Law and Order: "Second Chance" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 12, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the usual three shows on the Law and Order franchise, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order that, as usual, was the best of the three. It was called “Second Chance” and dealt with the beating death of Derek Stanton (LaRese King), a Black parolee who served four years for selling marijuana and then was released, where he tried to start a new life by opening a pizza restaurant. In the prologue he’s working late at the restaurant when a rock is thrown through his window, and he chases down the man who threw it. There are various suspects, including his former cellmate Jordan Spall (B. J. Clinkscales, a name which seems to invite bad jokes – Duke Ellington recalled that his first piano teacher was a woman named Miss Clinkscales), who repeatedly called Stanton and left messages which Stanton never returned. It turns out that Spall was planning a crime and trying to recruit Stanton for it, and Stanton wanted nothing to do with him. Eventually the police, led by detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), identify the man who beat Stanton to death as 18-year-old high-school senior Jessie Erickson (Brandon Tyler Moore, who brings the right smirk of I-can-get-away-with-anything attitude). Jessie is a rich kid whose father is an attorney and his mother a book editor. He’s a straight-A student and had planned to take a year off his education after he finished high school to be a volunteer teacher at a literacy school in Kenya, so when the cops look for evidence that he was either a psychopath, a racist or both, they don’t find any. All that happened to him is he hooked up with a Black fellow student to buy marijuana at a legal dispensary – the Black kid had a medical-marijuana card and Jessie didn’t – and he used cannabis for the first time in his life and had a psychotic episode.

Before watching this program – and also before the recent reports of senior citizens in California showing up in emergency rooms with overdoses of marijuana – I’d been skeptical of the reports I’d seen that today’s pot is much more potent than the stuff that was around when I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The statistic quoted in this script (and usually Dick Wolf and his writers do their homework on these sorts of details) is that the marijuana of the 1960’s contained t to 3 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the main active ingredient in marijuana, while buds available today contain up to 80 to 90 percent THC (so the conceit of the legendary 1930’s anti-drug movie Reefer Madness that marijuana can drive you homicidally crazy may not have been so far-fetched after all!). Even the state’s medical expert confirms that Jessie might have snapped and beaten a guy to death because he’d been driven at least temporarily crazy by using especially strong marijuana, and with that assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) agrees to cut a plea deal under which Jessie will be convicted of second-degree manslaughter and serve 10 years in prison, thereby ending his career as “scientist and saint” but also ending his status as the perfect golden boy and do-gooder. It’s a weird take in the anti-drug propaganda of old but it’s also a tragically compelling tale, well done in the best Law and Order manner,and the pathos of the ending is that both Jessie Erickson and Derek Stanton were looking for second chances, only one of them ended up in prison and the other ended up dead.