Married with Children (Season 14, Episode 13)
Premise: A motivational speaker is pushed from a hotel balcony, and suspicion falls on her former partner, who helped raise their daughter but has no legal claim to her under Florida’s ban on adoption by gay people.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 13
- 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
- Lucinda Jenney as Renee Bishop, Patrick Breen as defense attorney Kevin Hobart, Olivia Crocicchia as Sophie Winslow, Elizabeth Franz as Alison Bishop, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Wendy Battles & William N. Fordes
Summary
The Investigation
“Married with Children” begins with a balcony death behind the Park Terrace Hotel, where a couple find a woman’s body in their garden. Assistant M.E. Brody says she landed too far out to have simply jumped, and CSU finds a contact lens on a suite terrace. The victim is Lisa Winslow, a former Olympic swimmer turned motivational speaker. At her Riverdale home, a woman who calls herself Lisa’s sister, Renee Bishop, takes the news and worries about Lisa’s adopted daughter, Sophie.
Basketball player Shawn Beatty, the last person known to have seen Lisa, has an alibi. The DNA on the lens is not Lisa’s, and bruises suggest she was grabbed. Then Lisa’s estranged parents arrive and say she had no sister, and Renee and Sophie have vanished. Lisa’s lawyer explains that Renee was her partner in Miami, that Florida bars gay people from adopting, and that Lisa adopted Sophie on her own and shut Renee out after moving to New York. Hotel and phone records lead the detectives upstate to Rosendale, where they find Renee and Sophie with Renee’s mother, Alison.
The Trial
Renee is charged with kidnapping and held without bail. Her claim that Lisa had invited her to lunch falls apart when Southerlyn learns Lisa had an important business pitch that day, and Sophie reveals that she and Renee had talked by phone in secret until Lisa found out. The lens DNA matches Renee, and McCoy adds a second-degree murder count. Renee turns down a plea because her lawyer, Kevin Hobart, has sued to overturn Florida’s ban, and Judge Walter Bradley refuses to dismiss the kidnapping count on the theory that Renee is legally Sophie’s mother.
At trial a forensics expert says Lisa was pushed hard but concedes she was drunk. Sophie describes Renee as the parent who cared for her every day, though she admits telling Renee where Lisa was that night. Renee testifies that Lisa attacked her on the balcony and fell when she pushed back; McCoy stresses that she called no one and fled with the child.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Renee of second-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping. Afterward the prosecutors debate whether any of it would have happened if the two women could have adopted as a couple, and Branch argues that they knew Florida’s law and could have moved.
Why it stands out
- The case turns on Florida’s ban on adoption by gay people, which leaves the woman who helped raise the child with no legal standing as her parent.
- Branch, a defender of states’ rights, says same-sex marriage is none of the government’s business as the prosecutors discuss the Massachusetts high court’s ruling against that state’s ban.
- The defense calls the victim’s first-grade daughter as a witness, and McCoy uses her own answers to show Renee knew where to find Lisa.