Identity (Season 14, Episode 6)
Premise: The murder of a man who hid his layoff from his family exposes an identity-theft scheme that cost an elderly Harlem veteran his home, and the case turns on whether the old man is fit to stand trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 6
- 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
- Paul Benjamin as Lonnie Jackson, Roscoe Lee Browne as defense attorney Aaron Miller, Lorraine Toussaint as defense attorney Shambala Green, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Dr. Paul Jackson, Carl Gordon as Horace Worthington, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Janis Diamond
Summary
The Investigation
“Identity” opens with the murder of software designer Andrew Hitchens, found by his wife, Daphne, with a close-range gunshot wound to the chest. Nothing is missing and the doors were not forced. Briscoe and Green learn that Hitchens lost his job eight months earlier without telling her, yet a secret account he opened after the layoff holds nearly $400,000, which he has been tapping to fake a paycheck.
The money runs backward through a string of checks: a diamond dealer, Zev Mishaan, paid Hitchens for two emerald-cut stones that Hitchens had bought from another dealer, Shlomo Fineberg, with the proceeds of a refinancing on a Harlem townhouse owned by Lonnie Jackson. The house has since been foreclosed and sold to a renovator, and Jackson is nowhere to be found. The M.E. matches the bullet to a 7.63 Mauser, a World War II–era pistol.
Jackson’s wartime friend, Col. Horace Worthington, and his son, Dr. Paul Jackson, both insist he would never borrow against the house. A trace of his e-mail account leads to Harlem, where Worthington is hiding him. The retired airport porter claims not to know Hitchens, but fingerprints from his old job match prints in the victim’s apartment, and he is charged with second-degree murder.
The Trial
Jackson’s veteran lawyer, Aaron Miller, rejects a first-degree manslaughter offer. The prosecutors find that the refinancing notices went to a rented mailbox whose holder, as the clerk describes him, was a man of about forty with two small children: Hitchens. His laptop shows he was scouting valuable uptown properties, and Jackson’s was the only one owned outright. Jackson still claims he took the loan himself to travel.
Paul Jackson then has a family court declare his father unable to manage his affairs, becomes his guardian, replaces Miller with Shambala Green and asks to have him found unfit for trial. The DA’s psychiatrist judges him competent but afraid of growing old. At the hearing the son admits his own stock losses of about $180,000, and Worthington lets slip that Jackson still shoots at a range, though he also recounts Jackson describing a recent stroll with his wife, Emma, who has died.
Pressed on cross-examination that he could never have found Hitchens, Jackson snaps that it took him three days to track the man down, kill him and get rid of the gun. He later explains that Hitchens got his full legal name from an online contest entry, and that he found the thief by sweet-talking an Internet provider employee and using a reverse directory.
Spoiler, the ending: Green opens talks, and Jackson accepts a deal under which he will serve ten years in a minimum-security prison.
Why it stands out
- The defendant confesses on the witness stand at his own competency hearing, provoked by questions about his memory.
- A family court ruling lets the accused man’s son become his guardian, fire his longtime lawyer and argue that he is unfit for trial.
- The prosecutors’ debate over aging and guilt invokes the case of an 86-year-old driver who crashed into a Santa Monica farmers market.