Floater (Season 14, Episode 7)
Premise: A woman pulled from the Hudson turns out to be a family court clerk, and her husband looks guilty until the prosecutors find a divorce lawyer paying to get his cases before a favored judge.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 7
- 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
- Jan Maxwell as Judge Ruth Alexander, Erick Avari as Ravi Patel, Sean Cullen as Gene Marchetti, William Paulson as Raoul Welch, Jason Kolotouros as defense attorney Derek Greer
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story parallels the Brooklyn Supreme Court corruption scandal that broke in 2003, when Justice Gerald Garson, who heard divorce and custody cases, was arrested on charges of taking bribes to favor certain litigants; he was convicted of bribery in 2007.
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Eric Overmyer
Summary
The Investigation
“Floater” begins when a fisherman on the Hudson River reels in a badly decomposed body. The M.E. finds water in the woman’s lungs, so she was alive when she entered the river, plus a fresh fracture of her cheekbone and eye socket from a punch. A locket recovered in the riverside park holds a photo of a schoolgirl, seventh-grader Lena Marchetti, whose mother, Arianna, 32, vanished weeks earlier on a quick trip to a neighborhood deli. Dental records confirm the body is Arianna, a clerk in family court.
Briscoe and Green focus on her husband, Gene Marchetti, whose prenuptial agreement gave him custody of Lena. His first wife describes a cheater who fought her ferociously over their sons. A witness saw a woman in sunglasses climb into a black sedan near the Marchetti home, and Marchetti drives a new black Lexus, which his secretary and alibi, Terri Collins, admits riding in. CSU finds Arianna’s blood and a fragment of her prescription sunglasses inside, plus soil in the wheel wells from where the locket turned up. Marchetti is arrested as he and Lena prepare to leave for Europe.
The Trial
At arraignment the judge sets bail at $300,000 and takes Marchetti’s passport. Defense attorney Derek Greer answers the offer of a manslaughter plea with records of a fender bender days before the disappearance, when an air bag broke Arianna’s nose and sunglasses. A friend of Arianna’s then reveals that she had secretly retained Ravi Patel, a high-profile divorce lawyer, who first denies meeting her and then says he dropped her case. A former client says he inflates his bills, and Southerlyn notices that his cases land before Judge Ruth Alexander far too often to be chance.
Lawyer Raoul Welch, facing disbarment, admits he bribes the clerk who sets Alexander’s calendar. Branch, who taught Alexander and helped launch her career, presses her to unseal her divorce cases, and the files reveal a steady pattern favoring a small circle of attorneys, while her spending far exceeds her salary since her own costly divorce. A witness at her building remembers her returning late and scratched from a morning run around the time Arianna vanished, and she skipped her car service that day to drive her own car. Phone records show Patel called the judge, then Arianna, then the judge again the night before.
Spoiler, the ending: Confronted with those calls, Patel agrees to testify against Alexander. Faced with forensic evidence placing Arianna in her car, the judge admits meeting her and calls the death an accident, saying she only wanted to talk Arianna out of her fight. No trial is shown, and Branch is left to absorb the fall of his former student.
Why it stands out
- Branch must investigate a judge who was once his star student and whose first job he helped her get.
- A New York attorney later sued people associated with the series for defamation, claiming the divorce lawyer Ravi Patel was recognizably based on him.
- Evidence that seems to condemn the husband, the victim’s broken nose and her blood in his car, is explained by an air-bag injury from a minor crash.