Law and Order: "On the Ledge" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 29) I watched the latest episodes of the three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: the original Law and Order itself, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “On the Ledge” and its premise was largely the old one on the February 2, 1943 Suspense radio show called “The Doctor Prescribed Death” (https://archive.org/details/TSP430202), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mad psychologist, Antonio Basile, who works out a theory that a person apparently wanting to commit suicide can under the right circumstances can be induced to kill someone else instead. In “On the Ledge,” the person apparently wanting to commit suicide identifies himself as “Bill Jackson” (Chinaza Uche) and he prepares to leap off a bridge and drown himself until he’s interrupted by Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) of the New York Police Department. “Bill” declares that his life is ruined and he has nothing to live for, and Shaw successfully talks him out of it. Then Shaw and his police partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks), get a call to respond to an active-shooter situation in the emergency room of a local hospital, and we’ve already guessed what it takes writers Jennifer Vanderbes and Pamela J. Wechsler two more acts and 20 minutes to let us know for sure: “Bill Jackson,” the man Jalen Shaw just kept from committing suicide, is the active shooter.

By the time Shaw and Riley arrest him he’s already killed a doctor and severely wounded a nurse, as well as targeting (unsuccessfully) another doctor, and if nothing else this show made me realize why the Kaiser hospital on Alvarado and Zion in San Diego has metal detectors and an airport-style security checkpoint at the doors to their E.R. “Bill”’s real name is Kenneth Cartwright, and the reason he was so pissed off was that his wife just died while being taken care of by the doctor whom he later killed, and since she was pregnant and was in the act of giving birth when her case went sour and both she and the baby died, Kenneth was ultra-angry at the doctor and determined to kill him. Naturally Detective Shaw feels guilty about the whole thing because if he’d just let Kenneth kill himself when he wanted to, that nice young doctor would still be alive and his spouse, Catherine Halpert (Katrina Ferguson), would still be a wife, not a widow. Kenneth’s defense attorney decides to plead diminished capacity and claims that a persistent pattern of racism drove him to do it. Though racism as a cause of mental illness isn’t listed in the fifth (and current) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official scientific authority about what constitutes a mental illness, it turns out there are some authorities who argue that it exists and is legitimately diagnosable.

The show turns into a crisis of conscience for Detective Shaw, who like Kenneth Cartwright is Black and feels a certain degree of sympathy for him even though he’s also appalled at what he did (and Shaw’s perception of his own culpability in it). It turns out that Kenneth told Shaw as Shaw was arresting him that he killed the doctor because of “an eye for an eye,” and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) needs that into evidence to prove that Kenneth was a premeditated murderer who was aware of what he was doing and that it was morally wrong. Only Shaw isn’t sure he wants to rat out a fellow Black man in that fashion, and he threatens to testify that he doesn’t remember hearing Kenneth say that. The writers and director David Grossman build up a quite effective suspense sequence as Detective Shaw takes the witness stand and we’re kept in the dark as to just how he will testify – but ultimately he recounts the “an eye for an eye” remark Kenneth told him and the jury convicts the man. Though much of “On the Ledge” is pretty slow going, in the second half the conflicts heat up quite nicely and the overall message – Shaw’s conflict over should he tell the truth on the witness stand or let a murderer get off leniently (with incarceration in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison) because he feels there was some moral justification for what he did – comes through loud and clear.