Gunshow (Season 10, Episode 1)
Premise: A gunman with a converted machine pistol kills 15 people in Central Park, most of them women, and McCoy pursues both the shooter and the company that built the gun.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 1
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Neal Huff as Dennis Trope, Murphy Guyer as Mr. Weber, Helen Carey as defense attorney Charlotte Swan, Ron McLarty as Judge William Wright, Jeff Brooks as Victor Colby
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story draws on the 1989 massacre at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- René Balcer
Summary
The Investigation
“Gunshow” opens with a mass shooting in Central Park: a gunman spraying automatic fire kills 15 people and wounds 12, nearly all of them women, starting with a group of Hudson pre-med students gathered for an orientation on gender issues in medicine. A survivor says he cursed women as he walked past her. Briscoe, newly paired with Det. Ed Green, recovers the abandoned Rolf Nine and its spare clips, and the serial number leads to a Pennsylvania dealer who sells online and shipped the gun directly to the buyer.
The buyer of record, Lee Coats, is an elderly woman found dead of natural causes in her apartment; she was in Hudson Presbyterian Hospital when the gun arrived. Her purse went missing in an ambulance, which points to paramedic Dennis Trope, on disability, hostile to female colleagues and passed over by Hudson’s medical school. When the detectives find him, Trope reaches for a gun and is wounded. Green leans on him at the scene, and later, playing on Trope’s anger at women, gets an admission and the spot where he dumped his bloody clothes.
The Trial
A judge throws out the confession and the clothing because Trope was questioned after his mother said she was hiring a lawyer. Trope had filed the barrel, so ballistics can offer only a partial match, and Rolf Firearms refuses to hand over the specifications needed to rebuild the rifling. Trope pleads guilty and gets 25 years to life, and a grieving father erupts in court. McCoy then charges Rolf and its chief, Mr. Weber, with criminally negligent homicide. Judge William Wright dismisses the case, but an appeals court revives it.
Wright requires proof that Trope used the gun as Rolf intended. After a visit to Victor Colby, a laid-off marketing director bound by a confidentiality agreement, the prosecutors obtain an internal memo estimating that a tamper-proof design would cut sales by nearly 40 percent, and McCoy upgrades the charges to depraved-indifference murder. The judge rules the memo privileged. Carmichael defends responsible gun ownership in arguments with McCoy. Weber denies any fault, and Trope, called in rebuttal, shows the jury how he converted the weapon in about half an hour.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts on all 15 counts of second-degree murder, but Wright immediately sets the verdict aside and directs an acquittal, ruling that the People never met the standard he imposed. McCoy vows to appeal, and Wright tells him that jailing Weber would not stop the killing and that he will not let his courtroom be used to whip up a mob.
Why it stands out
- Jesse L. Martin makes his first appearance as Det. Ed Green, Briscoe’s new partner.
- The jury convicts the gun maker of murder, but the trial judge overturns the verdict from the bench.