Camouflage (Season 22, Episode 3)
Premise: After a racially targeted shooting on a Manhattan subway, Price takes the case as a special federal prosecutor on the condition that he seek the death penalty he has spent his career opposing.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 22, Episode 3
- Detectives
- Det. Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), Det. Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Ian Bell as John Nelson, Claire Coffee as defense attorney Andrea Rankin, Tru Collins as Jessica Farrell, Emily Rudolph as Kimmi Hsu, Brad Heberlee as Dr. Stanley Thibodeau
- Ripped from the headlines
- The subway massacre appears to draw on the April 12, 2022, attack on an N train in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, in which a gunman shot ten passengers, and on the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Director
- John Behring
- Writers
- Pamela Wechsler
Summary
The Investigation
“Camouflage” opens with a gunman firing on a crowded 6 train at Canal Street, killing seven people, including a 12-year-old boy, and wounding many more. Price is at the scene and keeps pressure on a wounded woman, Kimmi Hsu, until help arrives. All of the dead seem to be of East or Southeast Asian descent. Witnesses describe a short, masked white man with a camouflage gym bag whose strap is broken, and he escapes down the tunnel through a gate that should have been locked, which suggests he had a key; cameras then show him dumping his sweatshirt and walking toward the waterfront.
A gun shop owner says a man with the bag tried to sell him 50 boxes of 9-millimeter ammunition. Aaron Rossi, a man at the shop who planned to buy it, is caught with the bag and proves he pulled it from a dumpster. Inside is a photo of a schoolgirl, Lacey Farrell, who is deaf; Dixon talks with her in sign language. Lacey’s mother, Jessica, demands a lawyer, who explains that she fears the shooter’s white supremacist friends. Promised confidentiality, she names John Nelson, Lacey’s father, a former transit mechanic fired for harassing Asian riders, whom he blames for COVID. Cosgrove and Shaw find him in Rockaway, where he flees and fires before he is taken.
The Trial
The FBI removes Nelson on a federal detainer, and U.S. Attorney Monica Simms says Washington wants the case. Under a compromise, Price and Maroun are appointed special assistant U.S. attorneys, with Price as lead counsel, provided they seek a death sentence. Defense attorney Andrea Rankin, a law school friend with whom Price once worked for the Innocence Project, wins an order requiring the informant’s name. Price refuses to offer a plea that would break the federal deal, and Jessica, now exposed and furious, testifies as a hostile witness who recalls nothing; the judge suppresses the TEC-9 found in Rockaway.
Hsu tells the jury that the gunman passed over white passengers to shoot Asian ones. The defense then stipulates that the killings were a hate crime and pursues an insanity defense, with psychiatrist Stanley Thibodeau calling Nelson’s extreme racism a delusional disorder. Rankin confronts Price with a law review article in which he called capital punishment barbaric. In closing, Price walks the jurors through where each victim was on the train, including 12-year-old Jimmy Park and his grandmother, and argues that Nelson’s careful planning shows a clear mind.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Nelson of seven counts of murder and sentences him to death by lethal injection. Rankin tells Price she cannot believe he went through with it and that he has changed.
Why it stands out
- Price, who once fought to keep defendants off death row, wins a federal death sentence while serving as a special assistant U.S. attorney.
- Dixon communicates with the deaf Lacey Farrell in sign language and mentions that her own son is deaf.
- Price’s experience of this shooting comes back in the season finale, “Open Wounds,” when he sympathizes with a defendant traumatized by a school shooting.