Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Dutch Tears" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followe was called “Dutch Tears” and was given a thoroughly misleading promo in which Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T_ os beomg thrown a party to celebrate his 20th anniversary as a member of the Special Victims Unit. Fin gets so drunk at the party, which naturally is held in a bar, that Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) drives him home – where he’s confronted by a man he arrested over two decades before. He’s Ivan “Dutch” Hernandez, and when Fin arrested him Dutch was 17 and had just been accepted (Richard Cabral) to college – only he didn’t have the money to go and was trying to raise it by dealing illegally obtained prescription pills. From the promos it looked like Dutch was going to hold Fin hostage and torture him – maybe psychologicaly, maybe physically, maybe both – for the show’s hour-long running time until BEnson and his fellow SVU officers would somehow find out what was going on and rescue him. Instead Dutch turns out to have a real grievance: once he was thrown into New York’s notorious Tombs city jail, the first night he was there he was raped by a man he identified only as “Cream Cheese” because that’swhat his hair looked like. Dutch complained to the corrections officer on duty but from the man’s totally disinterested response sooin realized that the C.O. had deliberately let his rapist into his cell. Despite the lateness of the hour and Fin’s inebriated condition, he decides to launch an investigation and solicit the help of Benson and the other SVU detectives.

They track down the corrections officer, Pete Ryan (Mark Borkowski), who in the meantime is still working as a C.O. He’s now working at the almost as notorious Riker’s Island and he’s been promoted to captain. When the cops visit Ryan his wife makes a bee-line for a local sober-living center and the cops realize it’s gto give a heads-up warning to Virgil Hatton (Marc Basil), Dutch’s rapist and a man Ryan used to rely on in his old days at the Tombs as an unofficial discipline agent to prisoners he thought were getting out of line. It’s unclear why he sic’ced Hatton on Dutch, who was arrested for a nonviolent crime and didn’t pose a threat to anybody, but Hatton not only went to town on Dutch back then, he branded him with an “H” on his chest to indicate he was Hatton’s property and then loaned him out to other prisoners at his whim. Eventually both Hatton and Ryan are arrested for their crimes of over two decades before, though I wondered how they were going to be prosecuted. Granted, when Dutch was imprisoned and raped he was only 17 and New York may be one of those states that has eliminated the statute of limitations for sex crimes against underage victims, but still it doesn’t seem like that strong a case and this is one time I missed the dual structure of the original Law and Order in which the second half of the show depicts jow the crime is prosecuted and how the assistant district attorneys win (or sometimes don’t win) convictions against the accused.