcohol and Steven, and says she went after him with a carving knife when he was 12.

Fearful that his case is falling apart, McCoy dismisses the charges against Steven for the murder of the Lerner woman, but leaves them intact as far as the case of Mr Lerner is concerned. This takes away the justifiable homicide defense from Steven, since the foster dad never abused him, see? Very clever McCoy. The verdict comes back: Guilty of Murder 2.

Both Kincaid and I think McCoy went to far on this one. The kid was messed up and probably should've been committed to a psychiatric hospital, not convicted of murder.

8.23 Tabloid

In this episode (8.23), a couple of murders take place because of a gossip columnist's efforts to uncover a story of an unwanted pregnancy in a Kennedy-like family. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and McCoy and Ross try to pressure the family into revealing the truth.

The episode begins with a doorman and a UPS deliveryman squabbling over the where the UPS guy parked his truck. He says he's just trying to do his job, and the doorman says the same thing. The dispute comes to an abrupt end, however, as they look up and see a woman getting run over by a car. The victim is Margaret Abbott, a Hudson University law professor and member of the prominent Abbot family. The detectives suspect that she was chased into the street, putting her in the path of the car. The detectives talk to her rich husband, who tells them his wife was a nominee to be a judge. He says that the family is always in the public eye -- "Just a pick up a copy of the New York Ledger," he says, referencing the tabloid newspaper that is the namesake of this website.

Back at the precinct, Van Buren asks Briscoe, "How ya doin?" From the emotional tenor of her voice, you get the impression she's asking about his daughter, who was killed in the previous episode. Back on the case, they talk to the people at Hudson Law, who say that the victim's mood had changed lately. They get some background on the victim from a column called "Phil Marco's New York," a Ledger gosspit column similar to Page Six in the New York Post. Marco asserts that the husband may have been having an affair with an intern, but Marco refuses to say anything more than what's in his column, arguing he has a first amendment right not to.

They trace the victim's steps before her death, and learn from people at her gym that Marco was there. They threaten to take Marco into custody as a material witness if he doesn't cooperate. He says he has an alibi: he was in a meeting with a management company about another celebrity named "Bee Bee".

In the course of all this, Briscoe receives a phone call: Danny Jones, local drug dealer, was the one who put out the contract for the killing of his daughter.

Continuing with their investigation, Marco says he had a confrontation with the victim over his story about an unwanted pregnancy. He refuses to say more than that, but the victim's husband says that Marco was stalking them. During this scene, we meet the victim's daughter, Laura, who hangs back like a wall flower. But we know from experience that anytime a character is unnecessarily introduced during an interview scene, that character is almost always the perpetrator. So we keep Laura's image in the back of our mind.

At a meeting og the prosecutors meeting, Ross is upset over the light treatment that the Abbotts and Marco are getting. McCoy mentions Judge Feldman, who we know is planning to run against Schiff for District Attorney.

Marco pleads to harrasmment and allocutes. He is sentenced to community service and fined. (20 mins).

Sound like too light a punishment? Well, someone else though so, too: Marco is shot dead outside a restaurant. An crowd assembled outside the restaurant applauds his death.

So now they have a new death to investigate. They focus on Mr Abbott, of course, because he has a 9mm gun, and Marco was shot with a 9mm. But he has an alibi: he was with that intern he supposedly had an affair with, Julianne Lowry.

Ross talks to Lowry, and Ross asks whether the "unwanted pregnancy" we've been hearing so much about was hers. Her reply: "What [Abbott] likes, you can't get pregant from." Hm!

They search Marco's apartment, and find references to Laura Abbott in his files. Ross talks to the detectives, and they begin to suspect that Laura's birth may have been unwanted, that the orginal victim in this case, Mrs Abbott, got pregnant during an affair. Marco may have been planning to go public with the story, Laura caught wind of it, and killed Marco.

Meanwhile, Ross has family trouble of her own, having been subpoenaed by her ex-husband and co-worker Neal, who is seeking full custody of their daughter.

They bring Laura in for questioning, and McCoy is harsh with her. But Mr Abbott, not Laura, says he shot Marco.

He goes on trial (38 mins), and the trial becomes about Marco's career of muckraking instead of his murder. The case heats up, and Ross has yet another custody hearing. She also makes reference to the possibility of her marrying her current boyfriend, David.

The trial continues to be a boring discussion about the nature of journalism, and eventually, after I fell asleep and woke up three times, Abbott is found not guilty of Man 1, but guilty of Man 2. He's sentenced to a maximum of 7 years.

So, in terms of character background, we learn some new information about Briscoe's daughters death: her boyfriend, the drug dealer Danny Jones ordered it. We also learn that Ross's custody dispute (highlighted in the three-part series from Season 7) is continuing, and that she might marry her boyfriend David.

8.12 Expert

In this episode (8.12), an expert on a certain psychological malfunction who often testifies in criminal trials is nearly shot to death. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, trying to determine whether someone upset with him for getting a defendant acquitted might be to blame, or whether there was a different motivation. McCoy and Ross head up and unusual trial in which the victim essentially testifies on behalf of the defendant.

The episode begins with a group of people having a fun time in a restaurant. One gets up to use the bathroom, and shots are fired. Two customers run toward the restroom, guns drawn, yelling, "Mike? Mike?" Mike is fine, his mafia buddies are happy to learn, but Mr Milton, a 37-year-old camera repairman isn't so lucky: he's dead. Also shot, but still alive, is Dr Leon Mayer, 54, a psychologist from Seattle. He's at the hospital.

Curtis and Briscoe figure that Mike was the intended victim. They talk to an employee at the restaurant who remembers Mike's party as being sort of trashy, low-class types who didn't know anything about wine. But one of the women in the party left her business card. They track down this woman, and learn that she was out with Andy, Paul, and Mike, because of her friend Jen. They talk to Jen, who denies knowing these people. They talk to Mr Milton's wife who is sad and has no idea why anyone would want to harm him. Briscoe finds a connection between Mike and Jen's husband, and they track down Mike. Mike says he thinks Willy, Jen's husband's brother, was probably the shooter.

They talk to Dr Mayer, who still has a bullet in him. The pattern of shots indicates that he was in a bathroom stall, the door was opened, he was shot, he closed the door, and then he was shot again. This means that he was the target, and everyone else was just caught in the crossfire. So who would want to shoot Dr Mayer?

Without talking to Mayer too much, they use a Broadway ticket to trace him to a hotel room that was paid for by a law firm. They discover that the firm was retaining him as an expert witness for a client they are defending, a Mr Worley who ran over his girlfriend. The girlfriend's brother becomes a new suspect. But they talk to a pretzel vendor outside the restaurant who didn't see anyone matching the brother's description. He says he saw a woman fleeing the scene through a back door. Sounds like the shooter was a woman.

They talk to an executive who tried to "pick up" this lady at the restaurant. They trace her to where she works, and find her name is Lindsay Carson, and that she is connected to one a case Mayer once testified in. However, the defendant was convicted in that case, so it doesn't seem like vengeance would have been a motive. Unless...

They talk to Mayer in the hospital and learn that the case that Lindsay was upset about was actually her father's murder trial. He had gotten angry about getting fired and shot some people at his workplace. Mayer testified that he suffered a temporary "detachment" disorder from the stress of being fired, and was not aware of his actions at the time of the shooting. The jury didn't buy it, however, and so the father, Mr Rigg, was convicted. They reason Carson was mad at Mayer for screwing up her father's defense.

They search Carson's apartment, and arrest her after finding gunpowder in her portfolio case (27 mins). A judge suppresses this evidence, however, and charges against her are dismissed. Ballistics can only make a 60% match between the gun Rigg used in his workplace shooting and the gun Carson supposedly used when she shot Mayer. They visit Rigg at Attica to see how the daughter got the gun, but he won't help. They go to a hotel upstate where Rigg stayed after the original shooting, and learn that Carson stayed in the same hotel the next night, in the same room, even. They determine that Rigg left the gun inside of a space heater, and that Carson recovered it. They re-arrest her. And now things get really interesting. She pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect, arguing that she, too, had that same kind of dissociative episode that her father had. In other words, she using a defense promoted by her victim as her own defense.

Skoda interviews her, and determines that Carson was upset at Mayer for messing up her dad's defense. He got the details of Rigg's case mixed up with someone else's on the stand, and so lacked credibility. Mayer says that Carson was dissociative at the time she shot him, and so should not be held responsible.

He maintains this position at trial (48 mins), and McCoy cross-examines him. He gets Mayer to admit that during his testimony in the Rigg case, Mayer said that Rigg remembered being at the hotel upstate, but he shouldn't have, because of his "dissociative" state. This shows that Rigg wasn't actually dissociative, and that Mayer is full of crap.

Back at the family conference room, Carson confesses and pleads to Murder 2, and gets 20 to life.

5.16 Wannabe

In this episode (5.16), a man is shot dead in the street, and the investigation eventually leads to a couple of boys who are "wannabe" thugs. Briscoe and Logan generate the leads, but McCoy and Kincaid have to figure out who is actually responsible for the crime.

The episode begins at a birthday party, where people are waiting for the father to arrive. Shots are heard outside, and the victim, Bill Prescott, is the father everyone was waiting for. He's been shot twice in the back.

Logan and Briscoe arrive to investigate. The livery driver who dropped him off at the corner doesn't remember seeing anything. Ballistics says the weapon is a "Charter Arms Undercover." They check out his place of work, and learn that he was a "turnaround specialist" who often upset unions with his tactics. There were occasional threats against him. Ballistics does further research and learns that the gun was used in an old liquor store robbery. They talk to a Mr Rose who committed the robbery. Logan is rough with him, and he admits he dropped the gun in a subway tunnel.

They continue investigating and learn that his son was associated with a young, relatively poor Irish kid named Harrigan at their school, Chase Academy. Harrigan's dad is a trackwalker for the subway, which suggests Mr Harrigan may have found the gun there, gotten mad at Prescott for something, and shot him. Or perhaps his son got the gun from Mr Harrigan. They talk to Mr Harrigan, who says he called Prescott in an effort to get his son re-admitted to the school They talk to the headmaster of the school, but he clams up. Eventually they learn that Harrigan's son, Colin, once brought a gun to school and threatened Prescott's son with it. They expelled him for this.

They execute at a search warrant at the Harrigans. The son and dad arrive while their home is being searched. They arrest Colin Harrigan (28 mins), but a judge suppressed the evidence found in their home, saying the warrant was bad. They also learn that another student at Chase, a rich kid named Stuart Barclay, also threatened Prescott's son. They learn that Barclay was the leader of a gang of "wannabe" thugs who were really just preppie rich kids who idolized Harrigan.

They bring in the Barclay kid for questioning, and he's a stuck-up brat. It also turns out that he is the son of the school's attorney who was making an effort to conceal information about Harrigan's troubles at Chase earlier in the episode. They talk to the headmaster again, who has a classist contempt for Harrigan, and Mr Barclay says he doesn't like "Irish Micks" like Harrigan.

McCoy, suspecting that Barclay, not Harrigan, did the shooting, bluffs the Harrigan kid and says Barclay rolled on him and said he did the shooting. Instead, Harrigan's dad confesses to the crime, apparently in a bid to protect his son. He leads them to the gun, which he has hidden in a subway tunnel. They arrest the dad (42 mins), and he accepts a plea deal.

At his allocution, however, he offers testimony inconsistent with the facts of the case, saying that he saw the victim exit the livery cab. (The livery cab said he had dropped Prescott on the corner, not in front of his house.) To get to the bottom of it, McCoy drags in all the members of the wannabes, and threatens them with conspiracy to commit violence. One of the kids rolls and says Barclay and Harrington had a plan to kill Prescott. Barclay, now in the hot seat, wants a good deal with no record, and he says Harrigan pulled the trigger.

McCoy gets both sons in the Family Conference Room, and the Harrigan kid admits to the crime, even though we still have the impression that Barclay actually did the shooting. But Harrigan is steadfast, apparently trying to take it like a man, and the rich kid Barclay gets off scot-free.

6.16 Savior

In this episode (6.16), it appears that a desperate father kills his family to spare them, and himself, the humiliation of watching him fall apart. Olivet cautiously suggests the man might fit the profile of a "family annihilator," but the truth turns out to be more complicated.

The episode begins with woman and her son walking down the sidewalk. The son is discussing his stomach ache. They enter a townhouse, and call out to the occupants. They go upstairs and discover the woman's sister and nephew dead, and her niece seriously injured. Briscoe and Curtis arrive and learn that the victim's name is Joyce Elder, and her son Billy, 10, was also shot to death. The CSU team finds an empty jewelry box on the floor of a closet. They begin looking for the victim's husband, Ron Weber, but he is nowhere to be found. They head to the hospital, where the girl, Jenna, is in bad condition. She asks where her father is, but they still don't known. They regroup at the precinct (where Van Buren mentions she's been married 15 years). The detectives decide to talk to Jenna's friends to see if anyone may have followed her home from where she was the previous night. One of the boys, Chester, mentions that Jenna's mom didn't like him very much.

They finally locate the husband, who arrives at the precinct looking desperate and is very shaky during questioning. He says he was out drinking and fell asleep and woke up in a diner. Briscoe finds this an unlikely story, saying that because of his own drinking binges, he missed the Carter administration, but he was always home for breakfast.

They talk to a bartender who says he saw Weber with a co-worker named Sheila Gordon. They talk to her. She denies and affair, but says that Weber's wife worked for the liquor licensing authority. They talk to her boss there, who says she was a tough lady. Perhaps she angered someone and they struck back? They check complaints against her, only to eventually determine that she was actually seeking bribes from applicants, apparently to pay of family debt.

The debt occurred, it seems, after Weber got laid off from his job and didn't tell his wife. (She found out when his ex-boss mentioned it at a cocktail party.) The boss theorizes that Weber was planning a "Willy Loman" kind of thing, referring to the title character in Death of a Salesman who decides he was worth more dead than alive because of life insurance.

They interrogate Weber, but Kincaid tells the dets they need more before they can charge him. They have enough for a search warrant, and search his office, where they find the jewelry that was missing from the box found in the closet. They arrest him. (27 mins.)

Weber is represented by the attorney Margot Bell, who went to law school with Kincaid. Kincaid mentions that Bell replaced her on law review because Kincaid was spending too much time with "what's-his-name." Kincaid and Bell discuss the nature of lawyering, but are unable to reach a deal on Weber, who even Bell thinks is guilty. During this conversation, Claire mentions the parallel real-life case of John List, who also killed his family.

They bring in Olivet for her advice. She doesn't meet with Weber because Bell doesn't want her to, but given the available info on Weber, she tentatively tells McCoy that he fits the profile of the family annihilator, men who destroy their families to save them from humiliation, impending chaos, etc.

At trial (32 mins), Weber's daughter testifies that she doesn't remember anything, and Olivet testifies on the nature of family annihilators. But another psychological expert, who actually examined Weber, says he's not a family annihilator. Schiff expresses his frustration about this "battle of the experts," and gets even more worried when they learn Weber is going to testify on his own behalf. Schiff figures he'll "cry himself to an acquittal."

Weber does indeed break down on the stand when McCoy cross-examines him, but reaction shots of Olivet show that she is concerned. She tells McCoy that he should have broken down and confessed, which he didn't. McCoy is pissed at Olivet, but as she says, it's not her fault...McCoy asked her for an opinion, which she qualified. Schiff tells McCoy to offer Man I and "move on."

In the interest of what's best for Weber, Bell allows Olivet to examine him, as long as it's off the record. He discusses the problems between his daughter and his wife. Kincaid and Bell talk to Jenna's aunt, who says that Jenna and her mom often fought over Chester, Jenna's one-time boyfriend.

This leads to Chester being questioned again by the detectives, and he is evasive. The case is thrown into turmoil as Chester becomes a suspect. McCoy begins looking for a way out, which surprises Claire. McCoy refers to himself as "Hang 'em High McCoy," and says he just wants justice.

Kincaid eats fries at her desk, and theorizes that Jenna told Chester to kill her mom. This calls for the old Family Conference Room meeting, which happens, and Weber plays along to get his daughter to confess. He and McCoy make it look like he's going to accept a plea bargain and go to jail for 8 years. This is too much for Jenna to bear, and she finally rolls on Chester, saying he came in to rob the jewelry, found it wasn't there (Weber had taken it away to pawn it) and went crazy because he was stoned. But McCoy finds her to be not completely forthcoming, and asks her, Why did you involve Chester? He accuses her of setting up the murder, which she apparently confesses to off-camera.

In the epilogue, Kincaid and Bell play racquetball. See, it's a game, just like being a lawyer! They even talk about how a trial is like a game, just in case you didn't get it!

The plot of this episode is awfully similar to another episode, Flight, in which a father kills his son by injecting him with a deady virus because of a similarly desperate situation.

So, character background from the ep: we learn AVB has been married 15 years as of Season 6, and Kincaid was on law review with Bell, and gave it up because of a romantic attachment.

8.14 Grief

In this episode (8.14), an assault case leads to two incapacitated women -- one comatose, one mentally unstable -- who appear to have been raped in a hospital environment. But each case -- the assault and the two rapes -- turn out to be more complicated than they first appear to be. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, while Ross and McCoy figure out who they can put on trial, and for what.

The episode begins with a beating victim in a tunnel in central park. He talks to the detectives, but won't explain what happened. They talk to some other cops who happened to have arrested the victim, George Harding, a few days earlier. They say that two guys were chasing him. The cops aren't much help, however, so they go to a bar where these guys were scene. A barmaid identifies the guys as the Russo brothers.

They go to question Russo in his apartment building (where they find a door aggressively marked "Don't Knock! Day Sleeper!" A neighbor reveals that the Russo's don't live in that apartment any more, but he has some mail for them from a local psychiatric hospital. It's the same hospital where Harding works, and it turns out that the Russos' sister is a patient there. Hm!

They find Frank Russo, and Joe Russo is hiding in the closet, but they quickly find him because he was smoking in the closet. They are interrogated down at the precinct, and they eventually admit their motive: Harding raped their sister at the hospital.

They talk to an orderly at the hospital who knows Harding to see whether this is true. This leads to another case of a patient having sex, apparently with Harding: at Harding's previous place of employment, a comatose woman named Wendy Singer may also have been raped by Harding. The detectives head to that hospital and find Singer -- pregnant!

Singer's parents are going to try to have the baby delivered anyway, because Singer ended up in a coma by getting into a car accident while she was pregnant. The fetus died in the accident, costing them (essentially) a daughter and a grandchild. It's also revealed that Harding was having an affair with a nurse at this hospital, and their are certain similarities between those encounters and those described by the Russos' sister.

They talk to Leslie Russo to find out what happened. She is very mentally disturbed, and so is very erratic and uncertain in her responses. She says she likes Harding and finds him attractive. She says that she "sort of" had sex with Harding, but it's clear her grasp of reality is not very firm. They arrest Harding anyway. (21 mins)

From here, we get into all kinds of twists and turns. McCoy is skeptical of the evidence against Harding, particularly because Singer got pregnant supposedly after he stopped working there. Ross goes to straighten out the timeline and learns that Singer was actually pregnant a month longer than her mother had claimed. This means that Harding may have impregnanted her.

Ross talks again to Singer's parents, who are a little evasive and defensive. Harding's lawyer, Sally Bell (played once again by Edie Falco -- screenshot), is waiting to see some real evidence. At a grand jury proceeding, Leslie changes her story about what happened, and says she had sex with a fellow patient named "Roger," not Harding. Roger confirms the story.

When it's revealed that Singer could die if she gave birth to the child, McCoy decides to charge Harding with Murder 2 in addition to the rape. Under great pressure, Harding tells the truth about what happened: the Singers paid him to impregnate their comatose daughter so they could have a grandchild, even though it might kill her. Yuck! Ross refers to Mrs Singer as a "narcissistic monster" for concocting a scheme. They're not sure how to proceed against Harding -- is it really rape? Schiff says, "Solomon said, Divide the baby in half," which is his way of telling McCoy to make a deal on rape and drop the murder charges, and make a deal with the Singers too. The episode ends with the revelation that Harding's parents are moving to get custody of Singer's unborn child.

6.15 Encore

In this episode (6.15), McCoy gets another shot at prosecuting Michael Dobson, a man he suspected of killing his wife in an episode (Coma) in the previous season. Briscoe and Curtis investigate Dobson this time around.

The episode begins with an older couple walking in the park. The woman spots an assault occurring, and a man runs after the attacker. Cops on horseback respond and try to chase down the suspect, but find only the man who tried to help: he has a knife sticking out his chest, but he's still talking and nearly standing. The suspect is described as a Hispanic male, 5'8". The assault victim is dead.

Briscoe and Curtis respond and learn that a Colombian peso was found at the scene. These are commonly used as "slugs" to bypass MTA token machines. The knife found in the good samaritan is also a good clue: it is expensive and fine. The detectives try to track down Francis Murphy, a con known for selling the pesos. They hope they can point them to some possible suspects. He's no help, but the visit 17 knife stores until they find one who sold the knife. The owner says the buyer was a thug, a "collector" for Little Joey Giabone, a mobster. They talk to Joey, who almost immediately rolls and points them to Luis Cruz, a Mexican who is nowhere to be found. Profaci, meanwhile, is able to ID the victim, and notifies the detectives that her husband is down at the morgue, ready to identify the body. The husband, Michael Dobson, and Briscoe immediately recognize each other, because Dobson was the prime suspect in a murder the previous season. He was a suspect in his first wife's murder, and now his second wife, Emily, is also dead.

The detectives investigate, and learn that Dobson had a $1 million insurance policy on his wife. There's your motive. They talk to Curtis' old friends at OCCB, who tell them that Dobson and Giabone are connected via a garbage hauling company that had the contract for Dobson's comedy club. They talk to Dobson, whose tone is typical comical, cocky, and unpredictable. They check Dobson's phone records and note a call to San Francisco made with a stole credit card from a payphone near his house to a hotel he was staying at in SF. The card number was stolen from a commuter at Grand Central by -- guess who! -- Francis Murphy, the slug dealer. It looks like Luis Cruz made the call.

They raid the apartment where Cruz is supposedly staying, but they learn from his girlfriend that he has fled to Mexico. McCoy and Kincaid, entering the episode, reminisce about Dobson, and get him arrested (31 mins).

McCoy wants the death penalty, as does Schiff, but Kincaid, typically, doesn't. It's discovered that Dobson was having an affair with a Miss Nash -- another motive. They arrest Cruz (conveniently trying to sneak back in to the country via JFK airport!). He confesses and rolls on Dobson. Cruz apparently came back to the US to recover the payment that Dobson promised him. Instead, the investigators recover this money, and find Giabone's prints on it. He had previously appeared to have only a tangential connection to the crime. Dobson reveals that the mob people to whom he owned money threatened his family because of his debts. Cruz rolls on Giabone, but then it is discovered that it was Dobson's girlfriend who called Cruz's girlfriend to arrange the transfer of cash. A big meeting in the family conference room between Nash and Dobson clears everything up, and Nash rolls on Dobson, indicating that he set the whole thing up, and (I guess) tried to frame the mob, by making it look like they were framing him, or something.

This is Dobson's second appearance on the show, the last one being in Coma, in which he was the suspect in his other wife's death. Dobson is played by the instantly recognizable Larry Miller. Both this episode and "Coma" were written by Ed Zuckerman.

5.2 Coma

In this episode (5.2), a woman is shot in the head, and lingers in her coma while Briscoe and Logan investigate her husband for a connection to the shooting. The case becomes more complicated when McCoy and Kincaid fight to retrieve the bullet from her brain so they can use it as evidence, an operation which leads to the victim's death. The husband, Michael Dobson, goes free, but McCoy gets another chance for a conviction when Dobson re-appears in an episode (Encore) the next season, accused of killing his second wife.

The episode begins with a couple walking down a sidewalk. They complain about a man who seems to be stealing radios from parked cars, and the husband is about to call the cops when there is a loud crashing sound and he chases after the fleeing thief. As returns, he sees a bloody woman sitting behind the wheel of a BMW. She is non-responsive.

Briscoe and Logan arrive at the scene and learn she's been shot in the head and is unconscious. The car is registered to Michael Dobson, who owns a comedy club. Briscoe and Logan head to the comedy club, and become the butt of a performing comedian's jokes as they walk in. They find Dobson at the bar, who is seems shocked to learn of his wife's death. They talk to the victim's employer, a community newspaper, who helps them establish the victim's whereabouts prior to her getting shot. Forensics reports that the husband's fingerprints -- lifted from his liquor license application -- were found in an unusual position in the car, a position consistent with his reaching in to remove his wife's jewelry. (This significance of this seems contradicted by a plot twist later in the ep, however.) Profaci provides the dets with the victim's purse, recovered from 96th Street, and they read her date book which has the addresses of several banks on the east side. They suspect the woman may have been visiting these banks in anticipation of a divorce, to determine whether her husband was hiding assets from her. They also interview the victim's sister who says that Dobson was beating his wife.

They interview Dobson at his home, and he admits that he is a "son of a bitch," but he says he's "a son of a bitch whose wife was shot by another son of a bitch." They canvas the east side banks, and find one employee who remembers Mrs Dobson. She came and inquired about getting a safe deposit box, which apparently was a ploy to determine whether he husband already had one. At this particular bank, he did. Due to an employee's unwitting leak, Dobson learned that his wife had been inquiring about him, which gives him a motive to kill her.

This is enough to get a search warrant, after Kincaid makes a series of convincing arguments to a reluctant but charming judge. They search Dobson's apartment, and recover a tweed jacket Dobson was wearing the night of the murder. A wheelchair-bound forensics tech tells the dets that the victim's blood in on it, immersed in the fibers. Based on this, his pattern of abuse, and his motive, they arrest him, but they don't have any solid evidence.

In a meeting at the DA's office, McCoy lambastes the detectives for handing them such a weak case. Logan challenges McCoy, however, and says he should be able to indict anyway, since he can indict a ham sandwich. McCoy counters that ham sandwiches, unlike this case, have meat on them. This is an extremely unusual tone of exchange for the show (I guess due to the writers' efforts to provide characterization for McCoy in this, his second-ever episode. Also as part of that characterization, McCoy reveals to Logan that his father was a cop for 31 years.)

To bolster the case, Kincaid talks to the sister and to the victim's 8-year-old daughter who says her parents fought the night of the shooting. In the middle of this conversation, however, Dobson arrives, now free on bail, and takes his kids away over his sister-in-law's protestations. Kincaid stands by, unable to do anything. Kincaid files a motion with family court to separate the child from Dobson for the duration of the child, because she fears that Dobson is tainting the child's memory of events, but the motion is unsuccessful.

After this defeat, the next major plot thread begins to develop: the bullet they need for evidence is still lodged in Mrs Dobson's brain, and only Mr Dobson, the accused murderer, can authorize its removal. McCoy and Kincaid discuss what to do while sitting on a park bench as McCoy violates Kincaid's personal space by gripping her should awkwardly the entire time they are talking. Regardless, Kincaid goes into court (with an Asian female judge presiding -- very rare!) and argues that Dobson should not be the one making decisions regarding his wife's health, since he's the one accused of shooting her. The judge agrees, and Mrs Dobson's sister is empowered to authorize the risky surgery to remove the bullet. Schiff, ambivalent over the victory, says to McCoy, "I hear you've been promoted from Assistant District Attorney to Supreme Deity." (Schiff also says he's uncomfortable with the state interfering with a husband's right to control an incapacitated wife's medical affairs, a situation which might affect Schiff personally, as indicated in another episode in which he watches his wife die. Terminal, I think it's called.)

The sister approves the surgery, over the surgeon's warnings, but something unfortunate happens: Mrs Dobson dies during the surgery.

Kincaid glumly reports this news to McCoy who tells her to amend the indictment against Dobson to Murder 2. McCoy faces off with Dobson's attorney, Max, who says something like, "Congratulations on killing my client's wife." No deals are struck, and they go to trial (49 mins).

A gun shop owner from Bridgeport, CT testifies that Dobson purchased a gun from him. This gun could conceivably be the murder weapon, but they can't find it, so they can't test it. The case against Dobson hits a major obstacle, however, when McCoy receives an urgent call from Det. Logan. Briscoe and Logan are questioning a drug dealer/snitch who says that a junkie named Robin confessed to the shooting of Mrs Dobson. Robin told the snitch that he had a "purple scarf" from the vicitm. It turns out that Mrs Dobson was wearing such a scarf when she was shot, and the scarf was never recovered.

They track down Robin's apartment, only to learn that he died 2 days earlier of hepatitis. All kinds of stuff is found in his apartment, including Mrs Dobson's credit cards, a white jacket fitting the description of what a witness saw, and the murder weapon (not the gun from Bridgeport). Sure looks like Robin did it. Oh well.

In the next scene, McCoy withdraws the charges against Dobson, who is very cocky in his badgering of McCoy over the case. You hear him joking in the background to his lawyer, "Thanks...but you're still not worth the money."

Just as it seems all is lost, Logan provides a videotape to McCoy. The tape shows Robin performing at a comedy club, joking about his heroin habit.. At the end of his performance, guess who comes out to banter with him? That's right! Michael Dobson!

Cut to McCoy talking to Schiff. Apparently some time has passed. McCoy, defeated, tells Schiff that the cops have investigated every conceivable angle, and they cannot find any further evidence that Dobson conspired with Robin to murder his wife. Schiff asks McCoy if he thinks it's merely a coincidence that Robin killed the owner of the club he performed at. McCoy responds, with some thinly-veiled despair, "No."

Sam Waterston's performance of this one syllable line of dialogue is among the most remarkable moments in the show's history. He is absolutely pitch-perfect in the scene, which culiminates in that moment. In these early episodes, Waterston's performances still had a dynamic, unpredictable quality to them that has been lost in the routine all these years later. He can still hit the emotional high notes, but they're just not as high as they were back in the old days.

4.7 Apocrypha

In this pretty crazy episode (4.7), a young woman drives a Mercedes into a downtown office building's garage and the explodes a car bomb, killing her and damaging the building. It turns out that the woman is involved with a religious cult whose charsismatic leader may have led to the bombing.

The episode begins with the woman driving in heavy traffic downtown. She gets her windows washed by a squeegee man, and then enters the parking garage. Moments later, as the parking attendants are talking, a large explosion is heard and seen, and, in an unusually spectacular bit of staging, destroys the facade of the garage [screen shot]. Briscoe and Logan respond to the scene and learn that there is one victim, who they descibe as a "kid" and who turns out to be the woman we saw drive the car into the garage.

Forensics examines the car and determines how the bomb was made. It used acid eating through a condom and then igniting some fertilizer. Logan quips that he never liked condoms anyway. They get a VIN from the car and trace it to a diplomat from Egypt. They assume this means there are terrorist connections, leading Logan to say we should put an electrified fence around the whole country, but when they bring the owner of the car in for questioning, it turns out that he is connected to high levels of government and he has a rock-solid alibi: he was in a meeting with the State Department, his car was stolen, and his dad (we are told by an FBI agent) is a well-respected Egyptian. Back to square one, as they say.

At this point, we learn that the victim was the bomber, and that she's only around 18 years old. Briscoe says to Logan, "Your kid is 18, right?" and they suggest that perhaps she's not been reported dead because she's missing. They head over to missing persons, and based on information like tattoos and dental records get an ID: Wendy Alice Berman.

They talk to Berman's mom who explains that her daughter was fine until her dad died when she was 14. Then she became a troubled youth, and ran away a lot, until one time she didn't come back. She says she received a letter from her not too long ago. The letter is filled with Biblical references, and says something bad will happen if her mom tries to contact her. The return address makes a not-very-cryptic reference to Avenue C, and they head down there and find a prayer meeting in progess. They bring in the attendees for questioning, including a youngish man named Donald and another blonde woman. Briscoe questions Donald, and Logan talks to the young woman, whom he seems to get along with quite well. They talk about their shared Catholic background, and Logan mentions he went to a school called "Our Lady of Mercy" for 10 years, where he had to wear a blue blazer.

While this questioning is going on, the leader of the sect, Daniel Hendricks (played by Sam Robards), shows up. He answers the detectives questions and refers to Wendy as Ruth. He denies being in contact with her recently, and suggests he doesn't even remember her. To continue their investigation, they get a list of congregation members from Hendricks (though it's not believable he would just hand it over) and study the list over lunch, as well as the arrest records of those on the list.

They talk to various people -- family and friends -- of those on the list, and learn that Hendricks was a leader of another more conventional congregation, but left after someone else was elected president of the congregation. This new president describes Hendricks as "crazy." They also learn that Hendricks was formerly in the military's special forces and his expertise was demolition, which indicates he would know how to build a bomb.

They canvas gas stations that sell diesel gas (theorizing that since the Mercedes was a diesel, they intended to blow it up via the fuel inside it, or something). They find an attendant who says he saw Hendricks in the car with Wendy/Ruth. AVB talks to Kincaid, and they arrest him, in front of his congregation, for the bombing and murder of Wendy (27 mins).

Hendricks and his attorney, Louise, meet with Stone and Kincaid. Schiff isn't very confident in the case, and is concerned about connecting Hendricks to the bombing, saying, "I know how to scramble eggs. Doesn't mean I made breakfast this morning." Kincaid talks to family members of former and current congregation members, including one guy whose wife refused to leave, and who had to fight to extricate his 8-year-old daughter from the group. Kincaid, looking not very good in too much make-up and tall hair, argues to Stone that they can charge Hendricks with kidnapping, since he brainwashed his congregants, and then murder in furtherance of the kidnapping.

They present this notion to his attorney, who says Hendricks is crazy. Olivet examines him, and says he's essentially insane. They offer him a plea arrangement based on insanity, but he refuses it and fires his attorney, hiring a new, high profile attorney, Nicholas Burke. The DAs meet to discuss how to proceed and its clear from the assortment of tabloid newspapers (including the Ledger!) on Schiff's coffee table that the case has captured the imagination of the press. During this meeting, Kincaid reveals that she is agnostic. To which Schiff responds, "Give yourself 40 years."

At trial (42 mins), various witnesses testify, but to make his case that the people have been brainwashed, Stone gets that 8-year-old girl to testify. She says a lot of Biblical stuff, and it's clear she basically worships Hendricks, whom she calls "the Lamb." Around this time, as a viewer, you start asking yourself, so why was this building bombed anyway? The writers seem to have forgotten to answer that question. Eventually, however, Hendricks takes the stand and suggests that Wendy may have done it because "Love of money is the root of all evil" and she wanted to get back at "the money lenders." It is not at all clear whether he actually ordered her to perform the bombing, however. While Hendricks is testifying, there is a funny shot of Stone reading the Bible at the prosecutors' table. He then leverages this Biblical knowledge on cross-examination, and asks Hendricks whether he thinks he is the Messiah. His answer is ambiguous, and then Stone quotes a passage from the Bible about being wary of false Messiahs. Hendricks has no response, which makes him look like a fraud. (It's not a very believable scene, since he could have just said he was a prophet, not the Messiah.)

After closing args from both sides, the verdict comes back: Guilty of kidnapping, guilty of murder. At this point, a remarkable thing happens: Hendricks stands up and shows bleeding wounds on his hands, and says, "Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do."

Back at the DAs office, Stone, Kincaid, and Schiff talk things over, and Schiff says there is no way Stone should've won the case. Stone reveals Hendrick's stigmata were achieved with thumbtacks in his hands. As they muse over the case, Stone gets a shocking phone call, and he looks shocked. Cut to a new crime scene: at least 5 female congregants are dead, lying out in a row, apparently poisoned. At the end of the row, Briscoe comes across Logan, kneeling over the body of the blonde congregant he got along well with earlier in the episode. He is sad, and performs the sign of the cross.

The episode is notable because of the car bomb, the stigmata, the mass suicide at the end, Sam Robard's appearance, and Logan's discussion of his religious experience.

5.9 Scoundrels

Edie Falco guest stars in this episode (5.9) in which a swindling lawyer is killed in his office, and several suspects had a motive for killing him. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and McCoy and Kincaid build a prosecution.

The episode begins with the discovery of the lawyer, Arthur Kopinsky, dead in his office. Before the detectives even finish processing the scene, Kopinsky's own lawyer arrives, and starts passively hindering the investigation. After not getting very far with a conventional investigation, the detectives get the help of Kinciad who serves a warrant, raising her voice at Kopinsky's office. The detectives and Kincaid are trying to figure out the relationship between Kopinsky and a disgraced former banker named Tappan. They learn that Kopinsky was represented victims of Tappan who lost all their money when his Savings & Loan institution collapsed. But instead of properly representing them, Kopinksy seemed to be swindling them himself, promising them he was about to track down Tappan's hidden assets but just needed a little more cash to finish his work.

One victim of Kopinsky, Mrs Curren, is now in a convalescent home and the detectives visit her and her son there, questioning them about Kopinsky. They later learn from Mrs Curren's nosy roommate that Mrs Curren's son lied to them, and that in fact he was very upset with Kopinsky. Mr Curren is brought in for questioning, and is identified by a witness in a line-up. The search Curren's apartment, and discover a check that he had sent to Kopinsky and then recovered. They question Curren about this (Logan is pretty funny during the scene) and then arrest him. (29 mins)

Curren's defense lawyer, Ms Bell (played by Edie Falco), is aggressive in her dealings with McCoy. (Later in the ep, we learn that Bell is a former assistant to McCoy and apparently one of the ones he had an affair with.) The trial begins (31 mins) but it doesn't go well. A lot of attention is paid to Mr Pacelli, an early suspect in the case, and Curren's motive isn't entirely clear: since he had recovered the check that his mom had sent to Kopinsky, there wasn't really a need to kill him.

Outside the courtroom, the investigation continues, and they learn that Kopinsky was doing an awful lot of work for Mr Pacelli, who owns a gift shop called Empire Gifts. A private investigator reveals that Tappan is romantically involved with a female employee at Empire Gifts. It begins to look that this employee, Ms Huntley, was shielding Tappan's assets, and Kopinsky had figured it all out.

McCoy confronts Huntley, and she rolls on Tappan, acknowledging that she shieled his money from litigation. It then appears that Tappan and Curren may have been in cahoots to kill Kopinsky. Tappan, under pressure, says he sent Curren to the victim, and McCoy figures Tappan knew that the situation would turn violent. When McCoy decides to arrest Tappan, he objects, but McCoy retorts, "I'm a DA. I can arrest anyone."

Things get a bit confusing, but McCoy sticks to his idea that Tappan sent Curren to Kopinsky knowing violence would ensue. (During a conversation around this time, we get the impression that McCoy and Bell were romantically involved, and Kincaid reacts with faint jealousy.)

Tappan goes on trial for Murder 2 (54 mins), and Curren says Tappan told him to kill Kopinsky. The verdict: Tappan is guilty of Murder 2. McCoy reveals he didn't really believe Curren's testimony, but he knows that he got the right man for the murder. Justice at all costs.

The episode is notable for the appearance of Edie Falco as Susan Bell, a role she reprised several times until 1998. You get the impression from the way that her character is written that the writers wanted her around for a continuing story line, but Falco got her gig at Oz and so wasn't available. Anyway, Falco does a good job in the role. Coincidentally, another actor from The Sopranos, Dan Grimaldi, also appears in this episode. He plays Patsy Parisi on The Sopranos.

Brief Interview with Jill Hennessy

She discusses her short modeling career, not much else. In this accompanying picture, she's wearing too much makeup.

14.8 Embedded

In this episode (14.8), a television "tabloid journalist" is shot outside a bar. The prime suspect is a US soldier angry over reporting the journalist did in Iraq which led to the deaths of three other soldiers. Briscoe and Green capture the suspect, but McCoy and Southerlyn develop doubts as to whether they have the right man. The episode contains vigorous debate about the ethics of the war in Iraq and the usefulness of embedded journalists.

The episode begins with the journalist, Frank Elliot, talking with some friends in a bar. They're talking about women when he spots his ex-girlfriend, a blonde woman. He tries to get her to go home with him, since he's leaving for Iraq again the next morning, but she refuses, in part because she is now engaged. He steps outside (off camera) and shots ring out. Briscoe and Green arrive at the club (Louts), and Briscoe immediately recognizes Elliot who is injured but still allive.Briscoe, apparently not Elliot's biggest fan, quips "Only the good die young."

They visit Elliot at the hospital, where he is not yet conscious. His friends are there, and tell them about the blonde and that Elliot was planning to leave for Iraq the following morning. They visit the blonde, Gia, who talks to them while wearing a silky red robe and a black bra. She isn't much help. They visit his workplace, the CJC Broadcasting Network to learn who his enemies might be. They learn there that Elliot profiles a corporate executive who stole from his company. They visit the exec, as he's exiting his helicopter, but he has a solid alibi.

The dets revisit Frank in the hospital, and he's now conscious. Briscoe is angry with Elliot because of a story he did 3 years ago about a corrupt cop in the 12th precinct. The cop went on to commit suicide. Elliot tells the story of his own shooting and says he went out to get the NY Post because he heard he was mentioned in it, and then was shot. He says that perhaps a lawyer named Barry Boyd, who once attacked him in a restaurant, is to blame.

They talk to Boyd who says that he's happy Elliot once ran a negative story about him. It increased his reputation. Boyd reveals that he is representing the families of three soldiers who were killed in Iraq after Elliot ran a report that indirectly gave away troop locations and movements. The detectives review this video, in which Elliot is seen drawing a crude map in the sand illustrating his unit's location. The detectives have a conversation about the merits of the war, and Briscoe says he supports it. Meanwhile, ballistics reveals that the gun used to shoot Elliot was standard Army issue.

They talk to an army colonel to find out which soldiers might have been in NYC the night of the shooting. They learn that 3 members of the 81st Airborne, the unit of the three dead soldiers, were in town. They visit the family of one of them, George Meacham. They says that Meacham was friends with Dickson Hawes, one of the soldiers shot in Iraq because of Elliot's reporting. Meacham's mom and wife explain that he was downtown at a bar with some friends the night of the shooting, celebrating before shipping out for Iraq again the next morning. The bar is right near where Elliot was shot.

The visit the bar, the Blarney Stone, and talk to the bartender who cannot confirm that Meacham was there the entire time. A doorman at Lotus, the club where Elliot was, says that Meacham showed up there asking for Elliot. The bartender also says that his own philosophy about the war is "Nuke 'em all." He mentions that Beacham had a tattoo on his arm: "Business is good." (The detectives later learn that the other half of the tattoo says, "Killing is our business.")

Van Buren and the detectives talk again to the Army colonel, who says Meacham is "forward deployed" and can't be recalled to the states for questioning. But AVB detects some shiftiness in his answers, and learns that Meacham is at Rammstein AFB in Germany, and not yet in Iraq. He is recalled.

Meacham steps off a helicopter (the second helicopter in the episode!) and hands over his weapon to Green and Briscoe, who take him in for questioning. He says that he heard from a cabbie who entered the Blarney Stone that he'd just dropped Elliot off at Lotus. Meacham says he went to Lotus to confront Elliot over the story, and says that he, as a soldier, would be court-martialed if he'd done what Elliot had done. To prevent him from being shipped back to Iraq, they arrest Meacham (26 mins).

The lawyers meet to hash it out. They learn from Evan in Ballistics that the gun Beacham turned over was not the murder weapon, but it wasn't Beacham's weapon either: it belonged to Dickson Hawes. It looks like Beacham somehow switched the weapons while he was at Rammstein. Southerlyn asks the army to locate Beacham's weapon, but they can't find it.

This turn of events causes Elliot, a sensationalistic journalist, to hold a press conference in which he charges the government with a cover-up of his shooting. Various parties in the case against Meacham seek a gag order so Elliot won't be able to talk anymore. The judge allows it. Elliot makes a motion to withdraw the order, but it is unsuccessful. Immediately thereafter, while he is talking to McCoy, to FBI agents appear and arrest Elliot for treason for revealing the troop locations.

McCoy and SS visit the US Attorney responsible for prosecuting the case, Mr Spivak, whom Serena seems to know. He is steadfast about pursuing the case.

McCoy and SS determine that to successfully prosecute Meacham, they need to prove that he acted out of revenge, not a desire to protect troops from further harm. SS talks to Meacham's friends, and they review her findings while McCoy offers her ribs for dinner, which SS refuses. He tries to give her noodles, but she doesn't seem to like those either. McCoy explains in a rather convoluted fashion that Meacham acted out of revenge, but this becomes somewhat irrelevant when they learn that Meacham has changed his plea from one of not guilty to a affirmative defense in which he says he committed the crime but has an excuse: he acted to prevent the Elliot from revealing further information which could endanger the troops.

At trial, Elliot takes the stand and echoes Michael Moore's Oscar speech by saying that the US is fighting "a fictitious war waged by a fictitious president." Elliot also says he would do the same thing again, and he makes an argument against prior restraint.

Meacham takes the stand, and describes the attack in which Hawes was killed. McCoy gets him to talk about shooting Elliot, and then asks him directly, "Did you shoot Frank Elliot?" to which Meacham is unexpectedly evasive, and then finally answers, "No. Because if I pulled the trigger, he would be dead right now."

Well, that kills Meacham's affirmative defense -- you can't offer an excuse for a crime you didn't commit -- but the bigger question is, Who shot Elliot? It doesn't take SS and McCoy to work up a new theory: Elliot somehow got a hold of a service weapon and shot himself with it, or got a friend to do so, so that he could raise his own profile. SS noticed an inconsistency in Elliot's story: he says he went out to get the paper to read the gossip about him, but on the stand he said that earlier in the day, he read the headlines about 6 soldiers killed the day before. SS and McCoy suggest that Boyd might somehow be involved, too. But confronted with this theory, Elliot doesn't back down and he and McCoy get in each other's faces. McCoy says, "This isn't over" and says they'll find the gun and the friend who shot him.

Back at the DAs office, we learn that both Meacham and Elliot are headed back over to Iraq. The case goes unresolved, which is extremely unusual.

Elliot is extremely similar to Geraldo Rivera, who got into trouble himself for reporting troop movements during the war. Elliot is played by Nick Chinlund, an increasingly recognizable character actor, who played a creepy mortician obsessed with hair and fingernails on The X-Files, and who appeared as a thug in Training Day.

9.15 Disciple

In this episode (9.15), an ex-nun performs an excorcism that leads to the death of a young girl. The victim's mom tries to obfuscate what happened, but ultimately the full story becomes known. Briscoe and Curtis investigate the death, which takes a while to figure out, and McCoy and Carmichael figure out how to prosecute a woman who says she was guided by divine intervention.

The episode begins in a hospital waiting room, where two women talk until a guard notices a dead girl lying down next to them. Briscoe and Curtis respond, and get only vague information from witnesses (a doctor who saw the girl after she died is hurried and unhelpful, and a woman describes the man she saw putting the child in the seat as "5-10 or 5-12.") There is no identification on the girl.

The detectives talk to ME Rogers to find out the cause of death. The victim had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and appears to have been beaten to death. Her rib cage punctured her heart. They check security camera footage, and see the man carrying her into the waiting room. He is a big guy, wearing a varsity jacket that says "Bulldogs" on the back.

They use the absentee lists from the various schools to look for a possible match to the victim. They talk to lots of people, finding a woman who claims her daughter is staying in North Carolina. She shows the dets a picture of her daughter...it is not the same girl as the victim. They also track down a ConEd worker who has a suspicious story and says he doesn't know where his daughter is. They focus on him as their suspect, but ultimately learn that his daughter and her mother have fled to a battered woman's shelter. When they find the mom and girl, the girl identifies the picture of the victim as her schoolmate, Keira Grayson, the daughter of the woman who said her girl was in North Carolina.

They re-interview Mrs Grayson, who says they should call North Carolina and confirm her story. They do, and the people in NC are evasive. Mrs Grayson is uncooperative and won't give a straight story, so AVB hauls her down to the ME's office and shows her the girl's corpse. They way Mrs Grayson reacts, you know the corpse is her daughter. Under pressure now, Grayson says that Keira ran away a lot. Her lawyer says she was probably attacked by someone on the streets. AVB doesn't believe it. They search her apartment, and find scraping marks on the radiator, indicating that the girl may have been chained to it.

They see what they can learn from the neighbors, all of whom say Keira was a brat. One woman they talk to says she was with a guy named Bill Crawford. They try to track down Crawford, learning that he's mentally slow and transient. Eventually, they use his disability payments info to trace him to an SRO, and talk to his friend. His friend has the Bulldogs jacket, which he says he traded to Bill for a desert camouflage jacket. In the pocket of the Bulldogs jacket, they find a stub for a Chinese movie theater. They head to the theater, where they find (and briefly chase) Bill, who exclaims he didn't do anything to the girl.

They interrogate Bill (without a lawyer present, which you think will lead to problems later, since he doesn't seem competent to waive his rights). He admits to involvement in her death, but says he didn't kill her.

Despite having both Bill and the mom in custody, the DAs are struggling to connect them. At the mom's arraignment, she gives notice of her alibi, which is that she was in a church at the time, praying. Carmichael talks to the priest who confirms she was there. The priest knows Bill, and says that Bill stopped coming to church after he met a woman named "Sister Rosa." AC talks to Sister Rosa, who we saw earlier in the ep when Briscoe and Curtis were canvassing the neighborhood.

Sister Rosa admits being with the girl around the time of her death, and they search her apartment. They find leather restraints in her apt., as well as a shrine to St Michael, who Curtis helpfully points out is the patron saint of those in battle, and suggests that Sister Rosa was in battle against the devil.

They interrogate Sister Rosa and Bill, separately. Bill says Rosa "did one of those ceremonies" so that "she wouldn't be bad anymore." It's apparent he means an exorcism. The DAs confer about how to proceed, and how they should prosecute someone for performing a "do it yourself" exorcism. Meanwhile, Mrs Grayson seems to be working up an insanity defense. This leads McCoy to make a deal with her, since she didn't have direct involvement in her daughter's death. She gets Man 2 in exchange for testifying against Sister Rosa.

Carmichael walks through the snow and talks to the head nun at Rosa's former convent, who says Rosa was overzealous but very faithful. When she tells the nun that Rosa performed an exorcism, she directs AC to the Archdiocese. AC talks to a bigwig at the archdiocese, who tells her about official exorcisms, and how they don't like to talk about them, how there's a lot of investigation by psychologists beforehand, and how there's medical personnel standing by.

McCoy is concerned that the defense attorney is not returning his calls, and thinks he might be preparing some kind of church-and-state defense. McCoy and Carmichael get into a big discussion about spirituality and the world we can't see.

At trial (38 mins), Rosa defends herself against charges of Murder 2. The trial sequence opens with a shot of the "In God We Trust" lettering on the back wall, and pans down to show Mrs Grayson testifying against Rosa. Another witness testifies that Sister Rosa performed an exorcism on his son with great success. Now the son works maintenance at the Atlanta airport and everything.

Sister Rosa takes the stand in her own defense, and testifies for a long time. She says that she hears the voice of St Michael. McCoy objects since he hadn't been notified of any insanity defense. Her lawyer, Mr Wade, says that it's not an insanity defense, he's just establishing her state of mind. The judge allows it.

Rosa goes on to describe the exorcism and says she punched Keira and pushed so hard on her with a crucifix that she apparently killed her. After her emotional testimony, McCoy calls for a recess, a little bit unsure of how to continue.

The DAs confer about how to proceed, and discuss similarities between this case and the Son of Sam, who also heard voices that resulted in deaths. They talk again about the unseen world. McCoy says he's "not sure" whether the devil exists, but is inclined to think he does. He says he spent 6 years at St Ignacius, a Catholic school, where "they taught us to have a healthy respect for the devil." I think he means fear, not respect, but regardless: this bit of dialogue is in almost exact opposition to what he says in the episode Compassion, in which he says that religion is merely a pacifier.

Back at trial, Rosa continues to testify, and McCoy gets her to admit that she is accountable to God. She remains calm and says that "Keira was lost because I wasn't strong enough to defeat Satan." In his closing, McCoy says that even though Rosa was on a divine mission, she is still accountable to human laws. "Just as God holds her accountable, so should we."

The verdict comes back: guilty on Murder 2.

The episode is remarkably similar to the episode "Born Again," in which a troubled young female dies during a "rebirthing" procedure and a cover-up ensues. I hate that episode.

Candice Bergen to Appear on L&O Show?

Here's a report from one of the Daily News' gossip columns a couple weeks ago. Also includes a bit about Elisabeth Rohm:

Could Candice Bergen be headed back to prime time? The actress, whose beloved "Murphy Brown" show wrapped after 10 years on the air in 1998, had lunch with "Law & Order" producer Dick Wolf this week at La Goulue, a spy tells us.

No one's confirming anything, but word is she might play a judge on the latest "Law & Order" spinoff, "Trial by Jury."

Meanwhile, "Law & Order" actress Elisabeth Rohm helped host a dinner for her friend Halston designer Bradley Bayou on Wednesday. Among the guests were Rohm's boyfriend, MSNBC hunk Dan Abrams; Sale Johnson and Fran Drescher (with her Pomeranian).

"In the middle of the dinner, Elisabeth snuck downstairs to watch herself on 'Law and Order,'" chuckles one guest. "It was Jerry Orbach's last episode and the first one that her character gets to defend a case on her own." [source]

Obviously, this guest spends more time watching Rohm than she does watching the show: Rohm's character doesn't defend cases, she prosecutes them.

14.9 Compassion

In this episode (14.9), a pediatric oncologist uses cyanide to kill a man who claims he can talk to dead people. It turns out the psychic was previously a real estate con man who ripped off the doctor, and that appeares to be her motive. Briscoe and Green connect the dots, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute the doctor, who may or may not be crazy.

The episode begins with two middle-aged men eating together in a restaurant and discussing the merits of Viagra. One man swears by it, the other is reluctant to try it. The Viagra advocate gestures tolds an older gentleman sitting alone behind them and says that he is probably waiting for a twenty-something date to show up. Seconds later, that older gentleman coughs and drops dead, falling off his chair.

Briscoe and Green arrive and are told it seems that the oysters he was eating are responsible. Green smells his breath and smells "bitter almonds" which we all know means cyanide was involved. I love how he says, "bitter almonds," as if that is a scent that we are all familiar with. All I know avout bitter almonds is that's what cyanide smells like, but if you put me in a scent line-up, I don't think I could tell you the difference between bitter almonds and, say, fermented walnuts. But apparently Green can, and that's why he's the detective.

Well, a bit of sleuthing leads them to the conclusion that the cyanide was not contained in the oysters themselves, but in the hot sauce that the victim, Gideon Blake, brought with him to the restaurant, which we are told is common practive amongs certain oyster lovers. As they're investigating the crime scene, Blake's date shows up, and she's not a twenty-something bombshell at all. She's a middle-aged doctor named Dr. Allison.

They question her down at the precinct, where she is sketchy on the details on Blake's profession. Finally, she admits that he is a psychic/grief counselor who talks to dead people at seances. What, you might ask, is the connection between this oncologist and the psychic? Well, there are several, but the one that is immediately revealed to us is that Dr Allison is also a grief counselor, and she hooked up (professionally, not romantically) with Blake because of that shared interest, and she had endorsed his work. But not everyone did: Briscoe and Green learn that Blake had some dissatisfied customers.

The talk to these various ex-customers, including a hippie chick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who went to Blake to talk her dead boyfriend until she met a new guy at the gym, and an old lady who was defrauded by Blake until her daughter put a stop to it.

Meanwhile, Det. Cordova (the lady detective who seems to have replaced Profaci) tells Van Buren in a longer-than-usual-for-her scene that she looked into Blake's background and his fingerprints show that his real name is actually Lee Wayne Mapes, a fugitive con man who the feds have been looking for. This leads to a conversation with the US Attorney, who is happy to turn his files over to the detectives now that Mapes is dead and he doesn't have to worry about him any more. These files lead to a crucial break in the case: they learn that among Mapes' victims is none other than Dr Allison, the oncologist! She lost $500,000 to him.

They talk to Dr Allison's husband, also a doctor, who says he is separated from his wife. They were both responsible for being duped by Mapes, he says, and they are separated because of the stress from his wife's job. All those sick and dead kids.

They visit Dr Allison at her hospital, where they interrupt her as she's talking to a young cancer victim, who is shown looking all sickly but all chipper as Briscoe asks her how she's feeling. It's revealed that there is cyanide in the hospital and that Dr Allison had access to that cyanide since she works in the lab there, too. How she is both a grief counselor, a clinician, and a researcher is beyond me, but whatever. Anyway, based on their new theory of the crime -- that Dr Allison discovered Mapes's true identity and killed him out of revenge -- they arrest her (23 mins).

The case against Allison continues. At her arraigment, the judge (Fran Lebowitz) recognizes Dr Allison from TV -- she's been on Charlie Rose. Meanwhile, the detectives get a search warrant for her home, looking for cyanide. She talks about what a problem squirrels are in her garden, and Briscoe says she could use cyanide to kill them, but she doesn't take the bait. However, outside in her garbage can, they find a squirrel that was poisoned with the same kind of cyanide as Blake. Rather unbelievably, a judge suppressed this evidence because the warrant only applied to the house, not to the sidewalk outside it. Apparently, McCoy's argument that garbage is public property and there's no expectation of privacy, etc., didn't work.

So they have to build their case up. Southerlyn talks to her husband, but gets nowhere, and then talks to another doctor who knew Allison and Mapes. She says that she told Allison that Blake was really Mapes, and that Allison told her she'd do something about it.

McCoy meets with Allison and her lawyer to discuss a deal, and the case takes an unexpected turn when Allison tells McCoy that she talked to Blake this morning, which is strange, given the fact that Blake is dead. McCoy thinks she might be acting crazy to beat the case, and he has Skoda examine her. Skoda concludes she isn't crazy, but she does seem to believe she can talk to dead people.

At trial, the case against Allison is going pretty well, and SS and McCoy take some time out to discuss the nature of spirituality. McCoy says it's a bunch of nonsense meant to be a "pacifier," and SS says her friends gave her gift certificates to psychics for her birthday. (Which explains a lot.)

Anyway, back at trial, Allison takes the stand in her own defense, and McCoy breaks her down. She starts crying about what a failure is and how for some reason she decided to kill Mapes/Blakes. It is entirely unclear what her motive actually was, then. If not revenge, then why? She was overwhelmed by grief from her dying kids so she killed him? She sputters something about how the kids were "alone" until Blake went along with them (via her killing him) to keep them company in Heaven, but that makes no sense. Blake was all about consoling survivors, not the dead or ill. Anyway, all her weepiness about the dead kids has a visible effect on McCoy who even starts to tear up just a little in the courtroom, and he meets with her attorney in the hallway, making a deal to send her to a psychiatric facility. Everbody congratulates McCoy on having a heart, and Southerlyn reminds him "it's called 'compassion,' Jack." You mean the episode, Serena? Yeah, that too.

1.4 Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

In this episode (1.4), a young woman dies after being savagely beaten in her bed. After much detective work, Greevey and Logan settle on the young scion of a formerly wealthy, high-society family. Stone and Robinette have trouble making the case, however, until they secure the co-operation of some other love interests of the defendant.

The episode begins, as many of the early ones do, with a pair of cops on patrol, discussing a mundane issue (their kids). They see a lady enter a home, and the camera leaves the cops and follow the lady. She walks up the stairs, calling out to her roommate Paige Bartlett. She finds Paige in her bedroom, twitching and in shock. It appears she has been beaten within an inch of her life.

Greevey and Logan talk to the roommate at the hospital. Page didn't sleep around, she says, with a bit too much acting from the actress. They go to talk to her ex-roommate, Polly, whom they find at a gym, where Logan helps her in a flirty gesture on the universal weight machine. Their conversation with her leads to a conversation between Logan and Greevey about sex and dating. Logan says he'll have sex after the first date, and Greevey says something about AIDS.

They go to a second gym where they talk to Polly, who is wealthy. She says that Paige had a new low-class boyfriend, but she didn't know his name. They trace Paige's steps that evening, and go to a bar where she was seen with a guy with a ponytail. They had a fight that evening. The maitre d' at another bar says he recognized the pair, and said they weren't "our kind of people." He says he saw her leave not with Ponytail, but with a guy who looked like a young Warren Beatty around 1 AM. Meanwhile, they hear from the hospital that Paige is dead. (15')

They talk to her dad, who has no useful information. They talk to her friend Libby who identifies Ponytail as a guy named Steve, who runs a 'zine called "CyberFunk." They interview Steve at an apartment where they find him cavorting with a nearly-naked girl. His alibi is that he was with a wealthy woman who serves as a benefactor for his 'zine.

They talk to the ME, an older gentleman in a suit, who says the victim had sex with 2 guys that night. They talk to Steve again, and I think it's his "girlfriend" who says, "Who are you guys? The Sex Police?"

Polly IDs "Warren Beatty" as a guy named Ned Loomis, who comes from one of those families with a big name from the old days but no remaining welath. Ned dumped Paige for another rich girl.

They talk to Loomis, and he is represented by an attorney named Berkley (who is played, oddly, by Dennis Boutsikaris, the same guy who plays Al Archer in a bunch of episodes). Logan overhears Berkley and Loomis talking, and Loomis seems agitated. Also, they may not have properly Mirandized him. At his arraignment, a reported named Sally shows up and starts asking Robinette questions. (You get the impression that Sally was meant to be a recurring character, but they never really pursued it.)

They learn that Loomis has a socialite fiance named Rebecca who is known as the "socialite nun" because she comes from a wealthy family but doesn't sleep around.

Schiff tells Stone, "You're done," meaning the case has no legs. Stone and Robinette agree the case is tough. They want to get blood samples from Loomis, which the judge allows. Robinette talks to Rebecca, hoping for some cooperation and information but he doesnt' get it. They talk to his business partner who admires Ned and says he always gets women.

Meanwhile, it looks like the defense has started trying the case in the press, and leak something to the newspapers indicating that Paige slept with two men. Her father shows up at the DAs office enraged over the leaks. They learn that Loomis has a record of sexual assault, and the assaults seem to occur whenever he is rejected. Unfortunately, the charges in previous cases have been dropped. Robinette goes to Boston to track down one of Loomis' previous victims, who is reluctant to talk. She says the charges were a mistake.

Robinette tries again with Rebecca and still doesn't get anywhere. They finally catch a break when the Boston victim, Miss Brodie, arrives in New York with her earnest husband, and tells the story: Loomis once choked her. She goes through this heart-wrenching story, and then Stone tells her he can't let her testify because "that's the law."

At trial (50'), Berkley essentially puts the victim on trial, going into all sorts of detail about her sex life. Schiff, realizing Stone is piloting a sinking ship, tells him to find a way to get Brodie on the stand. Stone attempts to convince a judge that choking is a "signature" of Loomis' crimes, but the judge doesn't allow it. His last hope is to get his current girlfriend, the socialite nun, to roll on Loomis. He arranges a meeting between Brodie and the socialite nun, and Brodie shows her injuries and tells the stories. The socialite rolls and testifies, saying that "He told me he hurt [Paige.]" She also says she would describe Loomis as untrustworthy.

The verdict comes back after three hours: Guilty of Murder 1.

Stone says that although Paige's father must be happy with the verdict, "Justice doesn't give you grandchildren."

Today I began assembling a photo gallery of as many recurring characters who are defense lawyers as I can. Interestingly, Dennis Boutsikaris, who has gone on to play attorney Al Archer in several episodes, appears as a defense attorney with a different name in this episode, his first appearance on the series. Here's a screen shot.

2.20 Intolerance

Sam Rockwell guest stars in this episode (2.20) about a Chinese-American boy killed over academic rivalry. Cerreta and Logan determine his jealous friend's mother and brother (Rockwell) are responsible, but Stone and Robinette have trouble getting all the evidence they need admitted to the trial.

The episode begins with several school kids walking down the street near their school ("Manhattan Science") discussing a scholarship. The Chinese-American boy and the white girl taunted by some older Chinese boys in a passing car. Shortly thereafter, gunshots ring out and we learn that the Asian student, Tim, is dead. Logan and Cerreta arrive to investigate. Logan remarks that bullets don't recognize IQ.

Over at the precinct, they talk to the white girl, Kate, who was Tim's boyfriend. There were no witnesses to the shooting, but ballistics tells them that the gun was an expensive make. They talk to the victim's parents and sister, who say he was bound for MIT, and no, he wasn't in a gang. But then they learn he had cosmetic surgery to remove a tattoo. It was a tiger. A gang unit detective (or informant?) tells them that Tim was in a gang called the White Tigers "for about 5 seconds," hence the tattoo.

They talk again to the girlfriend. She says she was called an "egg" because she was white on the outside but "yellow" on the inside. She says Tim was in the "1600 Club" because he got a perfect score on the SAT. They talk to his physics teacher who says Tim was on his way to winning a science fair and its $20K prize and the attendant prestige. They learn that the other boy who was walking with the victim that day, Carl Borland, was always #2 to Tim.

They talk to Carl, and it begins to look like his family might be involved somehow. They talk to Carl's mom, who has a weak alibi. She directs them to her son, Randy (played by Sam Rockwell), who also doesn't have much of an alibi. Ballistics matches the murder weapon to that of the Borlands. They talk to the mom's boss (played by Estelle Harris from Seinfeld), as the detectives work to break everyone's alibi.

Logan gets an anonymous phone call from a tipster, and freaks out because he can't find his tape recorder. Finally, Ceretta solves the problem by picking up on the same line. Using the tip, they get a new search warrant and search, and find the gun in the china cabinet. The prints on the gun match Mr Borland's. Furthermore, Randy's alibi was that he was at the YMCA, but they learn that the sign-in sheet had been tampered with to cover for him. They arrest Ron Borland at the fish market where he works. He is represented by recurring character [?] Mr Willis. (31')

To seuq to the next scene, a rather unusual title card informs us that it is "3 hours later."

Stone and Robinette indicate that Borland might pleads to Man 2. Robinette visits Carl's high school, to figure more out. The parents are upset with the DA for investigating at the high school. The mom says, "My son's life is at stake," seeming to ignore her husband's stake in all this. Stone begins to believe that the dad is taking the fall for the mom and Randy.

They enter plea negotiations, and Willis challenges the search warrant, and wins, because the tip was not sufficient probable cause for the warrant. Like he always does, Schiff tells Stone to "make a deal" because "you'll lose."

Mom and Randy stand trail for the murder (46'). The gun is identified as a Tanfolio Titan 380, of which there are 2941 in NYC. At the Family Conference Room, the make a new deal offer: Randy gets 3-9, Mom gets 15-life. Mom refuses, so it's back to trial.

The vic's girlfriend resurfaces, and just as it looks like the case is going into the crapper, tells Stone she saw Borland at the scene in his fishing truck. This scene takes place in what is called "the Supreme Court rotunda." It appears Kate is lying.

Nonetheless, the verdict comes back guilty on Murder 2, so Schiff was wrong. Cerreta and Logan check out the girl's story after the fact. She says she saw a license plate on the front of the truck, and they learn there is no such plate. This leads to a mistrial.

Schiff says he liked it better when crimininals did the killings in the city. S

Here's a screenshot of Rockwell, who was 24 when this episode aired. Estelle Harris, who played George Costanza's mother on Seinfeld, also appears briefly in this episode.

Detailed episode summary coming soon.

7.11 Menace

In this well-written episode (7.11), a woman leaps to her death from the Brooklyn Bridge. It appears that she was being chased by a large, angry man whom she had a traffic accident with. After much investigation, it is revealed that this seemingly random encounter may have had its roots in an arson she was aware of. Briscoe and Curtis investigate, and McCoy and Ross try to make murder charges stick, despite the unusual circumstances. This is also the episode in which Curtis and his wife get separated.

The episode begins with a wealthy-looking couple (husband and sexy wife) stuck in traffic on the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. They're flirting with each other when they hear some yelling and look up to see a commotion. A man tells him that a woman has jumped off the bridge. Profaci and Briscoe are the first to respond -- apparently they couldn't get in touch with Curtis. The victim, a young female, has no shirt on and is wearing only a bra and pants. She fell 40 feet to the pavement below the bridge ramp. Her car is found nearby on the bridge, abandoned, and she is identified as Karen Watney. There is a push at the scene to rule the death a suicide, but a late-arriving Curtis discovers that the woman's shirt was torn, indicating she was attacked on the bridge.

Briscoe and Curtis talk to the victim's mom, who doesn't have much information, except that the may have gone out with a friend named Shawna the night of her death. Before heading over to talk to Shawna, Curtis reveals that his wife has taken the kids and gone to stay with her parents for a few days. (There is an implication of marital tension here.)

They talk to Shawna on 10th Avenue (right next to the Hess gas station on 46th Street). She says she and Karen went out that night and were drinking. She says Karen was having financial problems, and had asked her ex-boss, Mr Dorning, for some money. He used to own a shoe factory where she once worked, but now he manages a home loan company.

They talk to Mr Dorning, who remembers Karen fondly and says she asked for money but he couldn't help her. In the middle of the conversation, his adult son, Robby, enters the room. (It's one of those moments that's relatively common on L&O -- a person enters a scene in which they don't really seem to "belong" and you, as an experienced viewer, get the feeling that this person is the perpetrator. Well, not to spoil anything, but about 52 minutes later, that's exactly what you learn.)

Briscoe and Curtis discuss the case with Van Buren back at the precinct. The ME found alcohol and Midol in her system. Briscoe makes a joke about how Midol/PMS probably led to her death, and AVB tells Briscoe he should crawl back into his cave. Curtis, meanwhile, reports that the woman had a bruise on her arm inconsistent with a fall -- it looks like she was pulled around.

They trace the 911 call about the incident to the rich man we saw in the episode's opening moments. He says he didn't actually see the woman jump, but he remembers a guy in a maroon Volvo and a Daily News delivery truck. They track down the Daily News driver, who leads them to an employee of the Parks Department who was also on the bridge that night. The drivers says he saw the employee with a woman.

The Parks Dept employee, Mr Marsh, is uncooperative when questioned, apparently because he's trying to cover up his extra-marital affair. He even denies that he was on the bridge -- he says he was on Randall's Island.

Back at the precinct, AVB asks Briscoe "What's up with Rey?" Apparently he's been moody. Briscoe says he doesn't know, but we see him in the background, talking intensely on the phone. He comes in and says it was his wife. They come up with the idea of establishing a road block at that bridge ramp that night so they can find some people who typically drive on the bridge at that time. This idea works well, and nets them a bunch of diverse witnesses. They bring them all in for questioning: a businesswoman, Mr Marsh, the Volvo driver, the Daily News driver, and a maitre d'. They put them all in a room and question them. When Marsh refuses to admit he saw anything or that there was a woman in his van with him, Curtis freaks out and, enraged, shouts out him and pushes him against the wall and threatens him. Everyone is shocked.

Briscoe calmly asks Curtis to settle down and takes him outside and asks him what the hell is going on. Curtis says that his wife, Deborah, has left him and taken the kids. Briscoe asks why, and attentive viewers will be able to guess: she found out about the extra-marital interlude he had with a girl (Jennifer Garner) in the last episode of the previous season ("Aftershock," the one in which Kincaid is killed). Rey tells Briscoe that he told his wife that he "broke [his] vows" and Briscoe says it was his second mistake to say anything. Curtis says that his dad chased women, and he vowed he would never do it himself. Oh well. Briscoe tells Curtis to put his temper back in his pocket and solve the case.

Back in the interrogation room, the witnesses finally break down and admit they saw what happened: the victim and the big man had a fender bender on the bridge, the man got enraged, dragged the woman out of the car, and she ran away. He caught up to her, tried to grab her but merely ripped off her shirt, and she jumped off the bridge to escape him. Mr Marsh, finally fessing up to what he saw, says the attacker's car was a green Ford LTD.

They check Karen's car and find traces of green paint on both the left and right corners of the front bumper, indicating that there were two accidents, not one. That's strange. They canvas the neighborhood where Karen was before getting to the bridge, and find a security guard who says he saw the first accident. His description of the driver in that incident matches the description of the man seen on the bridge. He got a partial plate on the LTD, which leads the detectives to New Jersey to a guy named Mike McDougan. McDougan isn't home, but his elderly neighbor says they call him Crazy Mike and that he's a "menace" (hence the title of the episode). He says that Crazy Mike once chased his 14-year-old grandson and beat him. He tells them that Mike and his dad can be found at a local Eastchester bar.

They head to the bar, where they find Crazy Mike and his elderly dad. They take Mike into custody without incident, just some wisecracking from both sides (21 mins).

Crazy Mike, which is what they call him throughout the episode, pleads not guilty at his arraignment fro Murder 2 and Assault. Even the arraignment judge questions the murder charge, since Mike didn't actually push the woman off the bridge, so Ross wonders whether she'll be able to get an indictment.

Back at the DA's office, they discuss Mike's violent past -- many arrests for assault, and McCoy says Mike was arrested at "a known policy hangout." I have no idea what that means, but I assume it means that Mike is involved with low-level organized crime. Schiff is skeptical about the case, and says to Ross, "Throw the book at him, but if the grand jury throws it back, don't get hit in the head."

Ross takes the case to the grand jury, and is quite combative with Crazy Mike. He says he "would never" do something like the assault, and she raises his 5 arrests for assault, crimes she wasn't supposed to mention. His attorney (played by recognizable actor Tony Lo Bianco) objects, which he's not allowed to do in a grand jury proceeding, and Ross has him removed. The defense attorney gets the last laugh, though: he asks a judge to reign in Ross and get the information about the prior arrests stricken from the record. He succeeds.

Ross's best chance, then, is the testimony from Mr Marsh, but Marsh changes his story on the stand, and says that Karen was drunk, and that he didn't really see Crazy Mike assualting her. Ross is upset, and meets with McCoy, telling him the case is falling apart and he doesn't know what to do. He tells her he's enjoying the moment, but she says she's serious and needs advice. He tells her to follow her "gut" and either have the grand jury vote or withdraw the attempt for an indictment. She seeks the vote, but they only indict him for Assault 3, a misdemeanor.

Ross suspects that Mr Marsh was somehow threatened by Crazy Mike. They question his wife (played by Kathrine Narducci, aka "Charmaine Bucco" from The Sopranos), who says they have been getting strange calls lately but she doesn't know about any threats. She says she *69'd the calls one time, and a man answered.

Back at the precinct, Briscoe finds Curtis shaving in the men's room and tells him that the phone calls came from a number registered to a woman. Curtis tells Briscoe that he'll be staying with his sister for a while until he finds a place of his own.

They head over to the address where the phone number is registered, and learn from the front desk that the father of the woman's child, Dave Randall, often comes by. It turns out that Randall is also known as "Randall the Candle," and that he is a convicted arsonist. Well, neither we nor the DAs forget that Karen has a possible connection to an arson case: she used to work at that shoe factory that burned down. And there's another connection, even more surprising: Randall used to live in the same correctional facility (Altoona) as Crazy Mike! New theory of the crime: Karen found out that the factory fire was arson for insurance money, and threatened to tell, unless Dorning paid her off.

They talk to Karen's mom again, who tells them that the night before the fire, Karen brought a keepsake book she had been working on home from the office. Her mother thought this was strange. It is interpreted as evidence that she had foreknowledge of the fire.

McCoy and Ross review the case with Schiff. McCoy argues that Karen knew Dorning, Dorning got Randall the Candle to torch the place, and Randall got Crazy Mike to kill Karen. Schiff responds skeptically, "And who's got the evidence of the crazy conspiracy? Mac the Knife?" Schiff tells them to offer a deal to Mike or Randall so they get them to roll on Dorning, who is apparently responsible for the whole thing.

They arrest the red-haired Randall (off camera) and interrogate him. McCoy offers him a deal to roll on Dorning or Mike, but he is recalcitrant and cocky and says to McCoy, "Plead this."

They try to re-indict Crazy Mike for murder, given this new evidence of a conspiracy, but his defense counsel gets a judge to bar it.

To gather more evidence, they get a search warrant for Dorning's home loan company, and Ross confronts the angry son there. They review the company's financial records, and find checks drawn the day before and after Karen's death. The checks are endorsed by Dorning Sr. They bring Dorning's son in for questioning, and he rolls on his dad, but you get the feeling something isn't quite right. Dorning Sr is arrested (52 mins).

They have Crazy Mike in custody, too, but they can't find Randall, and they need him to make their case. Ross and McCoy meet with Mike yet again and offer him yet another plea deal to roll on the others. He tells the whole story about how he staged the accident and that Randall hired him to do it, without telling him details. McCoy got him to say this by implying he already had Randall in custody. However, Mike is unable to offer evidence about Dorning Sr, so McCoy wants to withdraw the offer. They say, why not just get the info you need from Randall, and McCoy admits he doesn't know where Randall is. He tricked Crazy Mike.

But he learns through this exchange that Randall had called Mike and told him to skip town -- arrests were imminent. He says this happened on Tuesday night, the same day the Dorning son was questioned. This leads Ross and McCoy to believe that the younger Dorning is the mastermind, and the he tipped Randall that the DA's investigation was heating up.

They bring in both Dornings for a big family conference, and McCoy tells Dorning Sr that he thinks his son burned down the factory so that his father would invest in the younger Dorning's attempt to purchase the home loan business from a third party (which he eventually did). Realizing that his own son burned down the factory and is responsible for Karen's death, Dorning admits he thought his son contracted the arson and says Karen told him she saw the younger Dorning at the factory the night of the fire, and was blackmailing him. The son had told Dorning Sr he would "take care of it." After watching his father give him up, the son unmercifully says to his dad, 'You're such a loser. Such a damn loser." Off camera, everyone gets the sentence they deserve.

McCoy tells ross, "I remember how I felt when I realized my father was a son of a bitch. I can't imagine what it feels like to realize you raised one." End of ep.

The episode is notable because it establishes the fall-out from Curtis's rendezvous in Aftershock. His marital troubles are referred to in many future episodes -- despite attempts at reconciilation, they remain separated for quite a while.

One subtle theme in the episode is father/son relationships. There is the relationship between the Dorning's, but Curtis mentions how his father chased women and that seems to have affected his behavior, and McCoy closes the ep by mentioning what a "son of a bitch" his own father was.

The episode draws heavily from Aftershock, in which McCoy discusses his father at great length, and we actually see Curtis kissing the girl played by Jennifer Garner.

The episode calls to mind a real-life case in which a woman was chased off a bridge by a man threatening her with a weapon, in front of a crowd of people. (This is a well-known case, but difficult to find on the Internet if you don't know the details. If you find some info, please post a link in the comments.)

9.2 DWB

In this great McCoy-on-a-mission episode (9.2), McCoy goes after some New York City cops for the dragging death of a black man. The storyline is like a cross between the Amadou Diallo case and the dragging case in Jasper, TX.

The episode begins with two men discussing fishing in the Hudson River. As they walk back to their car, one of them notices a body in the underbrush. Briscoe and Curtis are called in, and there is strong evidence that the body has been dragged down a road by a vehicle. When they find the victim's Bulova watch, Briscoe issues this wisecrack: "It stopped ticking when he took a licking." The ME examines the body in the presence of Briscoe and Curtis, detailing the victim's extensive injuries. There is some paint on his body, too, consistent with the paint used to paint lines on roadway. They meet with Lt. Van Buren, who gets a call beckoning her to the chief of detectives office. Rev. Dempsey, who is apparently a leader in the black community, is there, pressuring the chief and AVB to use whatever resources are necessary to solve this hate crime.

The case takes a step forward when they find the road area where the paint came from. A technician matches the still-unidentified victim's palm print to a print found in the paint. They canvas the neighborhood, and talk to a bickering couple of old ladies who point them to Ray Ray, a squeegee man. Ray Ray is at first somewhat helpful, but then uncomfortable around Briscoe and Curtis, neither of whom are black. (He is.) He talks to AVB and says he saw two white guys pull a black man out of a yellow/champagne-colored Cutlass. He says he'll tell the story to AVB, but not "to the Man." AVB reassured him: "In this house, I'm the Man."

They somehow track down the Cutlass...it's not exactly clear how. The detectives find a shirt in it belonging to the auxiliary police force of Westchester County. They also find an ID belonging to "Floyd Michaels." That's the victim, it seems. They talk to Michaels' wife who is very sad and also upset at the treatment she got from white police officers when she first reported her husband missing. From a perfume pack found in the car, they wind up at a bar that Michaels visited the night he was killed. (The bar sells the packages to men who need a present for their perturbed wives or girlfriends.) The bartender tells them he saw Michaels leave with an older gentleman, Artie Dixon. They find Dixon playing checkers in a park on the far Upper East Side, and he tells them that Michaels gave him a ride home that night and thought he was being followed by a car: a red Pontiac. They talk to a deli owner in the neighborhood (95th and Lex) who saw the car making the rounds, and he remembers the plate number. The deli owner says he called the cops re: the car, but they didn't do anything.

They trace the car to a guy in New Jersey. They visit him, but his angry, disheveled mom tells them that her son has been incarcerated on drug charges, and his car was impounded during his arrest in the city. Hm! That makes it sound like it was only the NYPD who had access to his car. Could police be responsible somehow?

They check out the NYPD impound lot, and the officer in charge tells them he can't locate the car. It's obvious he's holding back, and under pressure, he reveals that some officers on undercover patrol took the car out and never returned it.

AVB shares this information with McCoy and Carmichael, who are surprised and upset. It's clear that the police are somehow involved in the dragging death, but no one wants to come out and say it. They have the names of the cops, and they show their photos to Ray Ray. But Ray Ray isn't as dumb as he seems, perhaps, and he realizes that the photo array he's being shown is all cops. (One of them even gave him a ticket once.) He panics, and refuses to cooperate. So they bring in all the cops named by the impound lot manager and question them. There are four: Fratelli, Dietrich, Sawchuck, and Carlson. A rep from Internal Affairs Bureau is brought in for the questioning, also. Eventually, Sawchuck sort of rolls on the others, saying he didn't know about the dragging, but went up to Carlson's farm and saw the red Pontiac, and the other officers told them a traffic stop went bad and they had to get rid of the car.

The detectives visit the farm and find the car. The car had been set on fire and the rear seats had been removed and taken to the local dump, but they are soon recovered. They are coated with the victim's blood. The case is sealed when rope fibers are found on the rear bumper which match the fibers found on the victim. All the officers, except Sawchuck, are arrested (21 mins).

Before McCoy can begin to assemble a prosecution, however, the US Attorney steps in and he wants to try the case. Carmichael doesn't want to cede it because she likes the death penalty, and Schiff is reluctant to have another agency prosecute a case that occurred in his jurisdiction. McCoy also wants to keep the case. As Schiff says, "We'll do our own laundry."

The case gets more complicated, however, when Carmichael realizes that there is an inconsistency in Sawchuck's story: he's been lying to them. McCoy and AC question his wife and they force Sawchuck to tell the whole story. (They threaten him with contempt.) He tells the full story and says his partner, Dietrick, was involved and told him everything. Dietrick is questioned further, but they US Attorney walks in during the questioning, and offers Dietrick immunity in exchange for his testimony against the other two officers. McCoy is upset, but there isn't much he can do. He agrees to the deal for state charges. Dietrick tells his story again, fingering Carlson and Fratelli. He says Michaels was "profiled" and pulled over because he was black.

Carmichael visits the officers' precinct, the 21st, and talks to the commander about his policies re: racial profiling. It's clear that he tolerates it, and there are a high number of complaints lodged against the precinct for it. She goes back to the DA's office where she finds Schiff and McCoy watching a press conference by an aide to the mayor. The aide, Mr Butler, is saying that the citizens of NYC should be re-assured that "the Blue Wall" is penetrable and cops will indeed testify against each other for their crimes. He indirectly calls Dietrick a hero. But McCoy isn't convinced, and he's increasingly concerned that Dietrick is a bad man and is going to get him in trouble once he takes the stand.

AC looks into Dietrick's background and finds that he has had many complaints filed against him, and that a few years ago, he sued the city so that he could retire with a full pension. She investigates that suit, and learns that Dietrick claims he was stressed out by his job as a narcotics detective in the Bronx and felt hatred toward people of color and wanted to kill them. The department won the suit, however, and they retained him as an officer.

McCoy confronts Dietrick about all of this, and suspects that Dietrick's role in the crime was greater than he's admitting. Dietrick's lawyer is upset that McCoy is treating a witness this way, but McCoy won't back down: he moves to withdraw the immunity arrangement he had with Dietrick.

This act sets into motion a chain of events which brings great pressure down on Schiff and McCoy. The mayor is furious that McCoy has withdrawn the offer, and in a meeting at Schiff's office, the US Attorney tells Butler and the prosecutors that he can take over the case. Butler encourages it, and McCoy resists it, but Schiff eventually gives up and hands the case to the feds.

This infuriates McCoy, who calmly but forcefully pleads with Schiff not to do so. Schiff responds that "the Boston Red Sox couldn't have done a better job of botching the case' than McCoy and IAB did. McCoy says "For all we know, Dietrick is a murderer," and Schiff responds sharply, "For all you know, you don't know anything."

McCoy really gets fired up now, and tells Carmichael he's "not done with Dietrick yet." He tells her to find everything she can about "grants of immunity." AC spends time researching and McCoy brings her dinner. (Salad with lo-cal dressing, which she refuses in favor of his ribs. She says she burns fatinstead of storing it. Remember, this is only Carmichael's second episode, so we're getting characterization here.) She thinks she found something important: the feds pretty much just copied McCoy's paperwork on the grant of immunity to Dietrick, instead of writing up their own. But there's an important distinction between federal and state rules on immunity: on a federal level, anything of value given to a witness in exchange for testimony is considered bribery. On the state level, the thing of value must be given in exchange for false testimony. This gives McCoy an opening to challenge the grant of immunity, on the grounds that -- get this -- the offer constitutes a bribe, which is illegal.

Schiff learns that McCoy has filed this motion, and says, "So you're defying me." McCoy says that he is. Schiff says he can kill it with one phone call, and McCoy agrees, but says he would then file it "as a private citizen," implying that he would resign. Schiff, cryptically, says, "It's nice to have options." But, in behavior typical of the relationship b/t Schiff and McCoy, Schiff lets McCoy go off on his mission and doesn't interfere any further.

McCoy argues his motion in court, and somewhat unbelievably, wins! He thumbs his nose at the US Attorney, but Schiff isn't pleased with the decision because he thinks it'll threaten the entire federal prosecutorial system. McCoy says not to worry, it'll be reversed on appeal, after Carlson and Dietrick are on row. Schiff says it better be, or McCoy's resignation will be on his desk.

McCoy is then free to pursue his case against Dietrich and Carlson. He arranges a line-up with Ray Ray, who picks the third cop -- Fratelli -- out of the line-up. They use this to pressure Fratelli to roll on Carlson and Dietrick, which he does. As the line-up dissipates after Ray Ray's correct ID, Briscoe tells Carmichael that they told Ray Ray to pick suspect #3, Fratelli. Briscoe says it was easy for Ray Ray to remember the number: "it rhymes with squeegee." Carmichael gives him a look, but says nothing.

Carlson and Dietrick go on trial for Murder 1 (50 mins). The trial scene is unusual: we see only one witness -- Fratelli -- testify, and we do not see any cross-examination. Then, we see only McCoy's long and eloquent closing statement. No closing statement is seen from the defense. And finally, the verdict is reached and announced off camera. We learn from a discussion in Schiff's office what happened: both were convicted of Murder 1 and have been sent to death row.

McCoy asks Abbie how she feels about being involved with her first death penalty case. She says she's fine with it, but is concerned about what Briscoe did with the line-up. She describes the ploy to McCoy who says, "I know -- I told them to do it." He assures her it is perfectly legal, since they never intended to use the line-up in court. She still seems reluctant, but he says to her, "Major felonies, Abbie. Welcome to the bigs."

The episode is notable because of its heavy focus on McCoy. Also, Det. Curtis only gets about 5 lines of dialogue in the whole episode.

Casting notes: John Ventimiglia, aka Artie Bucco on The Sopranos, plays Dietrick. The US Attorney from this episode re-appears in Ambitious, an episode later in the season. In a sign that the program directors at TNT are actually working according to some kind of plan when they schedule the episodes, "DWB" and "Ambition" were shown back to back on June 3, 2004.

It's worth pointing out that McCoy is indignant over the feds' offer of immunity to Dietrick, a killer, but McCoy himself frequently offers immunity to killers who testify against other killers.

The title of the episode, DWB, is a vernacular abbreviation for "Driving While Black," a term used to describe the reason African-Americans are frequently pulled over in white neighborhoods.

Actress from CI Episode Shot on NYC Subway

Monica Meadows, an actress who appeared on an episode of L&O: Criminal Intent, was shot on the New York City subway yesterday.

She appears briefly in the truly awful episode F.P.S., one of the few CI episodes I've summarized.

12.22 Attorney Client

In this episode (12.22), the wife of a well-off defense attorney is murdered in her Jaguar, and either some former clients or the attorney himself is to blame. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Southerlyn figure out how to prosecute a defense attorney.

The episode begins with a couple walking down the street. They are just leaving the woman's 40th birthday, and are having a discussion about the nature of time when they hear shots ring out. Briscoe and Green respond to the scene, and find the victim, Marjorie Jensen, dead from 3 gunshots, and the hood ornament of her Jaguar is missing.

They talk to her husband, Harold, a defense attorney. He is pre-occupied with his current case, and tells the detectives he needs to get back to work on it. Forensics doesn't reveal much: the gun used was a .22, but there are no prints on the car. The dets check out the case that Jensen is working on, but there doesn't seem to be a connection. They check out Jensen at the NY bar association's disciplinary committee, where they learn of one former client, Mr. Griggs, who filed many angry complaints against Jensen.

They learn that Griggs has been recently paroled, and was supposed to be at an AA meeting the night of the murder, but he missed it. They go to Griggs apartment, where they find him drinking. They take him in to custody (13 mins). He says he missed the meeting because he received a call telling him his friend wasn't doing well, and he should go visit him. However, they address he was given to meet his friend was an abandoned building. But he says he stopped in a bodega to pick up cigarettes, and his face should be on the security tape. So he has an alibi. It looks a little bit like Griggs may have been set up, since it was part of his previous MO to use a .22 and steal hood ornaments.

They talk to the doorman at the Jensen's building who tells them that the Jensens' marriage was sometimes rocky, and he recently heard Mrs Jensen tell a cab driver to take her to a dive bar on 119th Street, not her usual habitat. They check out the bar, and the bartended says he remembers her, and that she met with a younger, sleazy guy.

They check out the Jensens' financial records and find evidence of lots of jewelry purchases and a trip to Las Vegas. However, it seems these were not for Mrs Jensen. They suspect an affair, and learn that Jensen had a mistress, a stripper and former hooker named Jasmine.

They track down Jasmine, who tells them the affair lasted 6 months but then Jensen broke it off because he was afraid of Jasmine's ex-boyfriend, Bobby Caldwell, who threatened him.

The detectives track down Caldwell at a sleazy motel (wth special "One Hour Nap" rates), and when they see him, he runs. Ed Green chases him down in an Ed Green 5-Second Foot Chase™ and they take him into custody. Bobby admits taking photos of Jensen and Jasmine and selling them to Mrs Jensen. That's why they were at the dive bar together.

Southerlyn visits Jasmine at her strip club to get more info. When she arrives, the club manager things SS is applying to be a stripper. Instead, she gets contact information for Jasmine's friend and former roommate, and visits her at her day job. The friend reveals that Jasmine and Bobby were conning Jensen -- taking all the money he gave her, while pretending that things had ended. McCoy and SS theorize that the murder was a conspiracy between Bobby and Jasmine. They are arrested (off camera, 29 mins) and McCoy meets with them at Rikers, where he offers them a deal -- one of them gets 15 years instead of life in exchange for testimony against the other one. Their lawyers say that McCoy can't use a conspiracy charge to prove the murder, because he doesn't have any evidence of a conspiracy. One of the lawyer's describe it as a "defense lawyer's dream." A reaction shot of Southerlyn makes us think that perhaps the other defense lawyer in this episode -- Jensen -- was somehow involved in cooking up this scheme.

They decide to reinvestigate Jansen. SS visits his secretary, and learns that Jensen frequently checked on Griggs' impending release date. He said it was so he could ensure his own safety, but we suspect he may have actually been waiting for a convenient time to frame Griggs. McCoy and SS develop a new theory of the crime -- that Griggs framed everyone else for the murder of his wife -- and the detectives arrest him at work (34 mins).

Jensen's trial begins (38 mins), and it's a real circus. A former client of Jensen's testifies that he provided a .22 gun to him, and Jasmine testifies that she was involved in a conspiracy with Jensen to kill his wife. (A lot of her testimony is "He said...", and I'm not sure why it's not hearsay. Maybe because she is a co-conspirator?) Things get strange, however, when Jensen takes the stand on his own behalf. He spends most of his testimony talking directly to the jurors, talking about how he takes responsibility for the affair, but how he is the victim of malicious prosecution. But when McCoy cross-examines him, Jensen is unable to say the date that he ended the affair with Jasmine. McCoy reveals he has photos of Jasmine and Jensen together, and suggests that these photos depict a date-specific item that would directly contradict whatever Jensen might say. Jensen freezes and refuses to answer.

Jensen decides to fire his attorney, Ms. Swan, and tells the judge he wants to represent himself, even though they're halfway through the trial. The judge allows it, and even allows Jensen to offer a "re-direct" examination of...himself. So Jensen gets back on the stand and gives the jury more nonsense about why he lied about the end of the affair and so on. Immediately after this, he tries to call McCoy to the stand! McCoy objects, saying he'd have to withdraw as the prosecutor of the case he testifies, and this would lead to a mistrial. The judge refuses Jensen's gambit, and McCoy and Jensen make their closing statements. Jensen tries to argue that McCoy maliciously prosecuted him, but McCoy says that the prosecution took the unusual path that it did because of Jensen's own efforts to frame everyone. Jensen is found guilty of Murder 2, but it's not over yet.

He calls a meeting with McCoy and offers to sell out all of his former clients in exchange for leniency. McCoy seems somewhat willing to consider this, but he talks it over with SS and Lewin, and tells Jensen he's decided to refuse the offer. Jensen says it doesn't matter: he has good grounds for appeal. He says that it was within his rights to call McCoy and that the judge's refusal to allow it is appeal-worthy. He tells McCoy that the smart thing for McCoy to have done would have been to step aside, but McC's competitive spirit wouldn't allow it. The episode ends.

This is a pretty simple episode, that only gets complicated and unusual near then end of the trial. I think the script writers intended it to be about the "gamesmanship" between defense attorneys and prosecutors, but that part doesn't really work very well, in part because of the preposterous nature of parts of the script, and also because of the somewhat uneven performance of Peter Friedman as Jensen. His performance varies in tone, and he has an element of weakness in persona that doesn't seem fitting for someone trying to go head to head with McCoy. Friedman should have played his character much more confidently, rather than try to make up for it with loud tantrums and so forth.

The episode's title refers to Jensen's framing of his clients, his proposed violation of attorney client privilege at the end of the episode, and, I suppose, to his status as both an attorney and a client.