Innocence (Season 20, Episode 16)
Premise: An anti-gay murder conviction is challenged by Cutter’s former law professor, whose clinic’s tactics come under attack before she turns the fight on Cutter’s own law license.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 16
- 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
- Amy Madigan as Emily Ryan, Cheyenne Jackson as Jon Sorrentino, Anna Chlumsky as Lisa Klein, Robin Lord Taylor as Cedric Stuber, Zach Grenier as Judge Cormac Braden, Ernie Hudson as Frank Gibson
- Director
- Fred Berner
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Julie Martin
Summary
The Investigation
“Innocence” opens with the arrest of Cedric Stuber, a truck driver who lives with his mother, for the murder of Alan Camden, slashed with a box cutter in an apparent anti-gay hate crime while walking home hand in hand with his husband, Jon Sorrentino. Police find no physical evidence, and Stuber claims he was home with his mother. Sorrentino picks him out of a lineup after Cutter assures him beforehand that the trip is worthwhile. At trial, Cutter goads Stuber’s mother into an anti-gay outburst, and the jury convicts Stuber of second-degree murder.
Within hours, Emily Ryan, Cutter’s former law professor and mentor, takes up Stuber’s cause through the Hudson University Innocence Coalition. A real estate agent saw Sorrentino kissing Ted Wilson days after the killing, and Sorrentino admits that he and Wilson are now a couple and that he had consulted divorce lawyers. At a hearing, drug dealer Rodrigo Diaz testifies that Sorrentino once asked him to find a hit man. Pointing to Diaz and to Cutter’s remark before the lineup, Judge Cormac Braden sets aside the verdict and orders a new trial.
Sorrentino denies the story and says he had threatened to report Diaz for selling meth to Camden. Lupo and Bernard learn that coalition student Lisa Klein met Diaz at a Brooklyn tequila bar, bought him drinks and handed him $100 in cash, after which he took a car service to a known drug location.
The Trial
Cutter subpoenas ten years of the clinic’s student records. Braden releases grades but not emails, and they show that students on successful exonerations get higher grades and recommendation letters. At a hearing, Klein admits she also promised Diaz a free lawyer without telling Ryan, and Ryan defends her clinic from the witness stand. Braden finds Diaz’s account suspect and reinstates the conviction.
Ryan then moves to dismiss, arguing that Cutter was never validly admitted: he left college without a bachelor’s degree but told the bar and the DA’s office that he had one. Cutter notes that New York does not require a college degree to practice law, and Braden takes the motion under advisement. McCoy sounds out Ryan about a manslaughter plea and orders a reluctant Cutter to make the deal. At the plea meeting Stuber scoffs at the hate-crime label with an ethnic slur, and Cutter raises the offer to 25 years, warning that a federal hate-crime case under the Matthew Shepard Act could follow.
Spoiler, the ending: Stuber takes the 25 years. The bar overseers reprimand Cutter but find no sign that the flaw in his credentials affected any of his past convictions. Cutter says he dodged a bullet, but is asked whether he really did.
Why it stands out
- Cutter’s own record becomes the issue: the defense reveals that he never finished college despite telling the bar he had, and he ends up publicly reprimanded.
- Van Buren’s cancer storyline continues in a radiation-treatment waiting room, where, with her boyfriend beside her, she reassures a frightened first-time patient.
- Cutter forces the plea by raising the prospect of a federal case under the Matthew Shepard Act, which he notes now makes anti-gay hate murder a federal crime.