Here's a photo of her on stage. She was introducing a member of the military, with her husband. Here's some more pics.
I guess Abbie Carmichael's conservatism wasn't an act.
This episode (8.10) deals with the African cultural practice of female genital mutilation and is extremely difficult to watch at times. The victim in the episode was arranging to have his niece undergo this procedure, and then one of her relatives killed him to prevent it.
The episode begins with a tow truck driver preparing to haul away a BMW. He notices a body concealed behind a short wall nearby. Briscoe and Curtis investigate. They find some notes about a flight on him, which leads them to his hotel, and they learn his name is "Joe" Moussad. They begin to have mild suspicions that he might be involved in terrorism.
Down at the precinct, the detectives pass a woman as they approach Van Buren's office. They ask who she was, and AVB explains it's her lawyer, and that she's suing the department becaused they passed her over for a promotion. She took the captain's test, and they gave it to a white woman, even though AVB had more seniority. This lawsuit is mentioned many times in subsequent episodes.
Once that's cleared up, they discuss finding residue of baking soda in the hotel room, and some odd movements of Moussad. They explicitly mention their concerns about terrorism. Forensics tells them that the baking soda can be used as a "stabilizing agent" in bomb-making.
They somehow get a lead on another related hotel room, and raid it looking for a man named Nasser who was mentioned in a message on Moussad's answering machine. They learn that Nasser was headed to the Statue of Liberty. They get all concerned he's going to blow it up, so they race over there and find him in line. He's carrying a medical bag, and when they knock it out of his hands, medical equipment (not a bomb) spills out.
They take Dr Nasser in for questioning and he basically stonewalls them until he can talk to a representative from the Egyptian consulate. ADA Jamie Ross shows up and says since he says he was in the US to do medical work on Massoud but entered on a tourist visa, they can hand him over to INS for immigration violations.
An Arabic-speaking police officer translates the answering machine tape for them. It's Massoud's sister talking about Nasser, arranging some kind of meeting. Another message is from Massoud's girlfriend. They go and talk to her and she says his family probably killed him. They were always trying to get money from him, she says.
They bring in Massoud's sister for questioning, and her husband, Mr Martin. They try to bluff him by saying they have a record of his leaving a parking garage around the time of the murder, but he calls their bluff and says those magneting cards don't have identifying information on them. The sister's teenage daughter (Massoud's niece) is also at the station. She's gets a minute alone with AVB and says her mother fought with Massoud and left the house after Massoud, so she might have killed him. In other words, she's trying to make it look like her mom did the crime.
McCoy and Ross determine that Nasser's story about Massoud having a bad heart is bogus, and Nasser isn't a heart doctor. They also note he was carrying surgical instruments, not something you'd need as a cardiologist.
The Egyptian consulate's representative is stonewalling Ross in her efforts to learn about Nasser, so she gets his car towed because he owed $30,000 in parking tickets. He begins to cooperate.
They talk to Massoud's sister's neighbors to learn more about the Martin family. The old lady neighbord says she hears them fighting a lot, and that Mrs Martin is very strict about her daughter's upbringing and flipped out once when she tried to wear makeup. She also says she saw Mr Martin returning home late the night of the murder.
Ross learns that Nasser is an ob-gyn doctor. She talks to another doctor who sponsored his visit to the US for a seminar a while back. That doctor says that over in Egypt, Nasser performs female genital mutilation on young girls. This is a process whereby the girl's clitoris is cut off to "ensure" chastity. There is a very graphic description of the operation.
The DAs figure it all out and determine that Massoud was arranging for Dr Nasser to do this to his niece, apparently with the consent of his sister, but against the wishes of Mr Martin.
They talk to Mr Martin and offer him Man I, for which he would plead extreme emotional disturbance and get 7.5 years. He refuses, and says he wants to go to trial. Ross wants McCoy to be even more lenient.
They take it to a grand jury where Mr Martin testifies about what was being planned for his daughter, and he admits to the killing. The grand jury returns and indictment for Man I, but he again refuses a plea bargain.
Meanwhile, Ross is working to secure the safety of the girl. She works pro bono to get the girl into the custody of her paternal grandparents. There is a hearing on the matter at family court, and there is more graphic testimony about gential mutilation.
McCoy struggles with his obligation to take the case against Martin to trial, and Schiff basically tells-him-without-telling-him that he can purposely lose the case.
Back at family court, Ross confronts the girl's grandmother who seems to be behind the whole push to operate on the girl. The old woman says a lot of stuff about how Americans don't understand, and finally the girl's mother stands up to her own mother and says she won't let this be done to her daughter, since she knows from personal experience how terrible it is.
The Martins meet in the family conference room, and they come up with a deal: Mrs Martin cedes custody of her daughter, and Mr Martin pleads to Man I and gets 7 years. They agree to this.
Casting note: Mr Martin's attorney is played by Steve Landesberg, who played Dietrich on Barney Miller.
In this episode (3.18), a professor is killed at the university lab where she experiments on animals. At first, it looks like animal rights activists might be to blame, but then when it is discovered that her husband and a colleague may have been having an affair, the focus of the investigation shifts. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and Stone and Robinette lead an ill-fated prosecution until they figure it all out.
The episode begins with the discovery of the victim, Fay Walsh, in her lab. Pro-animal graffiti ("Innocent Victims") adorns the walls. Briscoe and Logan talk to her husband, and he says she received threats from animal rights groups. They focus on Dirk Chesney, an activist with a violent past. They get a warrant for his apartment and search it when he's not there. They don't find too much, but he turns up in the middle of the search and he's carrying a gun. For some reason, he starts to flee, and they take him to the precinct.
During questioning, he just makes a lot of political speeches and offers an alibi: he was getting acupuncture. It turns out his gun was not the murder weapon, so they have to keep looking for suspects.
The murder weapon was a small shotgun, a "410," they call it, and they find that the university has access to one of these guns. They use it for killing birds in the field so they can bring in specimens. They find the gun in a locked closet. It's been cleaned but they can tell it's been recently fired.
They start looking for people associated with the university ("Manhattan Institute of Technology") who had a grudge against the victim. They talk to a biology department administrator, Susan Boyd, who tells them to check the victim's grade book. That doesn't go anywhere, but they learn Walsh had hired a private investigator to explore the possibility that her husband was having an affair.
They talk to the investigator, Mr Riggs, who says that it appeared Mr Walsh was having an affair with Susan Boyd. They talk to the husband and he says that Boyd once flirted with him but he never pursued a relationship with her. But, Riggs gave them a recording he made of Boyd leaving a steamy message on Mr Walsh's answering machine. They question Boyd and she admits the affair. It also turns out that she bought ammo for that shotgun down in New Jersey, identifying herself as Mrs Walsh.
They interrogate the husband and Boyd separately. You begin to get the impression that Boyd is obsessed with Walsh. Walsh continues to deny the affair and seems believable. But not believable enough: Stone decides to prosecute Mr Walsh for murder and make a deal with Boyd to testify against him. Walsh's lawyer, Wesley Burke, gets the tape of the steamy message suppressed, though, so they case is weak before it even starts.
A trial (38'), things aren't going very well. Stone and Robinette prepare Boyd for her testimony, and it's clear she's nervous and is having trouble with her story. Finally she turns to Stone and says, "What should I say?" He hesitates and reluctantly tells her to say she was home alone the night of the murder, even though she had previously told police she was with Mr Walsh. On the stand the next day, Burke questions her about her whereabouts that night and she looks at Stone before answering that she was home alone. Burke picks up on this and asks whether Stone told her to say that. She says he did. Uh oh. After a meeting in chambers, the judge tells the jury (off camera) they can choose to disregard her testimony.
Apparently, they do, and Walsh is found not guilty of his wife's murder (44').
So that leaves the DA with no one to prosecute, since they had made a deal with Boyd already. Then a judge named Feldman from New Jersey calls Robinette to talk about Boyd. They meet in Jersey and he says he knew her as Susan Daly, and she was once a clerk for him. He said she became infatuated with him, even though he was married. She moved to be closer to him an everything. Robinette later learns that Boyd has a history of fraud, and she wasn't even a lawyer, but she was good enough that she convinced this judge otherwise.
They finally get around to talking to Olivet about Boyd, and she (without meeting her) says Boyd probably suffers from "erotomania" which causes her to have imaginary romantic relationships with all these men, and to think that the men are sending her coded messages through mundane behavior. They learn that Boyd had an apartment on Cape May right near Mr Walsh's home there. They search it and find the ammo and a sort of shrine to Mr Walsh. They arrest her (54')
They all meet in the DA conference room. Walsh is brought in to tell Boyd he doesn't love her. She ignores him. Then -- in what is probably the best bit of the episode -- she tells Stone that he wrote her love letters saying that he wanted to get rid of his wife so he could be with her. She produces this letter and Stone reads it aloud: it's a memo to the entire office written just before the murder requesting extra security in the building because his wife would be working alone and animal rights activists had been threatening them lately.
It's clear she's crazy, but she refuses to acknowledge that she is of diminished capacity, even though it would save her many years of jail time. When her lawyer tells her she should take the deal, she fires him and represents herself.
The episode's closing scene features Stone reviewing the latest of her 16 pre-trial motions, and he says she's using an outdated prison library but her motions are better than what high-priced law firms produce. Schiff says, "Truth is ugly, so we put our prophets in prison." Stone guesses that Oscar Wilde said that, but Schiff says no, it was Charles Manson.
The episode is one of those that starts off seeming to be about one thing, but then ends up being about something else altogether. At the beginning, you think you're getting an episode about animal rights, but soon enough (the end of the first act, really), you learn that it's another fairly conventional crime-of-passion episode. Sometimes I think the writers of the show lack the courage to stick to the original issues they raise in their scripts, so they back off and write more standard stuff for the episode's later parts. But, this episode remains entertaining because you want to find out if the woman really is crazy, and her performance is pretty good.
The credits on TV Tome say Lawrence Pressman plays the recurring defense attorney "Nicholas Burke," but I think he is referred to as "Wesley Burke" several times in the episode.
Great news, non-existent readers! I got a new Tivo, so this project will be back on track in the next day or so. Unfortunately, I've already written about all the episodes that are on tonight, so we'll see what tomorrow brings.
It is such a relief to have Tivo again. I bought the new unit just so I could put the hard drives from my old, defunct unit into it. I was hoping this would allow me to see all the shows I had recorded on the old one, but that didn't work.
So I lost 28 episodes of Law & Order that I hadn't written about yet. Oh well -- a delay, but not a defeat.
Update: Let's celebrate with some photos of a L&O shoot downtown, via Gothamist.
