Red Ball (Season 16, Episode 1)
Premise: A five-year-old girl vanishes with her mother’s car, and the ex-convict arrested for taking her uses the child as a bargaining chip, offering to reveal where she is if prosecutors set him free.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 1
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- James Le Gros as Dwight Jacobs, Adam Arkin as defense attorney Charlie Graham, Wendy Hoopes as Denise Clark, Lindsay Crouse as Judge Deidre Hellstrom, Harry Prichett as Bernard Heinz
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- David Wilcox
Summary
The Investigation
“Red Ball” opens with a child abduction: a man drags Denise Clark from her car, hits her and drives off with her five-year-old daughter, Jennifer, still buckled in the back. The car turns up abandoned with the car-seat straps cut, so Fontana and Green rule out a simple carjacking. Jenny’s father, Jimmy, who owes child support, runs from the detectives, but he was at work when she was taken.
The detectives circulate a street surveillance image, and Van Buren, over Fontana’s objection, clears it for the press. A patrolman recognizes the man from a shoplifting arrest as Dwight Jacobs, and a paycheck address leads to the apartment of his girlfriend, Charleen Dowd. Jacobs is arrested there with the girl’s bloodstained dress, but Charleen is gone.
McCoy offers concurrent terms of 25 years to life if Jacobs leads them to the body, but Jacobs, represented by Charlie Graham, holds out. Then Denise gets a call in which Jenny begs to come home, a woman’s voice in the background, and Jacobs offers to give her up if neither he nor Charleen serves time. Branch tells McCoy to stall. Charleen slips past an AMBER Alert into the subway, leaving Graham’s business card in a stolen car.
The Trial
Graham will not discuss Charleen, and Judge Deidre Hellstrom denies McCoy’s motion to disqualify him, so McCoy has him arrested as an accomplice. Graham’s phone shows calls from Charleen, traced to a Queens motel where detectives find her stabbed to death and no sign of Jenny. A bloody print identifies registered sex offender Bernard Heinz, who says Jacobs offered to sell him something and that he killed Charleen after she pulled a knife.
Branch refuses to let a criminal extort his freedom, so McCoy secretly agrees with Graham to a plea to first-degree kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, with time served. Branch learns of it and sounds out Hellstrom privately, calling the talk hypothetical. At the allocution Jacobs admits that he and Charleen meant to sell Jenny to Heinz for $2,000, and Fontana and Green find her alive in his mother’s garage.
Spoiler, the ending: Hellstrom refuses to honor a deal that trades a kidnapped child for her abductor’s freedom and imposes the maximum sentence. Jacobs withdraws his plea, setting up a trial, and is dragged out screaming. Branch tells McCoy the office does not negotiate with terrorists; McCoy invites Branch to fire him, and Branch replies that McCoy is a great prosecutor who will never be a district attorney.
Why it stands out
- McCoy goes behind Branch’s back to promise a kidnapper his freedom, and the judge voids the bargain only after the child is safe.
- Defense attorney Charlie Graham is arrested as a suspected accomplice after McCoy loses a motion to have him removed from the case.
- Branch tells McCoy he will never be a district attorney; two seasons later, McCoy is promoted to Branch’s vacant seat.