Remains of the Day (Season 17, Episode 11)
Premise: A former street addict collapses and dies in his mother’s hospital room, and the autopsy traces his death to cancer carried in leg-bone grafts taken from corpses without consent.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Det. Nina Cassady (Milena Govich)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Ben Bass as Dr. Adam Vaughn, Mariel Hemingway as Ashley Jones, Michael Boatman as defense attorney Dave Seaver, Dan Bakkedahl as Tony Bicks, Eric D. Hill Jr. as Jason Carter
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Story: Shiya Ribowsky; Story & teleplay: David Wilcox
Summary
The Investigation
“Remains of the Day” begins with a hospital death: 19-year-old Michael Jones collapses while visiting his mother, Ashley Jones, a patient on the ward. Green and Cassady first suspect poison meant for Ashley, who is battling her late husband’s children, Miles and Hillary Foster, for a $46 million estate tied up in probate. Miles denies involvement, and his lawyer calls Ashley a schemer who sent her son away as a child. A photo of Michael making a drug buy leads to dealer Marco Penzler, who says he sold him nothing.
The hospital meal tests clean. Dr. Rodgers finds heroin and anti-rejection drugs in Michael’s system, but he died of a brain tumor that proves to be ovarian cancer, spread through bone grafts in both legs. An old girlfriend explains that he shattered his legs fleeing a theft and was admitted under a stolen ID. The hospital, unable to bill him, had planned to amputate; instead a nonprofit clinic run by Dr. Adam Vaughn repaired them. Vaughn’s file names the donor as Karen Kendall, 21, killed in a car crash. Her parents never agreed to donation, and funeral director Tony Bicks had collected her body within two hours and had it cremated.
Most bodies handled by Bicks’s funeral home had no family consent, yet their names surface on donor lists, and Bicks phoned Vaughn’s clinic often. Exhumed bodies are missing bones, veins and tendons, with plastic plumbing pipe holding their shape, and Bicks’s fingerprints are found on a pipe. He is arrested for grand larceny and forgery.
The Trial
To tie the cancer to the grafts, McCoy gets a judge to reluctantly order a biopsy of Jason Carter, a Georgetown-bound basketball player who received bone from the same donor; Jason has the same cancer. Bicks then says Vaughn did the cutting himself, from perhaps 500 bodies, while Bicks doctored the paperwork for fees; he takes a deal of at least ten years. Vaughn is charged with depraved-indifference murder and turns down a manslaughter plea.
On the stand, Jason says he probably would have had the surgery even knowing the risk. Nurse Valerie Miller then admits Vaughn had her change the operation date after Michael died, because the true donor was Tina Sadowsky, who died of ovarian cancer the day before the surgery. Vaughn testifies that he took the bones without consent because the system fails poor patients, calls the cancer risk tiny, and says he would do it again. McCoy hammers him for never telling patients the risk.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Vaughn not guilty of second-degree murder, though he is losing his medical license. McCoy is told afterward that he was right on the law, which leaves open whether Vaughn was wrong.
Why it stands out
- To prove where the cancer came from, McCoy wins a court order forcing a second graft recipient, an innocent third party, to have his knee biopsied, arguing from the Supreme Court’s Winston v. Lee.
- Vaughn admits on the stand that he harvested bone without consent and falsified records, yet the jury acquits him of murder.
- Mariel Hemingway guest stars as the dead man’s mother, Ashley Jones, and Michael Boatman plays defense attorney Dave Seaver.