Re: recent L & O episode "Inconvenient Truth" 4/18/2024 MAJOR SPOILER

On Apr 23, 2024 at 9:53:50 AM PDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

TomBenton@agent.com wrote:
 

In the most recent episode, Price has second thoughts about the
lawyer's guilt and drops all charges then indicts the wife. I've
watched enough of these to know if they bring a character on briefly
they are usually the guilty party so I was looking for some evidence
that she killed the chef. I never saw any. There was no one who put
her at the scene that I saw. And what was that gizmo that was
monitoring her?  And who was she admitting killing the chef to?  I was
totally confused at the end. What did I miss?

 
That had to be the worst-written episode of the season (thus far) and
among the worst episodes since the series was revived. The two
detectives started out with the hand-wringing about the bad
identification and how the dead guy got wrongfully convicted.
 
Shaw is such a fucking hypocrite, given the episode that's clearly been
retconned in which he was responsible for a bad investigation leading to
a wrongful conviction.
 
Then we got a statement from the post-conviction prosecutor about how
hard it is to reverse a conviction. Well, no shit. The evidentiary
standard to convict is quite high -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- but to
reverse... He's been CONVICTED, which means courts accept that the
conviction was fair unless something was very very wrong with the trial.
 
But the glimpses of the original trial we got weren't all that clear,
but it didn't sound like the guy had been railroaded. He was seen in the
vicinity by the father of the victim in the original trial, a girl who
had been raped and murdered. The father identified him in court.
 
There was nonsense about DNA evidence. This wasn't tested. Makes no
sense; I thought 14 years ago, testing procedures had gotten easier and
more affordable. His lawyer could have gotten this done.
 
Because the DNA test had ruled out his blood, the father concluded...
that his eyewitness identification was wrong? At no point was there any
discussion that the defendant had an alibi.
 
The reversal of his conviction WAS NOT based on police misconduct and
WAS NOT based on bad witness identification. There wasn't even a hint of
unethical behavior by the original prosecution. It appears that it was
based on bad representation.
 
That means he was entitled to be paid for the years he spent in prison
(state laws typically specify an amount) but he wasn't entitled to
noneconomic damages. Why the $10 million settlement?
 
Did the attorney who preyed upon him actually rip him off? I didn't
understand how the attorney represented him pro bono but then collected
fees. That's taking a case on contingency, not pro bono. But private
investigators are absolutely expensive and, yeah, it's possible he was
out a lot of fees.
 
At some point they just declared that the client was defrauded but there
was no review, let alone an audit, of the charges on the invoices. Yeah,
yeah, it's tv. It was done over a commercial break.
 
And then we see the witness. Gah. In the photo lineup, Riley was
OBVIOUSLY leading him to a conclusion. Yeah, he recognized the guy (and
remembered his wife) because he had dined at the restaurant a couple of
times (and tipped decently). But Riley led him to conclude that he'd
seen him outside the restaurant around the time of the crime. I was
waiting for Riley to point to the face on the photo array to verify that
this was the guy he saw outside the restaurant.
 
Price, of course, isn't the least bit bothered that he's got no evidence
to speak of. He never does. But this episode he wondered about the
reliability of his star witness?
 
I won't discuss the "evidence" at trial that no one introduced, that
Price barely objected to, and that the judge made an absurd ruling in
favor of the defense. That was discussed by others in the What Did You
Watch thread. Earlier, the defense was asking the dead man's daughter
all sorts of questions about his encounters with evil gangsters during
the more than a decade he was incarcerated. The daughter, who barely saw
her father during the whole time, had no evidence and there wasn't even
a hint that she knew anything of the fights her father had been involved
in.
 
At the very end, there was some sort of handwaiving about how they got
the wife's confession, some sort of phone call. I assume it was a call
recorded while the lawyer remained at Rikers. Now a lawyer is going to
know that all calls at the jail are recorded.
 
We also saw Price using his personal cell phone at Rikers. Uh, basic
jail procedure requires the visitor to absolutely not, under any
circumstances, bring a cell phone into the jail. I'm sure he'd put it in
a locker before entering the part of the jail to get to the interview
room.

I would always have to engage in a lot of grief and negotiations with the
prison officials whenever I interviewed a threat case up at the state prison
in Lancaster. Our policy is to always obtain a contemporaneous photo of the
subject with the interview and around 2013 or so, they took back all our
digital cameras and replaced them with iPhones. So the only camera I had to
use was the one in my phone and the prison wouldn't let anyone bring phones
into the facility.

We developed a form that we would require the prison's shift commander to sign
acknowledging that he was denying the request of the United Secret Service to
photograph an individual who had made threats against the president of the
United States. Nine times out of ten, the idea of putting his signature to
that form, irrevocably tying him to whatever that inmate might possibly do in
the future, was enough for him to grant exception to the prison's no-phone
policy.

If the wife did it, then it's not possible to believe that the husband
wasn't a conspirator after the fact.
 
Evidence shmevidence. Price will charge and prosecute the wife. We've
had episode after episode in which a complete lack of evidence never
prevent Price from prosecuting.

You forgot the part where the defense attorney basically argued that
eyewitness testimony as a concept should be globally excluded from all
criminal trials because some witnesses have been found unreliable in the
past.