Blinded (Season 9, Episode 7)
Premise: A schizophrenic children’s author who abducts girls he mistakes for his sister blinds Stabler, and Benson and Novak each bend the rules over whether he should face execution.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 7
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Chester Lake (Adam Beach), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), CSU Ryan O’Halloran (Mike Doyle), Defense Attorney Barry Moredock (John Cullum)
- Guest stars
- Arye Gross as Saul Picard, Heather Braverman as Sabrina Farmer, Cassady Leonard as Eve Holland, Daniel Cantor as Special Agent Nelson, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley
- Ripped from the headlines
- The fight over sending Picard to Louisiana takes up the debate behind Kennedy v. Louisiana: whether the rape of a child can be punished by death.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Blinded” begins when an elderly woman hears a voice calling for help from a car trunk. The car has been towed, and at a Queens impound lot an infrared camera finds 11-year-old Sabrina Farmer in a trunk, barely breathing, concussed and raped. The renter, Saul Picard of Mandeville, Louisiana, says he returned the car, and a rental clerk admits he left it on the street with the keys in it and faked the records when it vanished. But pollen from a Louisiana sedge on the seat and on Sabrina’s clothes points back to Picard, who has slipped away in another rental.
Sabrina says a man lured her from a bookstore, called her Francine and talked about an ark, and she picks Picard’s photo. When 11-year-old Eve Holland is taken from another bookstore, Stabler realizes Picard is William S. Falstaff, a children’s author. Reading the ark as an arch, the detectives find Picard’s car in Prospect Park, with Eve drugged but alive. Picard bolts while being taken to the car, and in the struggle Stabler falls head first through its rear window. He wakes in the hospital unable to see.
FBI agents take Picard, who also abducted a 9-year-old from a Gulfport, Mississippi, bookstore and left her near death in his ruined house, so that Louisiana can try him for child rape, a capital crime there. Novak enlists defense attorney Barry Moredock to fight the transfer, and Huang finds that Picard is schizophrenic: as a teenager he froze while boys raped his 11-year-old sister, Francine, and after her death he quit his medication and came to believe he was rescuing her. The federal case is dropped. Back on medication, Picard asks to be sent to Louisiana to die, but Novak insists on a New York trial. With a half-blind Stabler on the stand, her questions set off an outburst from Picard, and Judge Walter Bradley declares a mistrial and orders a competency hearing.
Spoiler, the ending: Stabler accuses Novak of throwing the case, and Benson confronts her about a schizophrenic former fiancé, Charlie. DA Jack McCoy shows Novak a five-year-old police report: Charlie attacked her, and she used her title to talk officers out of arresting him. McCoy orders her to see the case through and behave, or lose her job and license. Benson, who gave McCoy the report, admits she tipped off the FBI out of revenge for Stabler. Picard is found incompetent, which keeps him from Louisiana, and Novak reveals that Charlie was killed by a cab six months ago. After Picard tries to hang himself, Novak visits him; he says he would rather die than live with what he did, and she tells him he may one day forgive himself.
Why it stands out
- Sam Waterston appears as Jack McCoy. Because the 18th season of Law & Order had not yet aired, this was the first time McCoy was seen as District Attorney rather than executive ADA.
- John Cullum returns as defense attorney Barry Moredock, recruited this time by Novak herself.
- The episode reveals Novak’s past with Charlie, a schizophrenic fiancé who attacked her.