Law and Order: "Inherent Bias" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 10, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 10) I watched Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth. My husband Charles had a relatively early day at work and he joined me for the second half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and virtually all of Elsbeth, though he spent a lot of time at the computer while the shows were on. The Law and Order episode, “Inherent Bias,” dealt with the murder of a major women’s basketball star, who’s shot in plain sight with a single bullet through the heart. The murder victim was white but her female partner was Black (when the script mentioned “her girlfriend” I groaned inwardly and thought, “Ah, now it’s the stereotype that all women basketball players are Lesbians”). There were a few red-herring suspects, including the victim’s former boyfriend from back in Texas, whom she dumped to turn Gay and move in with her Black female partner; and a Black player on a rival team who’s resentful that women’s basketball, largely ignored when most of the players were Black, suddenly started attracting the big money when white women started playing and becoming stars. Ultimately the cops fix on a Black man named Darius Cain (Isaiah Johnson) as the shooter. Cain and the victim had become partners in a legal marijuana dispensary because New York state officials were giving preferential treatment for legal cannabis licenses to people who’d been prosecuted and punished for dealing pot when it was still monumentally illegal. Unfortunately, Cain wasn’t just prosecuted for marijuana; he also had a rap sheet for assault and other violent crimes.

When the woman basketball player he was partnered with realized that his record included crimes of violence, she decided to force him out and part ways with him, paying him off for his share of the business, because she worried that being associated with a violent criminal would harm her “brand.” Police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), who’s white, and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), who’s Black, corner Cain and arrest him at the waterfront just after he’s taken a metal object from his pocket and dumped it in the water. At first we assume it’s the gun with which he shot the victim, and Riley so testifies at Cain’s trial. Then, testifying in his own defense, Cain says it was not a gun; it was an outboard hard drive from the victim’s computer, which he had stolen in hopes it contained evidence that would bolster his legal claim against her. Shaw hears Cain say that from the witness stand and decides he can’t be sure himself whether the object was a gun, a hard drive, or something else. The defense calls Shaw as a witness, and Shaw tells his partner that in the face of contradictory testimony the jury is likelier to believe a white witness over a Black one (even though I’d seen earlier shots of the jury, and it looked like there were Black people on it). Damien Cain is duly found guilty, and as he’s being handcuffed at the end of the trial he loudly screams his innocence. Part of me was thinking, “That’s what they all say,” and part of me was wondering whether I was supposed to doubt the verdict after all even though, if Damien Cain didn’t kill her, that leaves open the question of who did.