For the Defense (Season 20, Episode 9)
Premise: The murder of a prosecution witness outside her Manhattan hotel exposes a mobbed-up car exporter and his lawyer, former ADA Marcus Woll, and Rubirosa must confront her own past with Woll to bring him to trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 9
- 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
- Jonathan Cake as defense attorney Marcus Woll, Casey Siemaszko as Bart Rainey, Betty Gilpin as Paige Regan, Kate Burton as defense attorney Erica Gardner, Ty Jones as Alvin “Mad Dog” Jackson
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story echoes the 2009 indictment of Paul Bergrin, a former federal prosecutor turned Newark defense lawyer accused of running a racketeering operation that intimidated witnesses against his drug-dealing and gang clients and plotted to kill some of them.
- Director
- William Klayer
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Luke Schelhaas
Summary
The Investigation
“For the Defense” begins on the first day of a murder-for-insurance trial, when the prosecution’s witness, Maggie Hayes, is shot dead outside the Manhattan hotel where ADA Maxwell Cavanaugh had hidden her. Her ex-boyfriend, defendant William Avery, had threatened her, but he was in court at the time. The doorman saw a blue Audi with New York plates, yet no Audi matches the partial number.
Hayes’s real employer is Amstrad Shipping, a Brooklyn firm run by Bart Rainey, a Pantano crime family associate who sends cars meant to be scrapped through the cash-for-clunkers program to Latin America on mismatched plates. Hotel video shows co-worker Paige Regan, who denied knowing where Hayes was, visiting her. The Audi is traced to a ship bound for Colombia, where an NYPD detective has it seized and finds a matching .45 casing.
Facing charges over a ship manifest she signed, Regan admits Rainey had her find Hayes and drove the blue car that afternoon. Marcus Woll, the ex-ADA who defended cartel killers in an earlier case, turns up asking for Regan and then represents the arrested Rainey. A judge rejects Woll’s challenge to the Colombian search, but a gunman posing as room service attacks Regan at the hotel where Rubirosa has hidden her. Regan survives but flees upstate and refuses to return.
The Trial
Avery’s Legal Aid lawyer reveals that Woll volunteered on that defense and learned Hayes could expose Rainey, and Rubirosa realizes Woll knew the hotels the office uses for witnesses. A judge balks at letting them bug Woll’s meetings with Rainey, and Woll warns that exposing him would invite appeals of his 102 old convictions. Rubirosa recalls Woll’s prosecution of drug lord Alvin “Mad Dog” Jackson in her first month, when defense witness Henry Lovett, a pharmacist, vanished before testifying and was later found dead. His widow says someone from the DA’s office learned his hiding place, and Rubirosa realizes she made that call at Woll’s request.
Rainey refuses to turn on Woll, who is arrested in court just as Rainey’s case is about to be dismissed. A judge calls the combined indictment a stretch, so Cutter narrows it to conspiracy to murder Lovett, and Rubirosa names herself as the unindicted co-conspirator the charge requires. On the stand she admits she slept with Woll, and when Woll claims he never kills witnesses, Cutter gets to ask him about Hayes and Regan.
Spoiler, the ending: Woll offers to hand over Rainey if he can walk free. Instead the prosecutors give Rainey 12 to 14 years in exchange for evidence against Woll; no verdict is shown. As appeals of Woll’s convictions arrive, McCoy tells Cutter and Rubirosa they will be working closely together.
Why it stands out
- Jonathan Cake returns as Marcus Woll, the former ADA turned defense lawyer introduced in “Boy Gone Astray.”
- Rubirosa makes herself an unindicted co-conspirator so that Woll can be charged with conspiracy, and her past affair with him is aired in open court.
- When Cutter insists colleagues should never become lovers, McCoy points to his own history.