The System (Season 22, Episode 9)
Premise: A young man who has waited 18 months at Rikers for a murder trial escapes from the courthouse, and a corrections officer’s death forces Price and Shaw to face what the system has done to him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 22, Episode 9
- 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
- Chaundre Hall-Broomfield as Troy Booker, Milauna Jackson as defense attorney Frazier, Catrina Ganey as Leanne Booker, Mandy Siegfried as Mandy Foster, Linda Manning as Alana
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode reportedly draws on the case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager held at Rikers Island from 2010 to 2013 while awaiting trial on a charge of stealing a backpack; he was released when the case collapsed and died by suicide in 2015.
- Director
- Alex Hall
- Writers
- Rick Eid & Pamela Wechsler
Summary
The Investigation
“The System” opens with Leanne Booker confronting Price outside court: her son, Troy, has spent 18 months at Rikers awaiting trial for the shooting of Marcus Williams, and she says he got the victim’s blood on him trying to help. At a hearing on a motion by his new lawyer, defense attorney Frazier, Shaw testifies that Booker confessed after two hours of questioning. Then the courthouse locks down: Booker has broken free at prisoner intake, and corrections officer Randall Foster has been shot.
A guard named Alana, recently disciplined for getting close to Booker, admits he called her for money after the escape. Detectives raid his brother Steven’s apartment in Bushwick and find fast food and blood but no Booker. Spotted on a nearby street, he fires a shot and takes hostages inside a building. Shaw, who took his confession, talks to him by phone, telling him that video shows Foster fired the gun as they struggled and urging him to trust the system; Booker answers that Shaw tricked him into confessing to something he did not do. As he demands a car, he is overpowered and taken into custody.
The Trial
The judge joins the murder and escape cases and refuses to hear new evidence. Frazier then shows Price a bystander’s video of the Williams shooting that bears out Booker’s story, and Price drops the murder charge. When he and Shaw go to discuss a plea with Foster, they learn from his wife, Mandy, that he has died of an infected wound. Price argues that manslaughter is fairer, but Booker is charged with second-degree murder as a felony murder.
Frazier tells the jury the system killed Foster and attacks conditions at Rikers while cross-examining his widow. Booker testifies that he was high when he confessed and that he fled because a white supremacist inmate had vowed to kill him. He angrily rejects a plea to manslaughter with 15 years. The warden testifies that video shows no such attack, though he concedes 16 people died in his custody the year before. Over a drink, Shaw tells Price he joined the force to stop wrongly accused Black men from being locked up.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Booker guilty of second-degree murder.
Why it stands out
- Shaw, the detective who took Booker’s false confession, talks him through the hostage standoff and later says he joined the force to stop wrongly accused Black men from being locked up.
- Booker is cleared of the killing he was jailed for, yet is convicted of murder for the guard’s death during his escape.