In God We Trust (Season 24, Episode 13)
Premise: A lawyer who left a closed religious community is found dead, and the killing traces back to the church, whose members refuse to testify and offer their own form of justice in place of a trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 24, Episode 13
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), Det. Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- Luke Slattery as Jacob Albrecht, Ashlyn Maddox as Martha Fairchild, Laura Heisler as Amelia Penner, Michael Devine as John Albrecht, Elia Monte-Brown as Suzanne Forrester
- Director
- John Behring
- Writers
- Jennifer Vanderbes
Summary
The Investigation
“In God We Trust” opens at an event for Alternative Justice in New York, where lawyer Eli Freeman talks about his pro bono fight to keep the Ten Commandments out of a charter school. He is later found dead in his apartment, his head smashed against a marble counter. His firm knows him as an orphan who put himself through community college and Fordham Law, but the college has no record of him. An ex-girlfriend, Angie Marliss, sent him an angry text that night but has an alibi.
Restaurant video shows Eli leaving dinner with a woman carrying a folder from Pathway Forward, a Hell’s Kitchen halfway house. She is Martha Fairchild, schoolteacher of the Baylor Church near Hudson, New York, and fiancée of Jacob Albrecht, son of Pastor John. Eli was born Elijah Penner there and was sent away after refusing baptism. Martha says Eli helped with her parolees’ paperwork. One of them, Marcus Wright, who served 17 years for killing his girlfriend, is seen arguing with Eli, but his work alibi holds, and he reveals he bought Martha a burner phone that made late-night calls to Eli. Her prints are all over Eli’s apartment, but bus-stop video confirms her alibi and shows Jacob never came to meet her.
Left alone together after detectives falsely say Marcus faces arrest, Jacob tells Martha he found her phone, confronted Eli and struck him when Eli said she was leaving the church. He is arrested.
The Trial
Jacob is held on $500,000 bail, and Eli’s mother, Amelia, tells Maroun she saw Jacob burning clothing that night. The judge suppresses the recorded confession, accepting that Jacob, an ordained minister, was counseling a parishioner. Martha refuses to testify, fearing she will be shunned, and on the stand Amelia will not repeat what she saw, saying no one from the church will take part.
Suzanne Forrester of Alternative Justice brings Pastor John to propose a restorative justice circle and a plea to criminally negligent homicide with probation. The offer is turned down, and Baxter tells Price and Maroun to win a conviction. The prosecutors learn that Eli called a women’s clinic and bought prenatal vitamins a week before his death: Martha is pregnant with his child. Price wonders whether manslaughter would be fairer, but Baxter says Eli chose their system and they should honor that.
Spoiler, the ending: Martha, now married to Jacob, still refuses to testify, so the prosecutors warn that the clinic and pharmacy records would reveal that the baby is Eli’s. To keep her secret, Jacob pleads guilty to second-degree murder with a recommended 15-year sentence, and he tells Martha to be strong for their child.
Why it stands out
- The dialogue describes the Baylor Church as a utopian sect of a couple hundred people that broke from the Mennonite Church about a century ago and does without phones, email and the internet.
- Price questions the system he works in, recalling a college student he sent to prison for seven years over a fatal bar fight who was later stabbed there; Baxter answers that the system is flawed but its rules let them act with integrity.