Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: ""Confess Your Sins to Be Free" (Dick Wolf Productions, U(niversal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

If anything, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that followed, “Confess Your Sins to Be Free,” was even better than the Law and Order which preceded it. It opens with a woman in the confession booth at a Roman Catholic church confessing to the priest that she’d already had extra-relational activity with a man other than her husband and plans to do it again that night with the same man, an upstairs neighbor. She tells the proest that she’s going to leave the door to her apartment unlocked so her lover can let himself in, only that night instead of her partner shels assaulted by a stranger and raped. She and the police, led by detectives Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), try to figure out just how the rapist knew that the door would be unlocked so he could let himself in, and after she insists that she never told anybody about that the cops deduce that it must have come from one of the priests who would have heard her confession, John Regis (Kelly AuCoin) or Ryan Duffy (Peter Darragh). Assistant district attorney Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is a lifelong family friend of Father Duffy and can’t believe he would go so far off the rails that he’d commit rape – and not for the first time, either: the Special Victims Unit has uncovered at least six other rapes with the same M. O. – but they set up a woman police officer to act as an undercover decoy and it’s Father Duffy who shows up.

Only it turns out that the real culprit is Father Regis, and Duffy knew that because Regis had confessed it to him but because of the unbreakable seal of the confessional he couldn’t tell that to the police or anyone else, though he could act on the information himself. The script by John Martin and Christian Tyler travels some of the same paths as George Tabori’s script for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film I Confess, a marvelous and grossly underrated movie in which Montgomery Clift played a Catholic priest in Quebec who is accused of murder and cannot clear himself because the real killer confessed the crime to him and he can’t use any of the information from the confession without breaking the seal. (The original ending was going to be Clift’s character actually being executed for the crime, and only afterwards would the real truth come out, but Warner Br.s vetoed that ending and forced Hitchcock and Tabori to write a chase-scene finale in which the real killer is himself killed but with his dying breath “confesses” the crime in the secular meaning and exonerates Clift’s character.) In the end the cops figure out how to get the goods on Father Regis – who, according th the Catholic church’s foul practice, has been moved from one parish to another when he was too near to getting arrested in one – without forcing Father Duffy to break the seal of the confessional. It seems that Father Regis regularly “confesses” to his mother, even though she was killed by his father when the boy was nine – which is supposed to explain his jaundiced view that women who cheat on their husbands deserve to be raped. Instead Father Regis goes to his mother’s tombstone and talks to her about everything, and the cops bug the tombstone, get his confession in a form they can use, and arrest him.