Law and Order: "Vicious Cycle" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 3, 2022)

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

I watched my usual Thursday night string of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, including a quite chilling episode of the flagship Law and Order show, “Vicious Cycle,” in which fashion designer and entrepreneur Perry Sutton (Terrance Eugene Murphy – oddly the character is listed as “Perry Wyatt” on imdb.com but “Sutton” is clearly his last name on the show) is murdered as he leaves a big party celebrating the opening of a new mega-boutique his company has been building after two years’ work. Ironically (or by authorial fiat of the writer, Pamela J. Wechsler) this is right after Perry had made a big speech at the gala saying that despite the rising crime rate, New York remained a great city and he intended literally to put his money where his mouth was by investing there. The police try out the usual suspects, including Perry’s supermodel ex-girlfriend as well as a woman who owned a small boutique until the pandemic put her out of business, whereupon just as she was ready to reopen his big boutique cannibalized the market and destroyed what few chances she had to restart her business. Alas, neither of them had a motive for killing Perry because he’d promised them lucrative jobs in his operation. Then it turns out that just before heading home from his party, Perry stopped in a convenience store right when it was being robbed by a career criminal named Nick Castillo (Eric Santiago).

The lead police detectives, Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), learn this from Perry’s Rolex watch, which was stolen off his arm even though his wallet and cash weren’t. Activating the GPS chip inside the watch, Cosgrove and Shaw trace it to a storage facility run by a Black fence, Eddie Wells (Brian D. Coats), who buys stolen goods, mostly over-the-counter pharmacy items like toothpaste and shaving cream, from local shoplifters. He got the watch from a local thief named Eriq Gwynn (a real red-haired cutie named Garrett Richmond) who, like a lot of New York shoplifters, has been operating with virtual impunity once New York got rid of cash bail for misdemeanors. (I voted in the last election to get rid of cash bail in California, but the proposition lost and judging from this episode, it was probably just as well.) But Perry’s actual killer is Nick Castillo (whose first name is given as “Keith” on imdb.com – I guess there were last -minute changes in the names of both victim and killer), and though the police arrest him and find his rap sheet runs to 15 pages, the prosecutors can’t use that at trial because the judge disallows it on the ground that the prejudicial impact of Nick’s record outweighs the probative value of the evidence that he’s a career criminal.

The case eventually turns on whether the cops and prosecutors can prove that Nick had a gun, since Nick’s attorney, a hard-nosed woman who makes objections to prosecutor Nolan Price’s (Hugh Dancy) opening statement, advances an alternate theory that it was actually Perry who had the gun and Nick killed him in self-defense in a struggle over Perry’s gun. The prosecutors investigate Nick’s previous arrests, and assistant prosecutor Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) finds a case from 10 months earlier in which she was assigned the prosecution. She didn’t follow up on it because the victim was a Black immigrant woman from Africa who barely spoke English and the legal bureaucracy never provided her the interpreter she asked for. Ten months later, the woman victim has learned enough English to get by and tell the court what happened to her at Nick’s hands, including the all-important information that he had a gun, but Nick’s attorney, instead of cross-examining the victim, accuses Maroun of violating the rules of discovery and calls her as a history witness for the defense. All seems lost until the prosecutors call Eriq to the stand, and he testifies that Eddie told him all too many victims were starting to resist, so he was issuing guns to all the street thieves who worked for him, and though the defense objects to this as hearsay, the prosecutors are able to convince the judge that Eriq’s testimony should be allowed because it’s “against his penal interest” – that is, he’s providing information that increases his level of criminal responsibility – and the judge agrees. Nick is found guilty by the jury, but Maroun is haunted by guilt because had she moved more aggressively to prosecute Nick for the initial robbery, Perry Sutton might still be alive.

This Law and Order was not only especially good on its merits, it illustrates the late Kurt Vonnegut’s remark that the best way to find out how the Constitutional protections of due process actually work is to watch Law and Order on TV. And it certainly clarified for me why fear of crime has become such an issue in the upcoming midterm elections, where it’s joining inflation and immigration as the issues that are virtually guaranteeing a Republican “red tsunami,” as well as an object lesson in how well-intended reforms (New York ended cash bail largely out of concern for the rights of innocent people who served months or even years in jail on pre-trial detention because neither they nor anyone in their families could afford to bail them out) can sometimes backfire.