Fixed (Season 15, Episode 11)
Premise: Fifteen years after he was locked up for abusing his family and causing his young daughter’s death, Jacob Lowenstein is run down a month into his parole, and the evidence points to the prison therapist who knew him best.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 15, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), 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
- David Groh as Dr. Jacob Lowenstein, Tracy Thorne as Joyce Draper, Marcia Jean Kurtz as Carla Lowenstein, Adam LeFevre as Dr. Evodius Peters, Jim Bracchitta as defense attorney Jason Goidell
- Ripped from the headlines
- Jacob Lowenstein, the abuser first seen in Season 1’s “Indifference,” is reportedly modeled on Joel Steinberg, and this sequel reportedly draws on the public attention that followed Steinberg’s release from prison.
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- Roz Weinman & Eric Overmyer
Summary
The Investigation
“Fixed” opens with a hit-and-run outside a school. Jacob Lowenstein, paroled a month earlier after 15 years for beating his wife Carla and fatally abusing their five-year-old daughter, is struck by a dark SUV that never brakes and loses a leg. His parole officer has lost track of him. Capt. Donald Cragen, who worked the original case, recalls that the couple’s toddler son Ezra was kept tied to a radiator.
Carla’s psychiatrist doubts she could hunt down her abuser, and Carla, who fled her old life when he was paroled, was at work that morning. Ezra, raised by an adoptive family in Patchogue, met his father once; Lowenstein denied everything and asked for money. The family’s cars are clean.
At the hospital, the detectives meet Lowenstein’s fiancée Sheryl, a prison pen pal who has let him move in with her two small children. Social worker Joyce Draper, who treated him in an experimental prison therapy program, says contact ended at his release. A former inmate whose appeals Lowenstein botched as a jailhouse lawyer calls him Draper’s pet project. Lowenstein, insisting he never hurt anyone, dies of a pulmonary embolism.
Draper’s freshly detailed Ford Explorer has a cracked grille and Lowenstein’s DNA on the bumper, and she quit the prison a week after his parole. She denies it and asks for a lawyer. Her supervisor and therapist, Dr. Evodius Peters, provides a taped final session in which Lowenstein boasts about moving in with Sheryl’s children. A caller posing as the aunt of Sheryl’s daughter Emily asked the school nurse about the girl’s broken wrist; phone records trace the call to Draper’s office two days before the crash, and she is arrested for murder.
The Trial
Peters testifies that Draper felt Lowenstein had conned her and could not stand to fail; defense attorney Jason Goidell suggests Peters set her up for that failure. McCoy plays the tape, betting it shows premeditation more than it wins her sympathy. Draper refuses any plea and testifies that she tried to reach the parole officer and that others could get to her car.
McCoy asks why she never warned Sheryl or the police about the injured girl and accuses her of following Emily home to find Lowenstein. Goidell tells the jury that Draper does not belong in prison. McCoy counters that she could have had Lowenstein sent back for violating parole, and that no citizen may decide who lives and who dies.
Spoiler, the ending: After a short deliberation, the jury finds Draper not guilty of second-degree murder. The prosecutors conclude that the jurors believed she did it but took the opening the defense offered, since they share the prosecutors’ doubts that the system can handle men like Lowenstein.
Why it stands out
- The episode is a direct sequel to Season 1’s “Indifference,” and Dann Florek appears as Capt. Donald Cragen, who worked the original Lowenstein case.
- Despite DNA on the defendant’s bumper, the jury acquits, a result the prosecutors treat as jury nullification for a hated victim.
- A videotaped prison therapy session becomes a double-edged exhibit, showing both the danger Lowenstein posed and the defendant’s motive.