Burn Baby Burn (Season 11, Episode 6)
Premise: A robbery detective hunting a reluctant witness at the wrong address is killed at a Harlem apartment door, and the former Black Panther charged with shooting him argues he was defending his life.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 11, Episode 6
- 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 Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest)
- Guest stars
- Clarence Williams III as Latiff Miller, Joe Morton as defense attorney Leon Chiles, Chuck Cooper as Rolando August, Sandra Daley as Selina Watts, Al Sapienza as Officer Tommy Cannizzaro
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story draws on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Richard Sweren
Summary
The Investigation
“Burn Baby Burn” opens with the murder of a police detective, Jake Kearsey of a robbery squad, found dead outside apartment 3-D in a building on St. Nicholas Avenue after firing two rounds of his own. Kearsey had been chasing Albert Rosa, a witness dodging a trial subpoena, but a co-worker of Rosa’s mixed up the address of the cousin Rosa was staying with, sending the detective to the wrong building. The bullets came from inside 3-D, rented to Selina Watts, an administrator at a Harlem eviction-prevention charity facing a fraud inquiry.
The charity is run by Latiff Miller, a former Black Panther imprisoned decades ago for robberies. His prints are in the apartment, size-11 shoes sit in the hall, and phone records show his answering service was checked from Watts’s line shortly before the shooting, but Watts will not talk. A bar raid by Officer Tommy Cannizzaro on a false lead ends in an angry clash with Green. Ex-Panther Rolando August denies hiding Miller, while a pressured gun dealer reveals that Miller goes to Friday prayers at a mosque on 135th Street. Green walks in alone and talks Miller into leaving with him.
The Trial
At arraignment Miller calls himself a political prisoner, and Carmichael says the People are weighing the death penalty. With no gun and no eyewitness, the office still decides to try him for murder. Defense attorney Leon Chiles goes after the victim, raising Kearsey’s Emerald Society membership, a weekend motorcycle club and six excessive-force complaints. Briscoe and Green then find cab driver Jean Marchier, who picked Miller up outside the building that morning and dropped him at Chiles’s office. Once Marchier is added as a witness, Chiles switches to self-defense.
The judge lets in both sides’ history: Chiles’s catalogue of notorious police attacks on Black Americans to explain Miller’s state of mind, and a 1969 Panther newsletter in which Miller urged followers to shoot police. Miller testifies that a stranger pounded on the door cursing, that he took a pistol Watts kept, and that the man aimed at him once he recognized him; both fired within a second or two. He adds that his teenage nephew was recently paralyzed by a police bullet in Newark. McCoy argues that Miller acted on his own racial assumptions and then ran.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury acquits Miller of first-degree murder as his supporters applaud. Afterward Lewin tells McCoy that enough jurors identified with Miller’s fear of the police, and McCoy answers that such fear once did not justify shooting an officer.
Why it stands out
- The defense shifts mid-trial from denial to self-defense once a cab driver places the defendant at the scene, and it wins a full acquittal.
- The judge admits both a list of notorious police-brutality cases and the defendant’s own 1969 call to shoot police officers.