DWB (Season 9, Episode 2)
Premise: The dragging death of a Black man is traced to white patrol officers, and McCoy fights both the U.S. Attorney and Schiff to prosecute the officer who bought immunity with his testimony.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 2
- 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
- John Ventimiglia as Officer Frank Dietrick, David Valcin as Officer Fratelli, Mark Mineart as Officer Carlson, Michael Hannon as Officer Gil Sawchuck, Russell G. Jones as Raymond “Ray-Ray” Davis
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- René Balcer
Summary
The Investigation
“DWB” begins with fishermen finding a Black man who was beaten and dragged by his ankles for a quarter mile, with nylon rope fibers in his wounds and fresh white road paint on his hands. As Reverend Theodore Dempsey demands action on a hate crime, a reluctant squeegee man, Raymond “Ray-Ray” Davis, says he saw two white men in street clothes throw a driver against a gold Cutlass. The towed car belongs to Floyd Michaels, a delivery driver and weekend Westchester auxiliary officer who had given an older bar patron a lift home when his car stalled.
The passenger recalls a red Pontiac trailing them, and a deli owner supplies part of a New Jersey plate. The Firebird had been seized in a drug arrest, then borrowed off the books from the impound lot by a Neighborhood Stabilization Unit, which puts Officers Fratelli, Carlson, Dietrick and Sawchuck in the frame. Threatened with losing his pension, Sawchuck says Carlson and Fratelli spoke of a traffic stop gone bad and that he saw the car with a bloody back seat at Carlson’s upstate farm. Fibers on its bumper match the rope, and Carlson and Fratelli are arrested for murder.
The Trial
Carmichael uses the town dump’s hours to catch Sawchuck in a lie, and his wife reveals that Dietrick told him what happened. With immunity from state and federal prosecutors, Dietrick says the pair showed up with Michaels cuffed and talked of breaking him. McCoy then learns Dietrick trained both men, made most of his precinct’s profiling stops, and once told a psychiatrist he wanted to kill Black and Hispanic people. When Dietrick won’t account for that night, McCoy pulls immunity; Schiff cedes the case to the U.S. Attorney, who keeps the deal. McCoy persuades a state judge that the federal grant is something of value under the federal witness bribery statute, and all three officers are indicted for first-degree murder.
Davis picks Fratelli out of a lineup, and Fratelli, offered life without parole, testifies that Carlson stopped and beat Michaels because of his race, that Dietrick proposed teaching him a lesson, and that Dietrick tied the rope around Michaels’s ankles and drove. McCoy tells the jury the department tolerated the officers’ racism long before the killing.
Spoiler, the ending: Carlson and Dietrick are sentenced to death. Carmichael is troubled that police told Davis which man was Fratelli before the lineup; McCoy says he ordered it, calls it legal, and notes the identification was never meant for trial.
Why it stands out
- McCoy voids a federal immunity deal by arguing that immunity is a thing of value under the federal bribery statute, which, unlike New York law, does not require false testimony.
- Characters cite the Abner Louima case in Brooklyn and the dragging death in Jasper, Texas, as the U.S. Attorney tries to take over.
- The verdict gives Carmichael her first death sentence.