SVU Episode #14: Dirty

Summary: A beautiful young prosecutor plummets to her death from a ten-story building. Before she fell, someone inflicted thirty shallow cuts all over her body.  The dead prosecutor had recently been threatened by a Latin King whose case she was prosecuting.  But, it turns out, the prosecutor had also been a “cutter” – someone who likes to hurt herself.  The Medical Examiner couldn’t determine whether the death was a homicide or a suicide. Then Olivia discovered that the victim had been stealing money from drug cases with the help of a dirty cop. When the victim tried to leave the racket, the dirty cop sent a dirty confidential informant to kill the prosecutor and make it look like a suicide.

Verdict: B

What they got right:  Some of the details in this episode sounded like the death of a real federal prosecutor named Jonathan Luna, who disappeared in the middle of a trial he was handling, and whose body was found repeatedly stabbed and drowned in a creek hundreds of miles from the courthouse. No one has been charged with his homicide; many have wondered what happened. Threats against prosecutors happen more frequently than you might think – judges, prosecutors and court workers were the target of 1,278 threats in 2008. Click here for the story of a tough homicide prosecutor in my office who received phone calls threatening to kill her son. I liked her response: “If someone is trying to frighten you, they’re trying to distract you from the case. You have to still do your damn job.” I’ve only been vaguely threatened once. A wife-beater I was prosecuting mumbled when he walked behind me in the courtroom, “You wanna mess up my happy home? I’ll mess up your happy home.” The Marshals gave him a stern talking-to, and my home remains happy.

What they got wrong: The dirty cop in this case was a main suspect from the start, but she continued to investigate the case. In reality, she would’ve been taken off the investigation when she was identified as a suspect. It’s hard to imagine something tainting a case more than the main suspect investigating it – she’d have every reason to lie about what she found, and if the case ever made it to court, she’d be (justifiably) eviscerated on cross-examination. A real police sergeant would have put her on administrative leave by the second commercial break.

And that final scene where the federal prosecutor questioned the Latin King in jail could never really happen. The prosecutor strode into his cell, asking “Are you sure you don’t want your lawyer?” “Nah,” the Latin King replied, “The government witness is dead. That case is closed.” The prosecutor then extracted a confession from the Latin King about his homicidal conspiracy with the dirty cop. She couldn’t do that. The Latin King had a lawyer, who hadn’t consented to his client talking alone about the case he was charged with. Tonight’s prosecutor not only extracted an inadmissable confession, she should soon be getting a letter from the Bar Ethics Committee denouncing her contact with a represented party and starting an inquiry into revoking her license to practice law.

All views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.