Positive (Season 16, Episode 19)
Premise: A 14-year-old’s attack on a hospital official leads detectives to his little sister’s death from AIDS and to the doctor who secretly gave her an experimental vaccine meant only for animals.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 19
- 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
- Vondie Curtis-Hall as Dr. Andrew Copelan, Jennifer Van Dyck as Dr. Elaine Clemens, Portia as Pamela Henson, Eugene Jones III as Jeremy Miller, Dennis Parlato as Randolph McGinnis
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Sonny Postiglione
Summary
The Investigation
“Positive” starts with a shooting in a busy diner at 175th Street and Broadway that kills owner Oscar Morales and grazes Dr. Elaine Clemens, who chairs a community advisory committee at the nearby Children’s Healing House. Morales’s nephew blames Prim, a dealer Morales had pepper-sprayed, but Prim has an alibi and names the gunman: Jeremy Miller, a 14-year-old foster child. Jeremy’s sister, Emily, born HIV-positive, died of AIDS at the hospital two days earlier, and Clemens had barred him after a nurse caught him unhooking Emily’s IV. Fontana and Green find Jeremy in a park, armed with a .22 and waiting for Clemens. He apologizes for Morales and blames the hospital for Emily’s death, then shoots himself.
His note asks why Emily’s head was injured. The medical examiner finds the bruise was not fatal; her organs failed under a heavy load of AIDS drugs, five where Dr. Andrew Copelan’s grant protocol allowed three, plus injection marks from a drug outside her regimen. An orderly admits sneaking in Pamela Henson, Emily’s former foster mother, who was charged with abuse after she stopped the medicines and saw Emily improve. The unknown drug turns out to be an experimental AIDS vaccine meant only for animal testing, and Copelan is arrested for murder.
The Trial
Copelan is charged with depraved-indifference murder, and the judge sets his bail at $500,000. The vaccine, LAV-60, killed 8% of the dogs given it; Randolph McGinnis, who owns a quarter of its maker, gave the hospital $50 million and emailed Copelan a child-mortality ranking under the subject line “shape up.” Clemens reveals that four other children in Copelan’s care died in similar ways, and two exhumed bodies show lethal drug mixes. The judge excludes those deaths as too dissimilar, and later bars evidence that Copelan himself has AIDS under state privacy law.
On cross, Henson is attacked for using an herbal remedy, and an AIDS specialist concedes that the drugs, in limited combination, were Emily’s last hope. Then the director of a city animal lab reports his LAV-60 supply was watered down, says Copelan once asked for a sample to test on himself, and police find Copelan’s fingerprint on a bottle. Copelan testifies that he stole the vaccine and gave it to Emily and to himself, having contracted HIV through a transfusion after a car crash in Nigeria. McCoy shows Emily’s blood counts ran a year ahead of Copelan’s on the same track, and Copelan concedes he hoped the drug would help him too.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Copelan not guilty of second-degree murder. The prosecutors suggest the jurors balked at convicting a dying man, or valued a vaccine that might someday save them over a child who was dying anyway.
Why it stands out
- The judge keeps Copelan’s HIV status from the jury under New York’s privacy law, but the doctor discloses it himself on the stand.
- The case ends in acquittal even though the defendant admits on the stand that he stole the experimental vaccine and injected his patient with it.
- Two other children’s deaths are excluded because each was killed by a different combination of drugs, too dissimilar to show a pattern.