Promote This! (Season 19, Episode 18)
Premise: Three Long Island high school athletes who record themselves attacking Hispanic men are tied to the beating of a Honduran day laborer and the murder of a laid-off autoworker.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 18
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Rosa Arredondo as Juanita Stratton, Josh Pais as defense attorney Mosely, Michael Drayer as Kyle Chase, Jason Jones as Len Pewls, Mary Beth Hurt as Judge Gillian Berrow
- Director
- Michael Watkins
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Christopher Ambrose
Summary
The Investigation
“Promote This!” opens a hate crime case with a man found broken and unconscious below an overpass, apparently hit by a car, with auto glass inside his pant leg and a fresh burn on his cheek. Left in a deep coma, he is identified as Oswaldo Morales, a Honduran dishwasher who also seeks day work. A fellow laborer saw him ride off with three white teenagers in a green Toyota. He apparently kicked out a window of the moving car.
An online video of youths shooting a BB gun at a Hispanic man from a Toyota shows a mail truck from Peconic, Long Island, where police have logged nine attacks on Hispanics in a month. A glass shop and the high school lead to point guard Tony Stratton, whose family car has a taped-over window and whose Argentine-born mother, Juanita, poses as the maid. A judge refuses a warrant for the car. Yearbook messages point to blond teammate Timothy Moore, who owns a BB gun, and the video was uploaded from the coach’s computer, used by team manager Kyle Chase.
The Trial
The three are charged with attempted murder with a hate crime enhancement, but four other attack videos are later suppressed. Then the body of Rey Alvarez, a laid-off Detroit autoworker, is found beaten with a bat and bearing the same burn, along with a pipe tipped with a heated Mexican peso. Under fire from TV pundit Len Pewls in an election year, McCoy overrules Cutter and joins the cases. When the judge demands proof that one tool made both burns, the hospital turns out to have flown Morales, an undocumented patient, to Honduras; McCoy pays to bring him back, Rubirosa wins his mother’s consent, and the M.E.’s comparison secures the joinder.
Chase pleads to the assault and testifies that the trio hunted Hispanic men weekly, moving into the city to dodge local police, and burned Morales with the heated coin before Moore pushed him out of the car; he says he stayed home the next night. Ramiro Lopez, an undocumented Mexican man, identifies Stratton and Moore as two of the youths who beat him in Peconic, and immigration agents detain him in court. Cutter’s cross-examination suggests Juanita Stratton taught her son contempt for poor laborers. A juror who showed a Pewls podcast to four others is replaced, and the judge denies a mistrial.
Spoiler, the ending: Moore and Stratton are acquitted of murdering Alvarez and of attempted murder but convicted of first-degree assault and sentenced to five years. Later, Morales’s mother signs a do-not-resuscitate order and he dies; McCoy has Cutter re-charge the two with first-degree bias murder, and Cutter wonders whether someone told her his death would allow a new charge.
Why it stands out
- McCoy, running for election as district attorney, faces a report that he once employed an undocumented nanny, which he traces to his 1991 divorce.
- A hospital sends the comatose victim back to Honduras under its policy for undocumented patients, and McCoy spends office funds to bring him back as a witness.
- Immigration agents take a prosecution witness into custody in the courtroom moments after he testifies.