Hubris (Season 11, Episode 9)
Premise: Four people, including a six-year-old girl, are shot in a jewelry store, and the trail leads to a smooth con man who takes over his own defense and sets out to charm the jury.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 11, Episode 9
- 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
- Tim Guinee as Mark Landry / Richard Morriston, Penny Balfour as Carol Gibbons, Keir Dullea as defense attorney Paul Lyman, Ana Reeder as Annette Perry, Susan Bigelow as Mary Fazekas
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Kathy McCormick & Wendy Battles
Summary
The Investigation
“Hubris” opens with a quadruple murder at a jewelry store, where assistant manager Rebecca Kent finds owners Adam and Corinne Bennett, designer Gail Churchill and Churchill’s six-year-old daughter, Ellie, bound and shot, with the security tapes and about $70,000 in merchandise gone. The medical examiner finds the Bennetts died around 3:30 and the Churchills two or three hours later, so the killer apparently waited for Gail, who was late because her ex-husband, David, had asked her to fetch Ellie from school and take her to the dentist. David stands to inherit a $250,000 trust.
Prints from the store and Gail’s apartment belong to her new boyfriend, real estate broker Mark Landry, whose real name is Richard Morriston. He has a fraud conviction in Colorado, two domestic-violence arrests and a girlfriend, Beth Fazekas, who vanished in Utah in 1994. Gail had paid a background-check firm to run a Social Security card found in his wallet, and a gem registry shows the heart-shaped diamond necklace he gave her was Beth’s. Waiting for a warrant, Briscoe and Green slip a toothpick into Morriston’s door, then find the store’s surveillance tapes hidden in his apartment.
The Trial
Judge Walter Bradley excludes the tapes, ruling that the toothpick seized the apartment before the warrant arrived. Carmichael breaks Morriston’s alibi of showing a unit at Carrington House, and a new search finds the gun and jewelry in a locked electrical room on that floor. Morriston then takes over his own defense, with Paul Lyman as adviser, and openly flirts with the jury forewoman; McCoy’s bid to remove her fails.
Morriston also produces a smitten receptionist, Annette Perry, who swears she was touring the building with him that afternoon, though McCoy suspects perjury. On the stand Morriston denies everything, hinting that the police planted evidence, while McCoy lists the coincidences he asks the jury to accept.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury deadlocks and the judge declares a mistrial. Forewoman Carol Gibbons then admits she dined with Morriston during the trial and pushed for acquittal until he dropped her days later, but the prosecutors expect a retrial to fail. Soon afterward Morriston attacks Gibbons from behind at her kitchen sink, and she stabs him to death with a pair of shears.
Why it stands out
- Key videotape evidence is suppressed because detectives sealed the suspect’s door with a toothpick before their warrant arrived.
- The defendant serves as his own lawyer and romances the jury forewoman, who later admits steering the panel toward acquittal.
- Keir Dullea appears as Paul Lyman, the defense attorney who becomes the defendant’s legal adviser.