Vendetta (Season 14, Episode 21)
Premise: A baseball fan hated for touching a foul ball is killed in a bar fight by a man recently freed after 20 years for a murder he did not commit, and the case leads to the officer who framed him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 21
- 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
- Giancarlo Esposito as defense attorney Rodney Fallon, David Warshofsky as Walter Grimes, John Michael Bolger as Kenneth Daniels, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet, Yvonne Jung as Melissa Donner
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story partly draws on the 2003 Steve Bartman incident, in which a Chicago Cubs fan received death threats and needed police protection after he deflected a foul ball in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Story: Michael S. Chernuchin; Story & teleplay: David Nahmod
Summary
The Investigation
“Vendetta” opens with a bar-fight murder at Rooney’s Tavern, where a stranger smashes a scotch bottle over the head of Brendan Donner, the fan New Yorkers blame for costing their team the pennant by reaching for a foul ball. Donner had moved out on his wife, Melissa, to spare her the abuse. An FBI agent who logged his hate mail traces a threatening call to a fan who found Donner’s number on a website tracking his whereabouts.
A lab technician rebuilds the shattered bottle over a plaster mold and lifts prints belonging to Walter Grimes, released three months earlier after DNA showed the blood on the knife used to convict him in 1984 of stabbing 15-year-old Leeanne Testa was not hers. Eight patrons pick Grimes from a photo array. His lawyer, Rodney Fallon of the New York Exoneration Project, offers to bring him in, but Grimes bolts and, when cornered, holds a woman hostage before his capture.
Fallon plans to argue that two decades of wrongful imprisonment left Grimes with a prison instinct that overrode right and wrong. Dr. Elizabeth Olivet finds him legally sane. Since the defense paints Grimes as law-abiding before prison, the judge reviews his sealed juvenile file: arrests but no convictions, including a liquor store holdup the owner says a Latino youth committed. The arresting officer, now Det. Kenneth “Kenny” Daniels, is Green’s former colleague, and he admits he planted the Testa knife. Earlier, Grimes had confessed after a beating in custody to cutting the throat of 16-year-old Julie Sayer and revealed the knife in a storm drain. When his lieutenant voided the arrest, Daniels kept the knife and later used it against Grimes.
The Trial
Grimes is tried first for Sayer’s murder, after DNA from her exhumed remains matches the blood on the knife. Fallon moves to suppress the knife as the fruit of a coerced confession, but the original lead detective swears every storm drain in the area was searched. McCoy argues inevitable discovery: without Daniels’s interference, police would have found it there. The judge excludes the confession but admits the knife. Fallon casts Daniels as a vigilante who has hounded Grimes since boyhood.
Grimes testifies that Daniels planted Sayer’s blood. When he insists he has never killed anyone, McCoy raises Donner’s death, and the judge rules that the denial opened the door, since the defense’s claim in that case concedes the act.
Spoiler, the ending: Grimes pleads guilty to second-degree murder for Julie Sayer and describes the stabbing; with credit for his 20 years, five years remain. He also pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter for Donner and receives 7½ to 15 years, running consecutively. Daniels says he has been pushed toward early retirement.
Why it stands out
- The officer who framed Grimes is an old colleague of Green’s, and Green has to confront his former friend.
- McCoy wins admission of the murder weapon through the inevitable discovery doctrine, arguing that only the officer’s own misconduct kept police from finding the knife where it was hidden.
- Giancarlo Esposito guest stars as Rodney Fallon, a lawyer who frees wrongly convicted prisoners.