Thinking Makes It So (Season 16, Episode 18)
Premise: A bank manager helps rob his own branch while his six-year-old daughter is held hostage, and the rough way Fontana gets her location out of the kidnapper threatens to sink the whole prosecution.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 18
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Peter Jacobson as defense attorney Randolph J. “Randy” Dworkin, Stephen Schnetzer as Mitchell Lowell, Michael Countryman as Howard Grant, Teri Lamm as Cheryl Grant, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley
- Director
- Tony Goldwyn
- Writers
- Michael S. Chernuchin
Summary
The Investigation
“Thinking Makes It So” begins with a bank robbery in which a guard kills the gunman, and manager Howard Grant, who filled the robber’s gym bag with cash, is arrested. Grant will not name an accomplice until his ex-wife, Cheryl, arrives and he lets slip that someone has their six-year-old, Julie. The gunman had stopped him on his way to work and made him phone home, where a man holding Julie threatened her life; Grant had left her alone for 15 minutes. Someone posing as Grant told the classmate’s mother who drives Julie to school that she was sick. A task force notes similar unsolved cases in Trenton and Philadelphia, where one child was killed and another never found.
Prints identify the dead robber as Cyrus Lowell, a waiter with expensive habits. His father, Mitchell Lowell, lives in a hotel, claims to work in mergers and says they have not spoken in two years, but the firm he names has never employed him. Hotel records show he gave his son a wake-up call that morning and phoned heiress Sara Essex daily; she admits lending him her car. Fontana finds Lowell at the Sag Harbor house of his ex-wife, a widow he once fleeced, and, alone with him, threatens him at gunpoint until Lowell says Julie is on a boat. She is found safe.
The Trial
At arraignment, defense attorney Randy Dworkin gets the judge to step aside because they know each other from summer camp. He then moves to dismiss, claiming Lowell talked only after Fontana jammed a gun in his eye and pushed his head into a toilet. Fontana tells prosecutors only that he denies whatever Lowell claims. Judge Bradley believes the detective and denies the motion, which troubles McCoy. McCoy and Borgia debate ticking-bomb arguments for torture, and Branch tells a boyhood fishing story and urges a deal, but Dworkin rejects ten years.
Julie testifies that Lowell treated her kindly. Dworkin calls Fontana, who sidesteps the questions about the toilet and says he was trying to save the girl, and Dworkin argues that everything flowing from the coerced statement must go. Borgia saves the case with inevitable discovery: a harbor master had told Lowell’s ex-wife he was on her boat, so police would have found Julie anyway. Summing up, Dworkin sets Fontana’s violence against Lowell’s gentleness with the girl; McCoy answers that fairness is not the same as justice.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Lowell of first-degree robbery and first-degree kidnapping. Afterward McCoy and Dworkin agree they can live with the result, but Dworkin asks whether they would feel the same if Fontana had abused an innocent relative of Lowell’s to make him talk, and neither is sure.
Why it stands out
- The title comes from a line in Hamlet that Branch says his father taught him on a childhood fishing trip; McCoy points out where it came from.
- When Fontana’s evasive testimony reopens the coercion issue mid-trial, Borgia saves the evidence with the inevitable-discovery doctrine.
- Dworkin opens with a stunt, getting the arraignment judge to recuse herself because they know each other from summer camp.