Haven (Season 9, Episode 12)
Premise: The beating death of a reformed gang member who runs a Harlem youth center leads to the first student from the neighborhood to reach an Ivy League school.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 12
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Avery Kidd Waddell as Jerome Warren, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Mr. Winters, Adriane Lenox as Myra Warren, Sean Cullen as Professor Davis Mills, Frederick Koehler as Steven Lang
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- David Shore & I.C. Rapoport
Summary
The Investigation
“Haven” is a murder case that begins when a boy sneaking into the Haven Center youth program to borrow a basketball trips over the body of its director, Randall Chase, a former gang member who served time for assault and turned his life around. He has been beaten with a softball bat covered in the prints of the many locals who played in his games, and fibers of blue polar fleece are found beneath his fingernails. Drug dealer Ricky Carter admits paying Chase $5,000 in December to stop staging marches on his corner, but the money never reached the center’s books.
Chase’s phone records lead to Professor Davis Mills at Hanford University, who sits on the admissions board and, the detectives suspect, has a drug habit. Chase had pushed the admission of Jerome Warren, a Haven alumnus who failed his midterm in Mills’s class and then earned high marks on his finals. Jerome says he was in a chemistry lab the night of the killing, but his instructor says he left the lab untouched, and Jerome, who owns a matching fleece jacket, is arrested. A roommate and a tutor then report that he arrived years behind his classmates and failed every course but chemistry at midterm, and a seller of answer-coded pencils and term papers identifies Chase as the man who bought four sets of test answers and three papers in December.
The Trial
Councilman Clayton rallies support for Jerome, and Schiff questions whether McCoy can prove a motive. A neighbor then claims he saw local dealer Lionel Kendry leaving the center, but McCoy shows the lights were off and the street lamp broken. The judge bars the testimony, and defense attorney Winters shifts to a defense of extreme emotional disturbance, which requires Jerome to testify.
Winters portrays Chase as using Jerome to raise money and calls a professor who argues that affirmative action set the young man up to fail; the judge strikes that testimony as a political argument. Jerome testifies that the cheating was Chase’s idea, that he wanted to drop out or transfer, and that he grabbed the bat when Chase insisted he keep cheating. On cross, McCoy points out that the medical examiner found two of the three blows came after Chase was down, and Jerome shouts that he wanted Chase off his back.
Spoiler, the ending: McCoy, now believing that Jerome wanted the cheating to stop, offers a plea to first-degree manslaughter, which Carmichael questions. Though Winters tells him he need not accept, Jerome pleads guilty and receives six to 12 years. McCoy tells Carmichael he wanted to close the case rather than gamble on the jury.
Why it stands out
- The defense puts affirmative action itself on trial, and the judge strikes an expert’s testimony against it as political debate.
- Jerome’s killing of his mentor is framed by the defense as the result of pressure to keep performing as Haven’s success story at fundraisers.
- The cheating ring relies on pencils with tiny printed answers, an idea the seller says came from writing names on grains of rice.