Allison Leotta, novelist, former sex-crimes prosecutor, tv critic
Author of A Good Killing, Speak of the Devil, and others.
Live in the D.C. area? Want a fabulous free night on the town, complete with wine-tasting, delectable foods from the area’s finest chefs, and live jazz by the Karl Straub Combo? Enter to win two tickets to “Of Wine & Words” — worth $150. The gala will be Friday 3/25 at 7:00 p.m. at the Boeing Conference Center (1200 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22209 — at the Rosslyn Metro).
Just leave a comment in this post — tell me your favorite crime TV show or book — and you’ll be entered to win. I’ll announce the winner next Monday. Good luck and thanks for your support!
This event raises money for The Reading Connection, an organization that helps at-risk kids by making reading a part of their lives. TRC provides volunteers to read to children in homeless shelters and low-income community centers, invites kids who are transitioning out of homeless programs to join their book club which provides them free books, trains parents on how to read with their children, and trains social workers on how to incorporate reading into their programs. Learn more at: http://www.thereadingconnection.org
Tonight, SVU ran reruns of “Possessed” and “Penetration” — you can see my blog on those episodes by clicking on the titles.
Meanwhile, here’s some fun stuff to sate your SVU appetite:
(1) An article announcing that John Stamos will guest star on SVU this spring, instead of replacing Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, as some TV execs had suggested. Stamos might not have Tiger Blood, but I think he’ll be Winning on SVU.
(2) A meticulous and goofy analysis of Law & Order’s conviction rate. As a law geek myself, I liked this. Thanks to a hip reader named John for emailing me about this one.
Enjoy and have a good week!
All view expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Check out todays’ article on AOL News about me and my novel, “Law of Attraction.”
Tonight’s SVU was a repeat of “Pop.” Click here to see my review of that. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to welcome guest blogger and sex-offense-prosecution expert Roger Canaff! Check out his guest blog below.
My colleague Allison’s “top five” post on what crime dramas get wrong inspired me to pen something similar, namely the top five things that just plain annoy me when I see my life as prosecutor depicted by Hollywood. In no particular order, here they are:
1. The Grand-Central-Station-sized apartments and offices. Yes, the one with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the major city in which the show is set. Believe me, if I knew the office that paid this well, I’d be camped out offering to sweep up at night. Between crippling law school loans and starting salaries not too much higher than the age of the young ADA herself, the crib isn’t going to look like this unless she’s independently wealthy. Likewise, office space for ADA’s is seldom mahogany-paneled and cavernous. If we just have our own door to shut behind us, we’re grateful.
2. The thirty-year-old superstar. Before I’m justifiably accused of just being jealous, I’ll point out that there are places in the U.S. where very young ADA’s do get seriously major cases. But those places are usually far, far away from the glittering lights those huge apartments look out over on TV. Major city ADA’s in particular usually wait years for the big cases, even when demonstrably gifted and hard working. Similarly, the savvy, street-wise homicide dick is normally not a cocksure, 25-year-old with perfect hair and expertly tailored suits.
3. Sex, sex, sex. Okay so maybe I AM just really jealous. But seriously- I’ve prosecuted in three jurisdictions, taught in dozens more, and I’ve yet to find the free-love bacchanal environment depicted in the typical crime show. Without a doubt, a bigger DA’s office can and will have it’s share of incestuous hooking up, and young female prosecutors in particular are sometimes chided for “going cop” by jealous male counterparts. But the way I’ve seen it depicted – judges and lawyers, lawyers and lawyers, judges and perps, lawyers and cops and bailiffs and the Fed Ex guy (and much of this occurring between court calls), I don’t see how any of them could stay awake long enough to try a case.
4. The effortless bon mot. I know, it’s TV; that’s why no one has offered to watch my actual life, which involves repetitive, profanity-laced preparation for anything I have more than hour to get ready for. But it’s not just that everything on TV looks unrehearsed. Equally annoying is the lengthy quote from the long-dead Supreme Court justice flawlessly evoked at the perfect moment. Or the pincer-like line of questioning that flows effortlessly, based on a surprise revelation that popped up on a bathroom break.
5. The ever-grateful victim (and everyone else). Domestic violence is an area of prosecution that often yields little more than contempt for the ADA involved. There is often a point reached where literally everyone in the courtroom seems to hate you; the judge, the victim, the perpetrator, the cops involved, the court reporter, etc. It’s often tragic and not to be made light of, but the idea that all victims of crime are thrilled with the system’s involvement in their lives is misleading at best. No, they don’t all gaze at you dewey-eyed like Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca and whisper “God Bless You” when it’s all over. There are times when doing the right thing has to be its own reward. Otherwise, there’s alcohol. And that, TV does sometimes get right. Except most of us don’t drink in the office from crystal decanters.
Roger Canaff was a prosecutor specializing in sex crimes and domestic violence in Virginia and New York for over ten years. He has been employed as a Highly Qualified Expert for the Army’s Judge Advocate General (JAG), where he trained and advised military prosecutors about sex crimes and other special victims’ cases. Currently he serves as president of End Violence Against Women International. Read more at www.rogercanaff.com.
*All views on this blog are those of the author’s, alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice or any other government agency.
Summary: A rich businesswoman is found dead in her apartment above an art gallery. Her neck has been slit by a glass shard, she has a blood alcohol level of 1.6, her panties are around her ankles, and she has anal trauma. Elliott and Olivia soon focus on the luxury wine company where the victim worked as a bookkeeper. The company marketed itself as a happy wine-making family, but the CEO was actually a terrible boss who berated and slapped her employees. The employees put up with the abuse because the company was about to be sold, and if they hung in there, they’d get rich. But the victim took videos of the CEO slapping her, and the other employees feared she’d leak them and ruin their deal. Elliott and Olivia ultimately discover that a handsome wine salesman went to the victim’s house and tried to seduce her into handing over the videos. When she declined his advances, he pushed her into the coffee table, where the broken glass lodged in her neck. Hoping to make it look like an accident, the salesman inserted a bottle of champagne into her anus to intoxicate her and make it look like she stumbled into the table while drunk.
Verdict: B
What they got right and wrong: A person can get drunk by “ingesting” alcohol through their vagina or anus. This has been a trend in recent years: college girls soaking tampons with vodka and inserting them in their nether regions. The girls say they like getting drunk without the calories or beer breath (that last part is wrong, since the body gives off alcohol fumes through the lungs regardless of where it’s ingested). Medical experts say doing this can cause terrible damage to the vagina:
Back to the crime. The key to intoxication through the anus or vagina is the bloodstream. The alcohol makes its way across the thin epithelial barrier and is carried directly into the blood, which then travels around the body intoxicating the person. So – this method of intoxication wouldn’t work for a person who’s already dead. If you insert a champagne bottle into a corpse’s anus, you won’t intoxicate the corpse – there’s no bloodstream to carry the alcohol around the body.
Maybe the killer inserted the champagne bottle while the woman was in the process of dying, but not yet dead? It’s hard to imagine there’d be enough time, with the carotid artery cut and the woman bleeding out, to get her blood-alcohol level all the way to 1.6. Even if there was, can you imagine the mess that would make? As she’s spurting blood from her neck, the killer lifts her off the broken glass table, turns her over, undresses her bottom half, manages to get the bottle in the right place and hold it there … He would be soaked in blood and champagne and likely leaving bloody fingerprints and footprints all over the place. The Medical Examiner said that there was no DNA or fingerprints, and speculated that the killer wore gloves, suggesting a meticulously executed murder. But it turned out this crime was an accident covered with improvisation, which would be much messier than that.
Sorry to stray from my usual legal analysis, but there wasn’t much law on tonight’s show, and as a mystery writer, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill people in unique ways. I appreciated SVU’s creativity tonight but (as usual) had to do some nitpicking. After blogging about this, I really need a beer . . . via the traditional route, thankyouverymuch.
If you’re interested in seeing how they filmed some of these scenes, click here.
All the views expressed on this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Summary: Debra Messing guest-starred as a TV journalist hosting an intense version of Dateline’s To Catch a Predator. (How intense? Debra tased one of the predators. Holy civil liability, Batman!) In her spare time, Debra is obsessed with hunting down the man who killed her sister 25 years ago. She is very public about her hunt, which gets the killer upset. The killer starts stalking Debra. The police discover he’s killed forty-three women. Along the way, he slices the throat of the salty, alcoholic DA. (Whoa! I kind of jumped off my couch when that happened. I wasn’t expecting any of our recurring characters to get killed.) In the end, they catch him and he confesses to all of his crimes.
Verdict: B-
What they got wrong: I laughed at the subplot where the bearded guy caught on Debra’s show was actually just a concerned citizen at the house to help the girl. Come on. Half of the men caught on To Catch a Predator (carrying condoms, lube, and teddy bears) claim they’re there to help the girl rather than have sex with her. It’s never true. It took me approximately 30 seconds to find such a clip on YouTube:
Maybe I’m just super-skeptical as a sex-crime prosecutor, but I think the idea of a computer-hacking concerned citizen who goes to the Predator house to stop a statutory rape, rather than perpetrate it, is totally unbelievable. Men who have sex with kids have a variety of lame excuses, but this one was particularly silly.
And I’ve never heard of a serial rapist who stalks one of his past victim’s family members – no matter how vocal she is about trying to catch him. Attackers like that tend to pick their victims based on things like proximity (someone they see every day), studied vulnerability (choosing the one woman in an apartment complex who keeps her sliding doors open at night), or the random bad luck of wrong place/wrong time.
What they got right: Debra’s assistant, who was dating the serial killer, couldn’t believe he was a bad guy. Even though there were all kinds of weird things in their relationship (he couldn’t be reached on a phone, he asked about Debra all the time), the assistant thought everything was hunky-dory. This interaction is really common. Women in love are reluctant to believe their boyfriend is a bad guy, even if the evidence is loud and clear. A girlfriend might delude herself just so she can keep thinking that her serial-rapist-boyfriend is actually just a nice guy who loves her dearly. These guys often employ charm to do their bad deeds: both to lure victims, and to get unwitting accomplices. The fact that the stalker used Debra’s assistant to get access to Debra didn’t seem far-fetched to me.
As a side note, did anyone else notice that this was yet another episode where Elliot and Olivia were apart most of the time (with Elliot video-conferencing from Quantico)? Some commenters have speculated that the actors haven’t been getting along. I wonder. Post a comment if you’ve heard anything about that!
All the views on this website are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.