Shield (Season 9, Episode 17)
Premise: When a detective is gunned down during a stakeout, suspicion falls on the fellow officer he had been beating, and her trial exposes how the department ignored her complaints.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 17
- 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
- Jenny Bacon as Officer Marissa Hastings, Holt McCallany as Officer Steve Felton, Philip Bosco as Lee Jerrold, Robert Turano as Sergeant McAllen, J. K. Simmons as Dr. Emil Skoda
- Director
- Stephen Wertimer
- Writers
- Teleplay: René Balcer; Story & teleplay: David Shore & I.C. Rapoport
Summary
The Investigation
“Shield” opens with the shooting of Detective Daniel Pelham of the Warrant Squad, hit twice in the chest at close range while watching a Hudson Street building for armed robbery suspect Terry Mays. His partner, Pete Bowers, had stepped away. Plate records from the stakeout lead to a document forger who sold Mays fake ID, and Mays is caught at LaGuardia. He admits hiding in his girlfriend’s apartment but says he watched a man in a hooded parka walk up to the car and fire.
A bloody print shows Pelham was shot while still seated, and his radio log shows he was awake. Bowers admits he had been slipping off to a nearby hotel to meet his wife, Alicia, who booked the room on her credit card. Pelham’s parents name his ex-girlfriend, Officer Marissa Hastings, and his old partner recalls scratches on Pelham’s neck. A desk sergeant, McAllen, says Hastings phoned often to check on him. Her sitter puts her home at 10:30, and at 10 p.m. someone used police letterhead to fax the card company about Alicia’s card from Hastings’s precinct. Internal Affairs arrests her.
Carmichael finds hospital records of a deep cut on Pelham’s back. The two officers who answered the call at Hastings’s home, Cass and DiPonti, eventually admit she had bruises and choke marks, cut Pelham with a box cutter to stop him, and was talked out of pressing charges.
The Trial
Defense lawyer Lee Jerrold shows that Hastings reported the strangling to an Internal Affairs hotline, where the call was never logged. Her partner, Steve Felton, tells Carmichael that Pelham pushed Hastings’s young son down the stairs. McAllen admits he only sent Pelham to a peer counselor, and Jerrold cites a recent case in which an officer whose wife’s complaints went nowhere killed her and their children. Hastings testifies to the abuse but denies the shooting, and McCoy presses her to admit she felt he deserved to die.
Hastings offers to plead to first-degree manslaughter. Dr. Emil Skoda then tells McCoy he doubts she did it: she feared Pelham would kill her eventually, not at any moment, and she shows none of the urge to confess he sees in battered women who kill. He notes she claimed she told no one about her son, though Felton knew. Felton’s wife says he went out for a prescription that night, but the pharmacy filled it the next day.
Spoiler, the ending: Told that Hastings has offered to plead, Felton confesses that he shot Pelham to protect his partner and says she never knew. He is sentenced to 15 years to life. McCoy and Carmichael wonder who protects police officers from each other.
Why it stands out
- Dr. Skoda doubts Hastings’s guilt, and the shooter turns out to be her patrol partner acting on her behalf.
- McCoy draws out the real killer by inviting Felton to weigh in on whether Hastings should be allowed to plead.
- Two patrol officers had written up Pelham’s knife wound as a shower accident, a report that later helps the defense show the abuse was hidden.