Paranoia (Season 6, Episode 6)
Premise: A Mount Amsterdam College student is stabbed to death in her dorm room, and suspicion shifts from an online stalker to her violinist roommate, whose sealed juvenile record becomes McCoy’s only way into court.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 6
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Sharon Martin as Megan Maslin, Sandy Duncan as defense attorney Michelle “Shelly” Kates, Ralph Williams as Dean Kirkwood, Glenn Fitzgerald as Merril Grupp, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Ripped from the headlines
- Two Harvard cases underlie the story: the murder–suicide at Dunster House and the case of Gina Grant.
- Director
- Fred Gerber
- Writers
- Michael S. Chernuchin
Summary
The Investigation
“Paranoia” begins when Megan Maslin, a music student at Mount Amsterdam College, finds her roommate Alison Reich, 20, dead in their dorm room with 27 stab wounds and no sign of sexual assault. Alison’s boyfriend, Josh, gives Briscoe and Curtis a violent story from a sex-fantasy bulletin board that seems to describe her, written by someone in Professor Cooley’s course on sex and violence in literature.
With help from pornographer Amos Brady, a man Briscoe once sent to prison, the detectives lure the author out: student Merril Grupp. A search of his dorm room turns up Alison’s underwear, and Grupp admits taking it from her room during a party, but his computer shows him online until about 9:00 that night. Megan says she saw Grupp near the dorm on her way to rehearsal, yet the oboist who used the practice room before her says she arrived more than an hour late.
When the detectives return to question Megan, they find her barely conscious after swallowing a bottle of pills. She mumbles that she did it, and a bloody knife turns up in her violin case.
The Trial
Defense attorney Michelle “Shelly” Kates, an old sparring partner of McCoy’s, reaches the hospital before anyone can explain who called her. The judge admits the confession but suppresses the knife as the fruit of a warrantless search. A newspaper database search by Kincaid shows that Megan, at 14, stabbed her older sister to death and served nine months in a juvenile facility; Kates says privately that the sister drank and beat her.
Dr. Olivet’s interview suggests paranoid thinking, but Megan rejects an insanity plea. McCoy instead charges her with fraud for hiding her juvenile record on the application that won her a full scholarship, knowing a defense would require her testimony. Kates quietly lets it happen. On cross-examination the judge allows McCoy to use the suppressed knife to impeach Megan, and she accuses Alison of hiding her bow rosin, then talks of poison and ground glass, things she says her sister did too.
Spoiler, the ending: McCoy moves to add a second-degree murder charge, and Kates then persuades Megan to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which McCoy accepts. Kincaid remarks that Kates seemed off her game.
Why it stands out
- McCoy uses a fraud charge over a college application to force a murder suspect onto the witness stand.
- Curtis’s wife, Deborah, and their three daughters visit the squad room.