Expert (Season 8, Episode 12)
Premise: Gunfire in a restaurant men’s room kills a diner and wounds a psychologist famous for testifying that killers were in a dissociative trance, and the suspect turns his own defense against him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 8, Episode 12
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Vera Farmiga as Lindsay Carson, Stephen Pearlman as Dr. Leon Mayer, Fred Burrell as Arthur Rigg, Joanna Merlin as defense attorney Deirdre Powell, J. K. Simmons as Dr. Emil Skoda
- Director
- Lewis H. Gould
- Writers
- David Shore & I.C. Rapoport
Summary
The Investigation
“Expert” opens with a shooting in the men’s room of a Midtown restaurant late on a Friday night: camera repairman Milton Garner is killed, and Dr. Leon Mayer of Seattle is badly wounded. A paroled robber, Mike Thompson, escapes unhurt from the next stall, and the detectives first assume he was the target of his jailed partner’s brother, angry over Mike’s affair. When surgeons find a fourth bullet in Mayer, it means his stall door was open when the shooting began, so the shooter saw whom he was firing at.
Mayer turns out to be a forensic psychologist and frequent defense witness who built a career on a dissociation theory of sudden violence. A diner recalls a woman who ran into the ladies’ room as the shots ended, and a sketch identifies event planner Lindsay Carson. She is the daughter of Arthur Rigg, convicted in Albany of shooting his boss and a co-worker after Mayer testified for him, and her apartment holds tapes, books and clippings on Mayer. She is arrested, but a judge suppresses gunpowder found in her portfolio and dismisses the case.
Ballistics links the bullets to Rigg’s never-found .38, though only partially. Rigg refuses a parole deal to help. Records show Lindsay visited him in jail and then stayed in a Binghamton motel room he had used the night before, where he had borrowed a screwdriver and a space heater was later found broken.
The Trial
Re-arrested, Carson rejects a murder two offer and pleads not responsible, claiming the same dissociative state her father did. Dr. Emil Skoda considers the defense too easy to fake; Mayer, for the defense, says she fits it. Ross learns Mayer refused, without explanation, to support a due-process appeal for Rigg.
McCoy subpoenas Mayer and shows that his testimony at Rigg’s trial described the motel screwdriver threat, an episode Rigg supposedly could not remember. Mayer concedes Rigg told him about it, and McCoy accuses him of selling a diagnosis for $40,000.
Spoiler, the ending: Carson admits she followed Mayer to beg for help, and that when he called her father a murderer she followed him into the restroom and kept shooting. She takes a plea to murder two with a sentence of 20 years to life.
Why it stands out
- Dr. Emil Skoda squares off with a celebrity defense expert over whether a dissociative state can simply be faked.
- The defendant claims exactly the dissociative-trance defense that her own victim used on behalf of her father.
- The key evidence is a detail in Mayer’s old testimony that his amnesiac patient should not have been able to tell him.