Conscience (Season 6, Episode 6)
Premise: A five-year-old is murdered after a birthday party, and the case against an unlikely young killer ends in a courthouse shooting by the victim’s father.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 6
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), Bureau Chief Elizabeth Donnelly (Judith Light)
- Guest stars
- Kyle MacLachlan as Dr. Brett Morton, Jordan Garrett as Jake O’Hara, Johanna Day as Leslie O’Hara, Peter Riegert as Chauncey Zeirko, P.J. Brown as Billy Turner
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Roger Wolfson & Robert Nathan
Summary
“Conscience” begins at a Manhattan birthday party, where five-year-old Henry Morton disappears; security tape shows him slipping out of view. A report of a man dragging a boy onto the subway leads the detectives to the wrong child. At the family home in Riverdale, Henry’s father, psychiatrist Brett Morton, stays strikingly composed, and Jake O’Hara, the 13-year-old next door, describes a man in a dark car watching Henry that morning. The sex offender unit points to Billy Turner, a paroled child molester, but vigilante Malcolm Wolinsky reaches him first and beats him.
A bloodhound leads police to Henry’s body. Warner finds he was not molested but suffocated, with pebbles in his windpipe and brown cat hairs on his clothes. Jake picks Billy out of a lineup, yet Billy’s babysitting alibi holds, the cat hairs do not match, and he is released into a street protest that ends with Wolinsky’s arrest. The pebbles turn out to be Colorado quartz from Jake’s front yard, carrying a child’s fingerprints, and Jake admits that Wolinsky, posing as a detective, showed him Billy’s photo. Jake then confesses: Henry saw him accidentally kill a neighbor’s cat and threatened to tell, and Jake feared being sent back to a camp where, he claims, other boys burned and sexually abused him.
Morton, who recommended that camp to Jake’s mother, Leslie, pleads for leniency, and Donnelly moves the case from adult court to Family Court. At the Rhinebeck camp, director Dr. Burt Gleason calls Jake disturbed; bunkmates describe him nearly drowning a boy and burning his arm, and the detectives come to see him as a likely sociopath. Novak asks to move the case back, but the hearing has begun. When she reveals that Jake’s injuries were self-inflicted, Morton erupts and is removed. In the hallway he warns Stabler that Jake will kill again, then grabs a court officer’s gun and shoots the boy, who dies in surgery.
Donnelly orders a second-degree murder charge. Defense attorney Chauncey Zeirko claims extreme emotional disturbance; Huang finds Morton’s account textbook, almost too perfect for a psychiatrist. At trial Novak confronts Morton with a 1992 journal article in which he argued that violent children should be locked up for life. Called by the defense, Stabler concedes on cross that Morton’s hallway remarks sounded like a psychiatrist talking, but says he cannot tell whether the shooting was planned.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Morton not guilty of second-degree murder, and the team suspects jurors did not want Jake free. Afterward Morton tells Novak that he resolved to kill Jake during the Family Court hearing, once he understood what the boy was, then waited for his chance, insisting that, unlike Jake, he will never kill again.
Why it stands out
- Kyle MacLachlan guest stars as Dr. Brett Morton, a psychiatrist whose son is murdered.
- Peter Riegert returns as defense attorney Chauncey Zeirko, and Judith Light appears as Bureau Chief Elizabeth Donnelly, whose decision to move the case to Family Court divides the DA’s office.