Darwinian (Season 14, Episode 11)
Premise: A wealthy publicist confesses to leaving a homeless man she hit to die in her garage, but a defense autopsy shows he was already dying from a beating by another homeless man.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Röhm), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Kate Burton as defense attorney Erica Gardner, Dylan Baker as defense attorney Sanford Rems, Christopher Donahue as Max Edgars, Brigitte Bako as Carrie Salter, Reg E. Cathey as Gerald
- Ripped from the headlines
- The hit-and-run storyline is reportedly inspired by the 2001 Fort Worth, Texas, case of Chante Mallard, who struck homeless man Gregory Glenn Biggs with her car, drove home with him stuck in her windshield and parked in her garage; she was convicted of murder in 2003.
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Marc Guggenheim
Summary
The Investigation
“Darwinian” opens with a hit-and-run victim found by chance, as two patrol officers chasing a flasher through Roosevelt Park come upon the body of a young homeless man. Assistant M.E. Erika Malchiodi finds windshield glass, paint chips and bumper fractures on both legs, and insect evidence shows he died days earlier and was stored somewhere cold before being dumped. A key in his pocket leads Briscoe and Green to a locker with his belongings.
An old appointment card points them to his psychiatrist and then to his sister, Gina Fisher, who says Alan developed schizophrenia in college, gave up his medication and vanished after their father’s funeral. A partial VIN etched into the glass and a custom paint color, Pentland Green, identify an Aston Martin Vanquish owned by publicist Carrie Salter. A body shop has just repaired it after what she called a collision with a deer.
The detectives find blood in her chilly Bank Street garage. Salter admits she hit Fisher at 2 a.m., drove into the garage with him wedged in her windshield and went inside while he cried out; when she came back, he was dead. Her lawyer, Sanford Rems, arrives just after the confession.
The Trial
Salter is charged with criminally negligent homicide, and Rems wins an order to exhume Fisher, whose observant Jewish family had declined an autopsy. His expert, Dr. Aaron Geller, testifies that the bleeding in Fisher’s brain was far too large to have built up in the hour between the crash and death, and that other injuries show a beating. Rodgers, who never performed an autopsy, agrees. The judge refuses to send McCoy’s causation theory to a jury, dismisses the homicide count and accepts Salter’s pleas to obstruction and tampering, leaving her on probation.
Fisher’s friend Gerald saw another homeless man pound Fisher’s head against the pavement that evening, a fight two officers broke up without arresting anyone or getting Fisher medical care. Gerald picks Max Edgars from a lineup, and Edgars admits he attacked Fisher for refusing to share an orange.
Erica Gardner, director of the Urban Justice Center, defends Edgars with a necessity claim rooted in the rules of street survival. Branch wants a plea, but McCoy goes to trial. Gardner makes one officer repeat the slurs he used for the homeless, and Edgars testifies that an injury cost him his construction job, his house and his family, and that backing down on the street would have made him a target. On cross-examination he breaks down.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Edgars of first-degree manslaughter, and he is sentenced to 12 years in Ossining. McCoy says Edgars belongs in prison, but notes that he has simply traded one jungle for another.
Why it stands out
- The hit-and-run driver walks away from the homicide charge after a court lets her lawyer exhume the victim for an independent autopsy despite his family’s religious objections.
- The title comes from the prosecutors’ reply to the defense’s survival-of-the-fittest argument: the law exists to keep society from sliding into “Darwinian” anarchy.
- Kate Burton guest stars as Erica Gardner, an advocate for the homeless who turns a manslaughter trial into an indictment of how the city treats people living on the street.