Deadlock (Season 17, Episode 9)
Premise: A mass murderer spared from execution escapes and kills again before his capture, and after McCoy fails to revive the death penalty, the father of a child victim shoots him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 9
- 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
- Craig Walker as Leon Vorgitch, Jeremy Davidson as Rob Purcell, Catherine Dent as Dena Carter, Patricia R. Floyd as Judge Rochelle Desmond, Cynthia Darlow as Delores Vorgitch
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- David Slack
Summary
The Investigation
“Deadlock” begins with an escape: Leon Vorgitch, serving life for killing five people at a Midtown burger restaurant in 1997, attacks his guards with a plastic shiv during a court appearance and escapes. Green, who responded to that massacre as a narcotics officer and testified at the trial, notes that Vorgitch was sentenced to death before the law changed. His estranged mother, Delores, wants nothing to do with him, his brother, Carl, names relatives and old friends, and ex-girlfriend Nikki Hale admits he stopped by and describes what he is now wearing.
A former cellmate, Pedro, sends the detectives to the dealer who sold Vorgitch a gun, but the dealer is already dead, and a corrections officer wounded in the escape dies in surgery. Suspecting revenge, the detectives check on massacre survivor Mia Alvarez and John Garvey, whose son was killed. Vorgitch’s friend Rex Mays reveals that Vorgitch’s mother has cancer and that he escaped to say goodbye. At a Chelsea hospital she refuses to forgive him, and he flees into a school next door and takes a classroom hostage. One girl, Megan Purcell, texts her father, Rob, that she is in diabetic shock. Shots ring out, police storm the room, and four children, Megan among them, are killed before Vorgitch gives up.
The Trial
Vorgitch faces eight counts of first-degree murder. With New York’s death penalty in limbo after People v. LaValle, McCoy persuades Judge Rochelle Desmond to issue a rewritten deadlock jury instruction so he can seek execution, but an appeals panel rules she exceeded her authority. As Vorgitch arrives at the courthouse, Rob Purcell shoots him dead.
Purcell’s lawyer, Dena Carter, a former prosecutor campaigning to restore capital punishment, rejects a manslaughter offer and pursues an insanity defense. Dr. Olivet and two other experts find Purcell knew right from wrong, and the judge refuses McCoy’s request to let jurors consider manslaughter. On the stand, Purcell says he only carried out the will of the people. McCoy learns that Vorgitch’s arrival had been moved to 9 a.m. at the last minute and that Carter was told of the change, but she invokes privilege.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Purcell guilty of second-degree murder. McCoy then visits him and asks whether Carter told him when to intercept Vorgitch, and Judge Harold Gordon later approves cutting Purcell’s sentence from 20 years to 10, with parole possible in three, in exchange for his testimony.
Why it stands out
- The legal plot turns on People v. LaValle, the 2004 New York Court of Appeals ruling that struck down the death penalty law’s deadlock provision, which the legislature never amended.
- Green has a personal tie to the case: he was among the first officers at the original massacre and testified at Vorgitch’s trial.
- The vigilante’s defense attorney is a former prosecutor running for office on a promise to bring back the death penalty.