Criminal Law (Season 16, Episode 9)
Premise: A gunman working through the witness list from a nine-year-old office massacre puts McCoy in danger just as the convicted killer wins a new trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 9
- 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
- Daniel Hugh Kelly as Leland Barnes, Maddie Corman as Elaine Bowman, Johnathan Tchaikovsky as Harlan Barnes, Thomas Sadoski as Robert Barnes, Peter McRobbie as trial judge Walter Bradley
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- David Wilcox
Summary
The Investigation
“Criminal Law” opens with a string of .45-caliber shootings that kill three women named Sylvia Rossi: a bodega owner at dawn, a mother shot at home in Chelsea along with her husband, and a victims’ advocate lured to a parking garage the night before. The advocate had survived a workplace shooting nine years earlier. A shopkeeper saw a man in gray coveralls use a pay phone near the garage; the man was driving a Balasco Brothers tow truck. The company’s driver, Troy Hendricks, escapes on foot but abandons a bag holding a list of names, including all three Rossis and, last, Jack McCoy.
The names belong to witnesses McCoy used nine years ago to convict Leland Barnes, who shot his wife and three others at her office. An appeals court has just overturned that conviction, and Barnes is due for a bail hearing. Witness Leon Whitaker and his wife are found dead at home, leaving Elaine Bowman as the last surviving witness. McCoy gets a police detail but rejects Branch’s advice to step aside.
The Trial
Representing himself, Barnes scorns McCoy’s offer of a deal, and the judge holds him pending a Sirois hearing on whether the dead witnesses’ earlier testimony can be used. Finding no evidence linking Barnes to the gunman, the judge excludes it and lets Barnes question Bowman himself in a courthouse conference room. Under his questioning, Bowman says she kept her eyes shut during the massacre and that he was not the shooter, and she then refuses to testify.
A former cellmate says Barnes read and destroyed letters, perhaps from a son, that were passed through an inmate later found hanged. Barnes’s older son, Robert, explains that the brothers were placed with a foster family, the Hendrickses, whose son Troy had died. Harlan Barnes has been using Troy’s name, and after he calls Robert, the detectives find him at a girlfriend’s place in Greenpoint and arrest him with the gun. He refuses to implicate his father.
Spoiler, the ending: With Bowman’s recantation and nothing tying Barnes to the killings, the judge dismisses the case, and McCoy vows to indict him for the murders. As the two men trade words afterward, a gunman appears and police order him to drop his weapon. McCoy admits he first thought he was the target.
Why it stands out
- McCoy is the last name on the killer’s list, and he stays on the case despite Branch urging him to hand it off.
- The prosecution pins its hopes on a Sirois hearing, which can let in a dead witness’s earlier testimony if the defendant is shown to have caused the witness’s absence.
- Barnes acts as his own lawyer and wins the right to question the surviving witness face to face.