Episode 18/9: Executioner

Fan Review by Mari

CAUTION: POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!

This was actually a good and thought provoking episode in many ways, but not my favorite. I was lost on a few things. An MD in town for a surgical seminar is found so brutally beaten to death that the weapon of choice, a bottle of some sort, is encrusted with blood and hair. The first guess for police is that is was a hooker-roll gone terribly bad. Some video surveillance shows that it wasn't actually a hooker, but a couple who gets their kicks by seducing, then extorting money from, foolish, lonely men.

Both Green and Lupo show in this episode that they are both the types that use whatever they have to, to gather evidence. First Lupo uses a girl's love for dogs to gain access to a cyber-cafe computer to find out what the victim, Dr. Burns, was up to. Foolish and lonely alright, Burns was browsing for "bored housewives in search of fun." Next, Green lures the female half of the suspected couple, after they question the twosome, it is realized that their guilt ends with the ATM robbery.

Linda, the female con, has a video camera for her and her boyfriend's kinky enjoyment of each caper later on. On the video, someone pounds angrily on the doctor's hotel door, yelling, "Dr. Garrison, open up!" before Burns even gets a chance to sample what Linda is offering.

So not only did Dr. Burns not cheat on the missus, he was the victim of a terrible case of mistaken identity. Now Green and Lupo seek out Dr. Garrison (guest star James Rebhorn), who says he was at the medical conference, but stayed in his own home in lieu of a posh hotel. Digging further, it is learned that Garrison's daughter has a criminal record of possession of meth with intent to sell, and that even though she, her boyfriend, and their friends were convicted and jailed in South Carolina, Mandy Garrison's dad, the doctor, had her moved from SC to NYC, to be closer to him. I was kind of lost on exactly why Dr. Garrison did this. What did his wife's recent death have to do with suddenly wanting his daughter "closer to him"? Believing that Mandy's drug buddies have a motive for wanting Dr. G dead (he was the one who turned the kids in), Green and Lupo travel to the South to hopefully turn up some new clues.

Lupo happens upon a bulletin board with articles about recent executions by lethal injection at the precinct in SC, and suddenly one execution which was horribly botched some years back, becomes the focus of the investigation. I am not sure what lead to this so quickly. Maybe my concentration lapsed during these scenes. It seemed that 2 and 2 were put together quite hastily, and that might be fine. It must have been just too fast for me to keep up : )

The prisoner whose lethal injection went awry was a man named Hartigan who was sentenced for the brutal murders of the family of a South Carolina man named Jamie Yost (guest star Michael Rooker). When Yost is questioned, he admits to being angry that the state of SC did not kill the man who murdered his loved ones, but claims no knowledge of the murder of Dr. Burns in New York or knowing any Dr. Garrison. Another news clipping shows Mr. Hartigan's son butting heads with Yost. When this son is questioned, he too, is angry, angry that his father is now a human turnip rotting away in some care center because of a failed IV drip. His father's condition surely points to motive to kill a doctor, but a hostess at a local hotel points to Yost, not to Hartigan's son.

I know that a fondness for golf connected Dr. Garrison with the warden of the prison Hartigan was in, but again, I am kind of lost on how Dr. Garrison ends up being revealed so quickly to be an assistant in capital punishment hundreds of miles from his home in New York, especially when the state of SC is not so eager to spill any information to the police or to Cutter and Rubirosa when they fly down to SC to gather answers. They get very little cooperation from the prison system there, and even less from Dr. Garrison, who insists he has no idea why they would believe the killer of Burns was really after him.

So Cutter, Rubirosa and McCoy are forced to dig on their own. Soon, they hit paydirt. Dr. Garrison indeed assisted in the executions of two men in SC. The fact that these punishments were carried out before their appeals were exhausted gives McCoy the idea that Garrison could be coerced into giving up the truth about Hartigan's botched death. At this point, Cutter suddenly balks, saying he doesn't feel justified pursuing this strategy, but McCoy wants to go for it. I have not seen many other episodes of L&O dealing with capital punishment, but I don't believe I am far off concluding that McCoy is against the death penalty, and when he gets it in his head that it's time for a political statement to be made, nothing can sway him. The fact that the presiding judge shares his views is the gravy. I guess I'm not far off when I say that Cutter is probably pro-death penalty, even though he eventually takes his place beside Rubirosa and McCoy to prosecute Yost for the murder of Dr. Burns. Cutter is angered by the defense's wanting to put capital punishment on trial and display by bringing in the now vegetative Mr. Hartigan into court, and by its claims that Yost's actions were the direct result of the trauma of losing his family members to a violent killer, and then seeing that violent killer become a "victim" for McCoy, the judge and other opponents of capital punishment to use to make their case.

While he is on the stand, Yost makes a startling revelation: Since the failed execution of Hartigan, Yost had tried several times to make contact with Dr. Garrison, who he learned (again, I'm not sure HOW, with all this anonymity in the prison systems) was the MD who presided. He states Garrison did not acknowledge Yost's attempts to speak with him. Yost claims that all he wanted was to speak with the doctor who failed to kill his family's killer, just for some "peace and closure". That's understandable. Maybe if the two had sat down and talked, something could have been accomplished. But that's not the way it went. Garrison did not want to talk with Yost. His reasons remain unspoken. Perhaps he thought Yost was an obsessed creep who meant to harm him. Perhaps it was nothing more than Garrison simply did not want to meet with Yost, and felt he owed Yost nothing. I will always wonder how his privacy was compromised. I also wonder if he is as cold as he seems, not only because he refused to meet with a man whose sadness was compounded a million-fold by the tragic mistakes made in that death chamber, but because he seems guilty of blatantly putting his collegue Dr. Burns in harm's way, just to avoid having to deal with Yost. Did he really "have no idea" that Yost was capable of the kind of anger and frustration that would send him into a homicidal frenzy? Who knows? All I know is, I found myself wondering why Garrison didn't end up facing some kind of charge, such as depraved indifference. Cold fish, that one.

But I am not saying Yost didn't deserve punishment. I think only the most hardened person could say that Yost hasn't suffered tremendously since the murders of his son and grandchildren. But he killed a man. What if Garrison had been in the right room after all? What if Garrison had told Yost to eff off and leave him alone. I'm sure Yost would have beat his head in with that bottle. I was pretty satisfied at the end. The deal that was made seemed okay with me. Yost had been through a lot of hell, but he also needed at least some measure of punishment for the killing he committed.