Can I Get a Witness? (Season 14, Episode 16)
Premise: A 19-year-old is gunned down in a park by a cyclist with a clouded eye, and the case against the accused collapses when one eyewitness backs out and the other is killed before cross-examination, sending McCoy after the cousin suspected of silencing them.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 16
- 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
- Chadwick Boseman as Foster Keyes, Dorian Missick as Ronald Duggan aka Slug, Gerry Becker as defense attorney Gerard Wills, April L. Hernandez as Shayna Rosario, Collins Pennie as Jimmy Gordon
- Director
- Don Scardino
- Writers
- Aaron Zelman
Summary
The Investigation
“Can I Get a Witness?” begins with a murder in a park, where 19-year-old Henry Ware, called Bigboy, is shot twice in the chest by a young man on a bicycle. His friends Jimmy Gordon and Shayna Rosario say the gunman had a milky white right eye. Ware had what looks like cocaine in his pocket, but a local dealer calls him a mere courier and denies wanting him dead.
Tire tracks lead to a bike shop whose owner recalls a customer with an artificial eye, and an eye prosthetics maker’s Medicaid patient files point to Foster Keyes. A boy whose Game Boy Keyes stole steers the detectives to his girlfriend, Jannette Richards, and they find him in her closet. Both friends pick him from a lineup in which every man wears an eye patch, and his lawyer, Gerard Wills, attacks their identifications.
Gordon gets threatening calls, and Rosario withdraws. At trial Gordon explains that Ware slapped Richards after she mocked his weight, and she vowed her boyfriend would settle it. Before cross-examination, Gordon is shot dead in his old neighborhood. The judge bars his grand jury testimony without clear proof that Keyes caused his absence, and because jeopardy has attached, the charge is dismissed with prejudice.
A Rikers visitor who signed in as “X” and a court officer’s memory point to Keyes’s cousin Ronald Duggan, known as Slug, whose past homicide cases collapsed when witnesses vanished. Duggan has an alibi, but his old robbery partner, Calvin Jacob Rivers, keeps a .38 under his grandmother’s mattress. Rivers refuses to testify against Duggan in exchange for a lesser charge. Promised relocation, Rosario agrees to talk, and Duggan and Keyes are arrested.
The Trial
Rivers, Keyes and Duggan are tried together for first-degree murder, with Duggan also charged with intimidating and bribing a witness. Wills, Keyes’s former lawyer, now represents Duggan. Rosario fails to identify the man who pressed her to recant, then reveals in chambers a death threat that morning and says Duggan took her to Wills’s office to retract her identification. Wills insists Duggan was only a supportive friend, and because the call cannot be linked to the defendants, the jury never hears of it.
The next day Rosario names Duggan and says nearly $3,000 appeared at her home after his friendly visits. Wills gets her to concede that Duggan never threatened her and that she never saw who left the money, and he notes that the gun bears Rivers’s prints, not Duggan’s.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Rivers of first-degree murder and finds Keyes not guilty of it. Duggan is acquitted of murder, witness intimidation and bribery, and double jeopardy bars Keyes from ever being retried for Henry Ware’s death.
Why it stands out
- Chadwick Boseman, later known worldwide as T’Challa (Black Panther) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, guest-stars as accused gunman Foster Keyes.
- With jeopardy already attached, the murder of the prosecution’s star witness forces a dismissal with prejudice, so the original killing can never be retried.
- The surviving witness reveals that the accused intimidator brought her to the defense attorney’s own office to take back her identification.