| 1 | Please Note: This page is for sincere questions, not complaining about the characters or the show. Do not use this page to ask "why does x suck so much?" Also refrain from making comments such as "x is such a <derogatory name>." Please keep a friendly tone and don't let your question or answer become a rant. |
| 2 | |
| 3 | It has been remarked on this page multiple times that the tone of the show has changed, with a rise in drama. It has also been remarked even more times that the characters have been {{Flanderized}}. Let's try to keep the page nice by not mentioning these things any more unless it's absolutely necessary to answer a question. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | Before adding a new question please be sure that the topic isn't already being discussed. |
| 6 | ----- |
| 7 | |
| 8 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 9 | |
| 10 | %% Please place new entries at the bottom. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | [[folder: Benson vs Lewis Saga]] |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Obviously the storylines of this show aren't made to make 100% sense simply to keep things interesting, with that being said there are several little practicalities about this particular storyline that either didn't make sense or where never clearly answered: |
| 15 | |
| 16 | * Was 'William Lewis' really his real name? When they first identified him in the episode "Her Negotiation" they found his New York state ID/driver's license with his full name, birthdate, hometown, etc, on it. What are the odds that a career criminal like this would knowingly have his real information available on file? |
| 17 | |
| 18 | * How the hell did he break into Olivia's apartment with NO signs of forced entry? |
| 19 | ** He could have picked the lock. Lewis displays considerable resourcefulness, so it seems likely that he's a career criminal that might have lockpicking in his skillset. |
| 20 | |
| 21 | * In "Her Negotiation", how did Lewis get lucky enough to have both his victim (whose rape he was being charged for) die suddenly of a heart attack AND the lab botch his DNA processing, rendering it inadmissible? |
| 22 | |
| 23 | * What all did he do to Olivia before she gained consciousness at the beginning of "Surrender Benson"? |
| 24 | |
| 25 | * When he kidnapped her, how did he remove her from her apartment totally unnoticed by security cameras, neighbors, passerby, etc? |
| 26 | ** If he had a gun on her, he could easily instruct her to play it cool and walk out with him. Security cameras would be more difficult to avoid, but bystanders would just assume it's two people out for a stroll. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | * What happened when he took Olivia to the bathroom? |
| 29 | |
| 30 | * What was he planning to do with Viva and Luisa after he ushered them into the beach house? More hostages just means more trouble right? Wouldn't it have made more sense to just make up some excuse for why they couldn't come in and tell them to leave and come back later? |
| 31 | ** He was in the middle of making such an excuse when he noticed the little girl. Then he changed his mind. He probably wanted to torment Olivia more by threatening and/or hurting a child in front of her. Also he doesn't seem to be the kind of hostage taker who wants to avoid any trouble. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | * After Olivia managed to restrain him, why didn't she duct tape his mouth as well? The only reason he got under her skin was because while he couldn't physically hurt her, he was free to talk. |
| 34 | ** She was still trying to stick to protocol. Police don't gag people when they restrain them. She didn't break protocol until ''after'' he got under her skin, leading to her pummeling him with the steel bar. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | * What are the odds of a person not only surviving being beaten repeatedly with a metal bar but resurrecting himself several times afterwards? (Lewis literally died and came back to life 4 or 5 times during this storyline, is that even medically possible?) |
| 37 | ** "Coming back to life" could refer to his heart stopping and his being resuscitated. People can survive considerable physical injury. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | * Was he really that sick and pompous that it took him 4 days to finally decide he was going to rape Olivia? He wasted no time in raping his other victims, she was the only one with whom he needed everything to be "perfect". |
| 40 | ** Olivia was a special case for him. He wanted to torment her. His other victims were strangers, but with Olivia, it was [[ItsPersonal personal]]. |
| 41 | |
| 42 | * In "Beast's Obsession" what are the odds of a rapist deciding not to rape his victim simply because she refused to resist him or fight back? Most rapists want their victims to not show any resistance, don't they? |
| 43 | ** Depends on the rapist. Some of them enjoy the struggle. Olivia correctly surmised that Lewis [[NoChallengeEqualsNoSatisfaction got off on the fight his victims put up]], and that he would lose interest if she wasn't struggling. |
| 44 | ** Not if is a sexual sadist. Sexual sadists can only have erections if they see the sexual partner suffering and if the sex is not consensual. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | * In "Beast's Obsession" why in the world did Olivia not draw on Lewis when he met her at the quarry? He's walking with a limp, he has damage to one orbital socket, he's holding his gun one handed, he's at least 20 feet away when he announced himself, and furthermore, Olivia, you're wearing a bulletprof vest. You have an excellent chance of drawing your weapon killing Lewis if he doesn't surrender. Before anyone responds to this by saying that they wanted to find the missing child Lewis had kidnapped, remember the photo that Lewis texted to Benson? One word: geotagging. |
| 47 | ** It's possible to spoof or disable metadata in cell phone pictures. Given that Lewis was extremely resourceful and planned a lot of his torment out in detail, Olivia might not have wanted to take the chance. |
| 48 | |
| 49 | * There's no way he could've anticipated Olivia refusing to fight him back when he tried to rape her a second time. . .so was he planning on the two of them playing Russian Roulette the whole time? There's no way he could've known that the bullet was in the last chamber, so did he really not care if he died or if Olivia blew her brains out? So much of that plan seemed improvised and last minute. |
| 50 | ** Despite his psychopathy and complete lack of morals, Lewis possessed a twisted sense of honor. {{Lawful Evil}} in a manner of speaking. It was his turn to fire, and he wasn't going to let Olivia "win" by breaking the rules of the game, so he chose to kill himself in a manner that would still negatively impact Olivia. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | |
| 53 | [[/folder]] |
| 54 | |
| 55 | [[folder: Questions pertaining to "Undercover"]] |
| 56 | |
| 57 | * Although I'm glad that someone was smart enough to put Fin in as a C.O. to keep an eye on Olivia. . . .exactly what was the protocol for doing so? Obviously they had to come up with a fake identify for him like they did Olivia, I'm just curious as to how he managed to go through that whole process in the first place. Surely he had to have been hired before they got through the process of putting together a fake profile for Olivia/Kat, then going through the process of having her arrested, charged and put in the prison system. |
| 58 | * I know this episode was the first one to air after the writer's strike of 2007 (I believe the original airdate was mid April 2008). The dates on the title cards indicate that the course of this episode took place during the month of February (and I've figured out that there's generally a one to two month gap between when episodes are filmed and when they actually air on TV). However there is a scene where Olivia/Kat is outside in the exercise yard with the other inmates and there is no indication whatsoever that it is wintertime in New York. Was there an unseasonably warm winter happening at that time? Or was there a miscalculation between the time of year the episode was scheduled to take place and when the scenes were actually filmed? |
| 59 | * Is Captain Harris only charged with raping Ashley Tyler by the end of the episode? Based on testimony by the other characters (and other subtle and not-so-subtle hints) it's strongly suggested that he has raped other inmates in the past as well, not to mention that the squad figured out early on the guard they were looking for had been selling drugs to inmates as well. They never said if they charged him for killing Ashley's mother either. And finally there was his assault on Olivia. . .SVU probably could've put together enough evidence to put him away for much longer than the 20 years Olivia implied he would be serving. |
| 60 | ** Getting an inmate to testify against a prison guard would probably be an uphill battle -- even if he lost his job/was convicted, the victim would still be worried about retaliation from his buddies. As for Olivia, given that she was also an investigator on the case, they probably wanted to avoid any possible allegations of collusion and/or entrapment that could muddy the waters on the entire case. (Look what happened to Olivet in the original L&O...the assault was caught ''on tape'', but he still got an acquittal by playing the "she works for the police, she set me up" card.) They could always try Olivia's case separately once they had a conviction secured on Ashley, but if they try the cases together and an issue is raised with regards to Olivia's case, it could screw up Ashley's as well. |
| 61 | * I realize that much of what happens in this series is very unrealistic, but who gave Olivia the 'OK' to interrogate her would-be-rapist alone? (Surely one of the conditions was him being chained to the table before she confronted him face-to-face. . . .) |
| 62 | * Was anyone else mildly disappointed in the fact that Harris never confessed/owned up to his crimes? Often during this series the perps will eventually admit their crimes (if not outright boast about them with pride) when they know that there's all the evidence in the world to put them away. I also find it amusing when they try to "rationalize" their crimes (sometimes they're just completely sick in the head, sometimes they turn out to be victims themselves, the latter being the cause of the former). Either way, he denied everything until the end, and I found it interesting (and slightly disturbing) that even after it was beyond reasonable doubt that he was guilty, he still had nothing to say for himself; like he seriously felt no remorse for his actions. |
| 63 | ** Pretty sure the implication is that he really doesn't feel remorse and every description of him and his actions essentially lead up to that ending as far as not confessing goes. He had raped a 15-year-old girl because her uncle stopped supplying him with drugs. Then killed the mother of the aforementioned girl at the mere thought of being caught due to whatever little testimony she might have given to Stabler (his fears were unfounded, but he didn't know that). It's implied he's BEEN raping prisoners because he knows he can get away with it. He almost rapes Benson. Benson confronts him in an interrogation room and when she rubs it in his face all he cares about is ripping her apart for putting him in that position; not remorse for doing what he did. Throughout it all he doesn't show any regard for his victims. The only reason he was caught at all was because Benson had seen his dick and then had tipped the teenage rape victim into telling Warner where to look for a distinctive mark. So, yeah, it sucks he didn't confess, but they leave plenty of hints that this guy is a screwed up sociopath that was never going to confess if he could get away with it. |
| 64 | |
| 65 | [[/folder]] |
| 66 | |
| 67 | [[folder: In "Transitions" How come when there is a man bleeding from his groin lying on the hospital bed with a fake fingernail EMBEDDED in his back, Benson automatically assumes that he is the perp?!]] |
| 68 | I mean he is nearly dead from blood loss in terrible shape and unconscious and Benson believes that he got it cause he got rough with a stripper and she put him in his place, I mean if it was a woman lying there it would have been a completely different story, she would have stayed up all night to catch the attacker and would make runs to the hospital so she could be there when the victim awoke, but no if he's got male genitalia he is the monster who got what he deserved. |
| 69 | * Benson showing bias against males? [[SarcasmMode What else is new?]] Seriously, the more I watch, the more [[TheScrappy I'm find myself liking her less and less]] due to her borderline Misandry. (The earliest of this, as far as I can remember, is in "Pique" [[note]]She says "All rapists have a problem with women," as if to imply that all rapists are misogynists and/or Male. Never mind her ignoring it's possible for males to be raped.[[/note]]) Makes you wonder if her NearRapeExperience [[FridgeHorror may have something to do with her behavior as of late]]. |
| 70 | ** Ignoring that males can be raped is one thing, but rapists whose victims are women would pretty obviously have a problem with women by default, wouldn't they? Otherwise they wouldn't be okay with having sex with them while unconscious/struggling/otherwise not consenting. Benson assumed he was the perp because the injuries suggested he was attacked in retaliation/self defense. |
| 71 | *** That's a pretty wide leap in logic; the injuries could easily have been inflicted by an offensive attacker. Who looks at someone badly injured and assumes, "He must have done something to deserve it?" |
| 72 | *** It isn't, really. It was a very specific injury to the genitals, rather than in the face or the center of the mass. Leaving aside the TV-logic that goes with it (If it wasn't related to a sex crime, why would the SVU get involved?), there aren't very many instances where a man is deliberately struck in the junk ''without'' there being some connection to his sexuality in one way or another. It's less "He must have done something to deserve it" and more "Someone must have really had a problem with this guy's dick". The go-to problem with dicks in this show? Rape. Olivia tends to be the voice of misandry, but at least in this case, she's not being irrational about it. |
| 73 | [[/folder]] |
| 74 | |
| 75 | [[folder:Suspects not knowing their rights]] |
| 76 | * Why is it that almost none of the suspects they interrogate ask for a lawyer immediately? Some of them are repeat offenders who at the very least should have an idea about their right to remain silent. This makes no sense. |
| 77 | ** RealityIsUnrealistic. Many suspects in real life will still try and talk their way out of things or make confessions even when they really should know better. By the time the idea that they really ought to stop talking kicks in, in show and out, it is generally after a suspect has already said far too much. The show also does go to great lengths to show the tricks law enforcement uses to convince people to talk freely and we do see a lot of suspects either clamming up or lawyers showing up to put a halt to their client's talking. |
| 78 | [[/folder]] |
| 79 | |
| 80 | [[folder:Is it just me, or is the show inconsistent on the whole issue of occasionally locking up or charging victims? This comes up when a victim won't cooperate with an investigation by lying or withholding evidence. The victim is charged and then offered a plea bargain wherein they cooperate in exchange for having the charges dropped.]] |
| 81 | For example, there was one episode where a woman who described having been attacked by an unknown man on the street turned out to to have been a victim of domestic violence of a very severe nature. In spite of this, the team could not get her to cooperate in staying at a safe house or enforcing a restraining order, and so she went back to her husband [[spoiler:who stabbed her in her heart that very same night of her going back to him]]. They could have arrested her on filing a false police report, but someone (Cragen, I believe) came out very strongly against it. However, I have seen them do this in other episodes, one of which involved a 15-year-old girl who had been raped and later beaten, somehow in connection with nude photos of herself that she'd taken and sent using her cell phone |
| 82 | * I admit that the latter example is a poor one, since it involved [[spoiler:a corrupt judge who wanted to send said girl to juvenile lock-up for possession and distribution of child pornography, i.e. pictures she'd taken '''of herself''']]. But I know that there have been others where they locked up the victim for non-compliance in their investigation. |
| 83 | ** A good example is the episode where they were after the guy who attacked the same women repeatedly in order to try to get them pregnant. They arrested one of his victims who had actually become pregnant by him in order to get her to admit what had happened and consent to having genetic testing done so they could prove that their suspect was the perp. She'd reported the first rape but not the subsequent ones because she didn't want her husband to know that the baby was the rapist's, and not his, so they charged her with obstruction. |
| 84 | * Adding to the confusion, the same issue has come up in at least one episode of ''Series/LawAndOrder'' as well. |
| 85 | * I agree, the show is inconsistent on this issue. But then again, it's a complicated question that people are prone to disagree on, and the writers of L&O are no exception. In a way it's an unintentional stroke of genius because it mirrors reality so well. In real life people don't form one opinion and stick to it forever. They rationalize, they deconstruct, and they waffle. In fiction we call that being OutOfCharacter, but in real life it happens all the time. |
| 86 | * It's often a case where they're balancing two different interests. On one hand, they want to use whatever they can to protect the victim and/or convince them to talk. On the other hand, they don't want to create the illusion that they're in the habit of arresting victims for any little thing that pops up during the case, because that will discourage others from coming forward. |
| 87 | * There was also a case in the first season where a victim of a serial rapist found out who her attacker was, but refused to reveal who is because she claimed he has been "changed" after joining her church and would consider it betrayal to give him away. The SVU team feels torn up about it for a whole of ten seconds before locking her up in hopes that she would break and tell him who it was. |
| 88 | * Going through the mentioned cases in order: |
| 89 | ** In "Persona" (domestic violence), no one suggested arresting the victim at the time. It's only after [[spoiler:she dies]] that Olivia expresses a wish that she had arrested the victim because at least she would have been safe, and at that point it's basically just blaming herself, playing through all the "what could I have done differently" because she feels bad that she couldn't save the victim. In saying Olivia would never do that, Cragen is just trying to help her get out of that loop. |
| 90 | ** In the teenage girl case, Olivia was adamantly ''against'' arresting the victim, but the ADA (not one of the squad's regular [=ADAs=]) ordered her to do so anyway. They also planned to have the charges dropped as soon as she testified; that's the point where the corrupt judge threw a SpannerInTheWorks. |
| 91 | ** All of the other examples mentioned are serial cases, so it makes sense that the approach is a little different. In a domestic/dating violence case, the perpetrator is really only a threat to the specific victim in question, so the only person the victim is hurting by holding out is themselves. In a serial case, that's a perp who poses a risk to countless potential victims if they're not stopped, so it makes sense that the detectives might push the existing victims harder in order to stop a serial offender from hurting anyone else. (Even though the one woman claims her rapist had "changed", they're not going to take her word for it, and she doesn't tell them the ''actual'' thing that would have proved he was no longer a threat (that he's paralyzed), presumably because that would have made it easy for SVU to figure out who he was.) |
| 92 | [[/folder]] |
| 93 | |
| 94 | [[folder: The girl who stabbed a boy]] |
| 95 | |
| 96 | * In "Alien", an 8-year-old girl stabbed a 12-year-old boy with scissors. They played up the fact that he was harassing her for having lesbian parents. The reasoning was that her response (stabbing) was violently disproportionate to the stimulus (harassment) and used this to charge her, stick her in jail, and claim that she's violent. However, at one point during the investigation, it also came to light that the stabbing "victim" had grabbed her, tried to kiss her, then cut her hair off. Apparently she managed to wrestle the scissors from him and used them to stab him. Far be it from me to question the impeccable legal logic of a ''Law & Order'' episode, but that kind of sounds like self-defense against a sexual assault. |
| 97 | ** She never wrestled the scissors from him, him cutting her ponytail off and her stabbing him were a few days apart. |
| 98 | *** This is correct. The boy cuts off the girl's ponytail, and when she comes back to school with short hair she's made fun off for looking even more like a dyke than before. The constant teasing and abuse drives the girl to stab the boy in the back with the scissors, thus paralyzing him. |
| 99 | ** Pretty sure they happened within the same day though I don't think she wrestled the scissors from him; they were in the art room, where I'm sure multiple pairs of scissors were available. |
| 100 | ** Yeah, I think both incidents happened within the same day. One of the mothers state that they were told by Emma (the 8-year-old) and her older brother Charlie that Emma got gum stuck in her hair, and that Charlie attempted to fix the goof with a haircut. When Liv tells them that they know the ''real'' reason Emma's hair is short, this prompts Emma to tearfully confess that Sean (the 12-year-old) cut off her ponytail, and that she stabbed him with a pair of scissors (not necessarily the same ones that Sean cut off her ponytail with, but as stated earlier, they were in the art room, so it's not that much of a stretch to think there were more pairs of scissors there). |
| 101 | * Did everyone miss the comment he made that was something like "I'll make sure she's really a girl?" That's pretty damn rapey to me. |
| 102 | ** Exactly. He makes a remark like that, tries to kiss her, she pushes him away, then he cuts off her hair to "make her look like a dyke." And before and after that encounter he was sending her emails in which he threatened to force some kind of sexual activity on her in order to make her straight. There is a difference between a little boy trying to kiss the girl he likes and what this kid was doing. |
| 103 | * Yeah, I ''really'' don't remember the sexual assault part. Maybe I'm just not remembering things correctly, but I could've sworn that all the boy did was constantly bullying the girl for having gay parents and eventually cut her hair. Then I remember the girl finally snapping and taking the scissors used to cut her hair and then stabbing the kid. This stuff about a forced kiss is news to me. Did the episode only make a very brief mention of it or something? |
| 104 | ** Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was actually a very big part of the episode. |
| 105 | ** You seem to not understand the difference between "I don't remember this happening. Perhaps I'm remembering things incorrectly." and "I don't remember this, so that means it didn't happen." |
| 106 | ** It happened. I watched the episode just last night - the boy DID try to kiss her. She claimed not to be a lesbian, and the boy said, "Prove it." Then went for a kiss. |
| 107 | *** He also made an implied rape threat to her in an email, where he threatened to 'cure her from being a queer'. |
| 108 | * Was it a few days between the ponytail cutting/forced kiss and the stabbing? In that case it's not self-defense. (Even though I agree, that sounds like sexual assault). If you assault someone in revenge for them attacking you earlier, you don't get self-defense. |
| 109 | * Sean had been picking on Emma and Charlie for months because their mom is a lesbian (and especially Emma because she's smaller/younger/weaker than him, while Charlie is older and bigger). Sean made frequent comments to Emma of the "you're going to Hell" sort. One day he grabbed her pony tail and cut it off in the art classroom, telling her that "you're a dyke so you should look like one." Sean then tried to kiss her and Emma grabbed another pair of scissors and managed to stab him in the back. Emma became scared and got her brother Charlie, who leaves Sean outside of a hospital. We later find out about the many emails that Sean sent to Emma, and in at least one he threatens that he's going to "cure" her. When Emma admits to what she's done, she's crying and says that she didn't mean to hurt Sean and that "[she] just wanted him to leave [her] alone." Emma was a scared eight year old child, not a violent criminal. |
| 110 | * Legal matters aside, Sean deserved it. I'd have arrested him for assault and sent him to the soap droppers. |
| 111 | ** He deserved to become a paraplegic? I mean, maybe time in juvie sure, what he did to Emma was definitely assault, sexual or not, but Goddamn. |
| 112 | *** He may not have specifically deserved to become a paraplegic, but he ''did'' deserve the consequences of pushing a little girl around until she snapped on him, whatever they would have been. If you set out to bully someone, whatever they do to protect themselves from you is on your own head. What he did was a kiddy version of attempted corrective rape and the very definition of a hate crime, and it was fully condoned by all the authority figures around him! She stabbed him because he had been making her miserable for months and then physically attacked her, but the blame immediately went to Emma's lesbian parents for putting her in a position to be bullied. The fact that Sean shouldn't have acted like such a little piece of shit is completely ignored. So not only does he learn that lesbians are acceptable targets, he also learns that girls (especially smaller and weaker ones) have no right to refuse his advances or defend themselves if he assaults them. His being paralyzed from the waist down is probably going to save the Special Victims Unit a ''lot'' of work in the future. |
| 113 | *** I think that Emma didn't deserve to be bullied and I think that Sean didn't deserve to become a paraplegic. I also think that people who claim that either of the children deserved what they got are sick (sorry but sending a twelve year old boy to "soap droppers")? |
| 114 | ** I'm curious as to what your idea of fair consequence would be in that case. Sean's paralysis was an accident, but it was the direct result of his own actions. How can someone not deserve the consequences of their own behavior? It would be an extreme ''punishment'' if it were done in discipline, but Emma just happened to score a critical hit. If he hadn't abused her for months on end, he'd be fine. |
| 115 | *** So being bullied gives the victim a clean slate to exact any sort of revenge on their tormentors? The implications of that... just... whoah. |
| 116 | ** Why are we even arguing this? There was a whole scene where the detectives read the nasty notes Sean wrote to Emma and one clearly states that he was planning to rape her in order to (preemptively, I presume) "cure" her. |
| 117 | [[/folder]] |
| 118 | |
| 119 | |
| 120 | |
| 121 | [[folder:Our 'Shocking Swerve' entry refers to an episode where Elliot puts a guy away in Rikers, then after that guy is exonerated by someone else who confesses, the real perp dies. The ADA tells them they can't get the guy out now because the real perp isn't available to confess. But in 'Criminal', the exact same case arises: they put a guy away, and it turns out he's innocent; the difference is that once they figure out who the real perp is, they get the guy out almost immediately. Wat?]] |
| 122 | * Two possible explanations come to mind; however, I imagine this was just an oversight on the part of the writers: |
| 123 | ** I can't remember that one ref'd in Shocking Swerve, but it could have been that the only evidence implicating the real perp was his willingness to confess. Maybe they hadn't yet contracted a confession from him and had no evidence besides that? Still, it seems a bit weak. |
| 124 | *** The episode, for the record, is "Unstable". It's the season 11 opener. |
| 125 | ** They couldn't free the wrongfully convicted man based on the advice of that ADA who had a lot more friction with the main cast and who eventually lost her job for showing up to court drunk. When they successfully freed the guy in "Criminal", Novak was the ADA. Could be that the former ADA just didn't care enough to get thing moving. |
| 126 | ** My mother is a lawyer, and I usually make a point of not watching any Law and Order show in her presence because it turns into a free-for-all of what they get wrong...but in this case, she said it was true, the guy would be stuck in prison unless the governor pardoned him. |
| 127 | ** They had forensic evidence and in addition to the confession in "Criminal", not to mention that a major piece of evidence against him turned out to be demonstrably flawed ("his car" was seen at the victim's house, but a closer look revealed that the plates didn't match). In "Unstable", all they had was personal knowledge of another person's guilt. They had arranged for the guilty person to make a formal confession, but he had ''not yet done so.'' The confession was on tape, but it was an audiotape, not a videotape, and had not been authenticated, which is to say, the person making the confession had not signed a notarized paper acknowledging that it was he on the tape, or otherwise signed a transcription of the confession. Once he died, it couldn't be conclusively established that it was him on the tape; the only evidence of his guilt (and thus the other guy's innocence) was Stabler's say-so. The tape might have been enough to get someone a "not guilty" verdict at trial, but the threshold to overturn a conviction is much higher. |
| 128 | *** For further evidence of this, look at "Confidential" later in the same season (in which a similar situation is narrowly averted). The real perp is killed, but the detectives don't freak out about the innocent man until after they learn that the evidence in the case was lost. Clearly they had figured the DNA would clear the innocent man (DNA analysis wasn't available when he was first convicted) and weren't worried until they learned that they didn't have that either. |
| 129 | [[/folder]] |
| 130 | |
| 131 | [[folder:In 'Baggage', a serial rapist was caught in the act of attempting to hog-tie a woman in what turned out to be a police sting. But because they couldn't indisputably connect him with the earlier crimes, they had to let him walk. Um, what? Didn't they just catch him in a sting with clear intent to commit rape?]] |
| 132 | * That episode had quite a few problems; I wrote a small rant about their treatment of a suspect which included a large amount of PoliceBrutality and denying him a lawyer and resulted in the poor man committing suicide instead spending more time with SVU. Other things include being uncooperative with the detective that had been working the case for six month because they thought he would take all the glory for it, finding killer by finding his sisters DNA in a non criminal database, and that they finally convicted him by saying that the victim used more electricity than usual that day proved he used a kiln to set her on fire. |
| 133 | ** They weren't uncooperative with that detective. ''He'' refused to cooperate with ''them''. Once he came around they were willing to work together as well. |
| 134 | * From what I remember, the guy opened the window or something so the victims body would decompose slightly faster and make it seem like she was killed on a day he was visiting his mom. The judge then said if they couldn't prove he wasn't at his mom's house, she'd dismiss the entire case against him. |
| 135 | ** Actually, victim's body was left in her own ceramics studio which contained a kiln. The perp put her body in the kiln briefly, thereby quickening decomposition, which had the effect of making it seem like she'd been killed a day earlier than she was, which was the day he had an alibi for. Part of the reason the energy surge was so significant was not just that it gave them a possible explanation, it's also that there's ''no'' reasonable alternative, since based on the original timeline she'd have been dead by then (and it's a stretch to say someone else could have done it, because if she had been killed on Sunday, anyone who went in on Monday would have found the body). |
| 136 | ** Also, they didn't ''convict'' him based on the kiln/electricity usage -- what that did was just refute his alibi. When they went to question him again based on him now being a viable suspect due to no longer having an alibi, they ended up catching him in the act in a victim's apartment, and that (along with the DNA from the other scene and the pattern/signature) is presumably what got him convicted. |
| 137 | * In terms of the sting, they didn't catch him "with a clear intent to commit rape" by legal standards. They jumped way too soon and arrested him as soon as he raised a hand towards the undercover cop, so all they really had him on was taking a swing at her. It's clear from the audience perspective, especially with the benefit of hindsight, what he was trying to do, but from a legal standpoint, it was a long way from what they observed during the sting to being a brutal serial rapist/murderer. Combined with his (manufactured) alibi, that was enough to get him released. |
| 138 | ** But it was still at least an attempted assault, wasn't it? Even if it wasn't enough to tie him to other murders, it's still illegal. |
| 139 | *** Theoretically, that's true, but with something this comparatively minor, it's probably just more trouble than it's worth -- there's a lot of wiggle room for a defense attorney to potentially get him off (say, on a claim that it was misinterpreted and it's not ''really'' what it looks like), and it's likely not enough to keep him off the street in the meantime either, since bail on an offense like that would probably be reasonable. So they'd only be wasting their own/the DA's time by pursuing the case. |
| 140 | [[/folder]] |
| 141 | |
| 142 | [[folder:Also in ''Baggage'', there's a pretty big potential hole in the killer's alibi plan...]] |
| 143 | * His entire plan was based on making it seem like the victim died a day earlier than she did. But he had no way of knowing what the victim had done on that missing day (he couldn't have watched her because he was out establishing an alibi). What was his plan if someone had seen or spoken to her in the time between when she was supposedly murdered and the actual time of the crime? |
| 144 | [[/folder]] |
| 145 | |
| 146 | [[folder:Did Olivia or Melanie shoot Abraham in "Charisma"?]] |
| 147 | * Melanie did. I can see why you'd be confused because of the camera angle, but based on their reactions, and Melanie's dialogue explaining why she pulled the trigger at that particular moment, it's apparent that it's Melanie who fired the shot. That takes a careful viewing, though, because the camera isn't on Melanie when she does it. |
| 148 | ** I thought they intentionally tried to confuse you but ultimately it was supposed to be Melanie, except Olivia grabbed the gun by the barrel afterwards before tossing it aside. Shouldn't it have been hot to the touch if it was just fired? |
| 149 | *** Actually, given the situation, a little heat (or even hand burn) isn't the problem she'd be focused on. |
| 150 | [[/folder]] |
| 151 | |
| 152 | [[folder: Seriously, why hasn't Cragen transferred Stabler and Benson out of SVU by now?]] |
| 153 | Yeah, we know the "real" reason, but in-story it makes no sense that Cragen would keep two ticking time bombs like them on the roster. ESPECIALLY Elliot "Punch first and ask questions when forced" Stabler. |
| 154 | * It may have something to do with the fact that Elliot and Olivia are the SVU's best detectives, according to both their case completion rates and at LEAST one psychiatrist who spoke to Cragen after their psychological reviews. |
| 155 | [[/folder]] |
| 156 | |
| 157 | |
| 158 | [[folder:Where ''did'' Casey get that t-shirt?]] |
| 159 | * The "Sex Crimes" one in "Night". |
| 160 | * NYPD Softball league. |
| 161 | * Zazzle.com |
| 162 | [[/folder]] |
| 163 | |
| 164 | [[folder:Why, when Olivia is shown as being really traumatized by events in ''Undercover'' over several episodes, did they not show Casey not even being vaguely freaked out or upset by events in ''Night'' (discounting the scene in the hospital), ''Raw'' or ''Alternate''?]] |
| 165 | * Because people respond differently to trauma and not everyone reacts the same. It's also possible that she did have trauma but the show didn't see fit to feature it, as they tend to do with characters not named Stabler or Benson. |
| 166 | * In Night, Elliot mentions that Casey has taken time off work and doesn't want anyone to see her while she's out; that sounds like she's upset. |
| 167 | * Casey also doesn't remember what happened to her in ''Night'' (and probably never will). I'm sure it was still scary in its own way to wake up in the hospital the way she did, but she doesn't have actual memories of what it felt like to be beaten like that, while Olivia does have (and is haunted by) very vivid memories of the attempted rape. The other two are different because they aren't nearly as deliberate or targeted; Olivia and Elliot occasionally get assaulted by suspects as well (and Elliot is also in the courtroom shooting in ''Raw'') and aren't traumatized. The incidents in ''Night'' and ''Undercover'' stand out because they're much more brutal and personal. |
| 168 | [[/folder]] |
| 169 | |
| 170 | [[folder:In "Authority", how come Munch never commented on how Merritt Rook looked a hell of a lot like an older version of a man in Baltimore whose wife got shot?]] |
| 171 | I know it goes way beyond CelebrityParadox (celebrity who guest starred on two shows in the same continuity as different characters paradox?), but that would have been a (darkly) funny moment if he did. Hopefully this could happen if "Authority" gets a sequel... [[spoiler:[[NeverFoundTheBody And I'm fairly certain it will]].]] |
| 172 | * They never mention when actors pop back up again. Diane Neal (Casey) played a rapist in a previous episode, and no one mentions how the new A.D.A. resembles a prior perp. |
| 173 | ** Peter Scanavino also appeared as a one-off (and three other appearances across the franchise) before joining the regular cast. |
| 174 | ** Not limited to SVU, either. Jerry Orbach played a defense attorney in an early episode of the main L&O before being cast as Lenny Briscoe. Alfred Molina was a perp on SVU before becoming one of the main characters of L&O: LA. |
| 175 | ** S. Epatha Merkerson was a cleaning woman who was the mother of a victim in an early episode of regular ''L&O.'' Plus, there are non-celebrity actors who have popped up repeatedly. Anne Dowd is a character actor who had played nine very different characters over all the different series. Some perps, some victims, some witnesses, some background characters. Denis O'Hare played six, including two priests, a schizophrenic who represented himself, and a retarded man who ended up institutionalized. Lindsay Crouse played a judge who was shot and paralyzed, and then sued for her right to die, before the person who shot her was brought to trial. [=McCoy=] opposed her, because he wanted her as a witness. She eventually does die. Then she shows up six years later as another judge, plus, she is on SVU as a ''third'' judge. Peter Francis James played a judge on several eps of SVU, was a suspect's father on an episode of CI, and was a judge again ([[YouLookFamiliar but not the same one]]) on L&O. Think of it as a repertory theater. |
| 176 | ** I believe the trope you're looking for is YouLookFamiliar. |
| 177 | * Practically speaking, that was one case out of thousands that Munch worked for a few days in a different city entirely almost a decade and a half ago that he wasn't even the primary investigator on. There's a good chance he didn't even remember the other guy, and why would he? Who remembers the exact facial details of people they barely knew one time over a decade ago? |
| 178 | ** Heck, if he was going to mention any resemblance, he'd have a much better chance of noticing that recurring defense attorney Bayard Ellis looked a lot like one of his former coworkers. |
| 179 | *** That one did actually get a wink-wink nudge-nudge acknowledgment, though it was Ellis asking Munch "have we met?" rather than Munch recognizing him. |
| 180 | * I think the short answer is, in a long-running set of series like these ones (especially when you're considering all the shows in the SharedUniverse, rather than just the ''Law & Order'' franchise), this kind of thing is almost bound to happen, and it actually happens a ''lot'' in this particular franchise, so while it might be funny to the audience to drop a reference to it on occasion, it also makes sense that they choose to just play it as though each character is a completely unrelated person and not make any in-universe acknowledgement of the reused actor situation. |
| 181 | [[/folder]] |
| 182 | |
| 183 | [[folder:Why did the episode "Doubt" end with the viewers left to decide on what the verdict was? All evidence obviously pointed to the man being innocent and the girl committing perjury.]] |
| 184 | * A poll was held and more than 60% of the viewers sided with the professor. |
| 185 | * I think the idea was supposed to be that with a case like that, which was nothing more than he said/she said, things aren't clear-cut. So they decided not to actually give the ending. |
| 186 | * In [[RealLife Real Life]], a lot of cases do end up like this because of insufficient or conflicting evidence. |
| 187 | ** Well I don't know, I mean I think they tipped it ''just slightly'' toward making the alleged victim a shakier witness than the alleged perp, just to convey the idea that the emotional trauma of rape may cause the victim to become very unstable and difficult to believe, leading to a mistrial or not guilty verdict. Somewhat inadvertently then, in that sense, the person who posted this topic reflects in their question that intent of the writers. |
| 188 | *** The interesting thing about that episode was that it exposed each individual viewer's subconscious prejudices. Those who believe rape victims should act a certain way or remember details correctly will side with the professor, while those who have difficulty accepting that a woman could lie about being raped will side with her. In reality, the episode didn't give enough information to determine who was telling the truth. The only unbiased answer would be "I don't know which side to believe". |
| 189 | *** What broke that woman's credibility with this troper was her accusing Elliot of ''groping'' her when he dropped her off at home and her attorney used his separation from his wife as evidence to support. Even if Elliot was separated from his wife and kids, the guy is ''more'' than professional enough to NOT GROPE A VICTIM! |
| 190 | *** If she had been raped, then that would have happened after she had been traumatized, on top of being physically exhausted, medicated, and possibly still inebriated. Eliot took her home because she could barely stay on her feet. The ''attorney'' brought the issue to trial, and it's implied that she came up with the accusation as a strategy when Myra told her that Elliot escorted her home. |
| 191 | ** It seems like there's really two questions here: what was the verdict, and what is the actual truth of the situation? To the first point, it seems pretty likely that the ''verdict'' was "not guilty", because a case with this many ambiguities and uncertainties doesn't seem to meet the standard of guilt of "beyond a reasonable doubt"; however, that doesn't necessarily mean that he absolutely didn't rape her, it only means there wasn't enough evidence to prove it to a legal standard. The question of what ''actually'' happened is a lot murkier and probably not possible to answer with any real certainty. |
| 192 | *** Right. It was a neat experiment, "letting the viewers decide," but a hung jury would have been a more realistic outcome. Given that we know there was a verdict, the episode's very title belies what it is -- there's considerably ''doubt'' as to the defendant's guilt. |
| 193 | [[/folder]] |
| 194 | |
| 195 | [[folder:In ''Dependent'' the guy that Elliot killed could not have been the rapist and murderer.]] |
| 196 | When the little boy gets home his father is attacked from behind, he then runs across the house into his parents' bed room and sees someone else raping and killing his mother. He later identifies the monster that attacked his dad as his sister's boyfriend and he said he also saw his sister there. Also, why would a man need an object like a candlestick holder to rape somebody, if he was as high as they said he was I doubt he would have worried about leaving DNA. Finally they made remarks earlier that the person who did it had anger issues with the mother and it was a personal crime yet the boyfriend had never meet her before. It seems the only thing they were able to prove was that the boyfriend was also there and attacked the father, but since Elliot accidentally killed him they decided to pin the crime on him and let the girl that raped and killed her own mother go free. |
| 197 | ** As far as I know, Elliot did not "accidentally kill" the boyfriend. Warner had confirmed there was something wrong when she examined the body, saying the boyfriend stopped taking medication. I haven't seen the episode for a while, but it was something along those lines. |
| 198 | *** But Elliot did kill him, the kid not taking his medicine just made it a lot easier for him to do it. |
| 199 | *** Warner's assessment was that the kid had quit taking his heart medicine, which controlled a palpation syndrome; without the medicine, he suffered a heart attack due to the pursuit and confrontation with Elliot. Although he was attacking Elliot at the time of his heart attack, Warner determined that Elliot's return blows were not the culprit; it was just being in that situation caused a heart attack. (Or maybe something more technical, but that was the gist of it anyway.) |
| 200 | ** Being high is a good enough reason someone might need to rape someone with a candlestick holder instead of performing the act themselves. Some people don't have as easy a time performing when they're drunk or high. |
| 201 | *** Well even if they don't ''need'' to use a candlestick, if he was as high as they said, then he may have just been in a delirious state of mind, which can cause ... very erratic, bizarre, and unpredictable behavior. |
| 202 | ** Also the story the girl gave was full of holes and contradicts evidence from earlier that episode. She was telling them what happened during a drug induced blackout which she should have no memories of with the help of sodium amytal a drug that Huang had said in an earlier episode is useless for truth telling and memory recovery. It is usually used to get the person to say what the questioner wants to hear and they gave it to her after constantly asking if she remembers her boyfriend raping and killing her mom. |
| 203 | [[/folder]] |
| 204 | |
| 205 | [[folder:NY State hasn't performed the death penalty in decades. Can someone tell the SVU that?]] |
| 206 | Every episode has the ADA threatening the death penalty. Which NY hasn't used since 1963. Then one episode revolved around a man wanting to go back to his home state to be given the death penalty. What? |
| 207 | * Law and Order may be based in a place that's a lot like New York, but it really isn't. AllMythsAreTrue, republicans have magical powers, the death penalty exists in New York, and the government experimented on inner city black kids. |
| 208 | * Actually one of the suspects did mention that NY hasn't used the Death Penalty in years, but the detectives handwaved it by saying that they could make an exception. |
| 209 | * Except they can't make an exception now. It's gone beyond just not being used now- the state of New York declared the Death Penalty unconstitutional in 2004. Nobody can use the Death Penalty anymore. It might just be a case of the ADA or Elliot trying to use ignorance about the death penalty in PerpSweating to make the guy talk, letting them think they could be sent to the chair if they don't do exactly what they say (Jerkass behavior and bullying like this isn't unheard of for the show). Of course, that doesn't explain why they use it when there are other laywers present.... |
| 210 | * In the L&O universe, New York ''has'' had an execution in the past couple of years. It was shown on-screen in the main series, and was the subject of the sixth-season finale (the same episode where Claire was killed by a drunk driver). |
| 211 | * Having the death penalty in the show gives the viewers a sense of closure. Plus, it's an easy plot device for the writers to fall back on when a character needs motivation to share information. This is L&O, creativity need not apply. |
| 212 | * In a recent episode, Elliot told a suspect who said NY hasn't done the death penalty in years that he could still be convicted of a capital crime and have to sit around until they change the legislation. |
| 213 | * New York did briefly restore the Death Penalty, and did sentence some people to it, although no one was ever executed. So the regular ''L&O,'' "Teenage Wasteland," where Nora Lewin debates whether to do what she believes is right, and not ask for the death penalty, or to do her job, and ask for it, as it has recently been reinstated, is actually very good. Now, while no one has been executed in New York in many decades, the death penalty exists ''in statute.'' This means that a DA can ask for someone to be sentenced to it. What is currently unconstitutional in any method of execution. It is possible that at some future date, a method will be adopted which will be constitutional in New York, and theoretically, someone sentenced to death in 2004-2011 could be executed. It's pretty likely that a lawyer would argue that since the person under sentence wasn't sentenced to the method under question, they can't be executed by that method, and that would probably work, given the reluctance of the state to use capital punishment, but it is all theoretical. |
| 214 | * Plus, even though the New York Court of Appeals had declared the death penalty unconstitutional, ''a future Court could reverse that decision''. True, a judge who sentences a person to death will stay the sentence indefinitely due to the Court of Appeals's ruling, but who wants to be the test case for revisiting that question? |
| 215 | ** This one is even more true when you consider that the death penalty process frequently takes years if not decades to fully run through. The sentence might be stayed, but they can still work through that appeals process in the interim and then if the decision is reversed along the way, it's as though it was never there. (This is unlikely, given that more and more states are moving ''away'' from the death penalty, but it's theoretically not impossible.) |
| 216 | * As mentioned, the original ''Law & Order'' actually had a few of the defendants go on to be executed within the context of the show. Aside from the one that was shown in the episode Claire died, there was a woman who shot a cop and later converted to Christianity while on death row, and probably a few more besides that. I was actually coming here to post a headscratcher about the episode where the defendant claims New York hasn't executed anyone since the sixties; while true in real life it isn't true via the show's continuity.(Before anyone says the guy could have just been uninformed, Casey confirmed it, and she should know better.) |
| 217 | * As for the case of the defendant who wanted to go to his home state, that one is consistent in-universe, because the issue isn't about which states have an active death penalty but about what crimes it can be used for. In this case, the defendant didn't commit a capital crime in New York (only murder qualifies in that state), so he wouldn't be eligible for the death penalty in New York even if there wasn't a moratorium in place. However, in Louisiana (the state he wants to be extradited to), rape of a child under 12 is also a death penalty crime, so he ''is'' eligible for the death penalty in Louisiana even though the actual crimes he committed are the same across both states. |
| 218 | [[/folder]] |
| 219 | |
| 220 | [[folder:Whatever happened to Fin wanting a transfer because of Elliot's general douchebaggery? I feel like it was mentioned once and just magically never brought up again.]] |
| 221 | * The transfer paperwork was held up due to red tape. The guy handling his paperwork was an ex-colleague of Fin's who held a grudge against him, and stalled his transfer to get back at him. All of this was mentioned at some point in season ten. They haven't said anything since, so I guess we're to assume that one guy can stall his paperwork indefinitely. The whole thing about Fin wanting a transfer was probably done as a cliffhanger, in order to draw in viewers and boost ratings. Kind of a lazy and cheap ploy, but there you have it. |
| 222 | ** Actually it was mentioned in the first episode of the new season (And from his reaction of being told to work with Stabler, they were still not at the best of terms). |
| 223 | *** It came up again in the episode afterward, in which Elliot had managed to indirectly earn Fin's professional respect again. Elliot went after the webmaster of a pedophilic website for having a photo of his daughter Elizabeth when she was much younger; he beat the guy within an inch of his life, and tried everything he could to crack the password to delete the photo from his PC. Later, as Liv and Fin are confiding in each other as they wait during a stake-out, Fin admits that, knowing what pedophiles do when they see pictures of children like that, if he were in Elliot's shoes and that was a picture of his kid on the website, he would've gone ahead and killed the sick bastard. In Fin's eyes, evidently Elliot proved that he was actually capable of showing some restraint, which seemed to be a characteristic he lacked before. From that moment on, Fin did begin to see Elliot in a different light, and again, it seemed that they had a mutual, professional respect for one another after that. |
| 224 | ** Given that Cragen, Liv, and Munch were very aware of the conflict between the two and that Fin was doing everything short of quitting the NYPD to leave SVU, it's not that hard to believe that the three aforementioned played keep-away until they both cooled off. |
| 225 | ** As for it never going through, since Fin had no other reason besides his conflict with Elliot for wanting to leave SVU, he could have withdrawn the request once he and Elliot were no longer fighting. |
| 226 | [[/folder]] |
| 227 | |
| 228 | [[folder:The episode ''Babes'' in general.]] |
| 229 | * First off, a guy kills someone because he thinks he raped his sister. It confuses me that anyone would do this without investigating anyone's side of the story. |
| 230 | ** People act without thinking all of the time, especially if they're enraged. A significant portion of real-life murder cases involve this kind of thing. Would you be level-headed enough to get the other side of the story if you believed a loved one had been raped? |
| 231 | * Then, a girl appears to commit suicide. In an earlier episode, they find out that someone who appears to have hung herself was strangled and then hung up. But here, they make no effort to investigate this, and instead go after a woman who insulted her over the internet. |
| 232 | ** Blame the idiot ball for this one. |
| 233 | ** The issue is that they were trying to investigate from the state-of-mind angle - they had reason to believe that the online harassment may have contributed to the suicide in the first place - which isn't unreasonable considering that at the time the episode aired, there weren't really any laws for cyberbullying. Not to mention, the previous instance I believe you're citing is that one in which it was thought that an autoerotic strangled herself. In that one, they ALSO believed it was a death caused by (in this case, accidental) self-strangulation - and the only reason they had further reason to suspect foul play was because Warner (who wasn't part of the initial investigation) re-examined the body and gave them reason to. |
| 234 | * At the end, when the mom gets off, Greylek insults her enough to get the mom to attack her. Then Greylek says she's gonna get her for assault. Any sensible person in the room would ignore these charges and report Greylek to the ethics committee or whatever. Instead, we see the mom's daughter crying that her mom is going to jail. |
| 235 | ** As far as Greylek provoking the mom, provocation is not a legal defense to assault and battery (which is what the mom did), and what Greylek did did not violate the ethics rules for lawyers. All Greylek did was say that while the mother's actions didn't cause the girl's death, that didn't mean what she did was okay, and that the general public would realize that (and it doesn't really seem like she was even intentionally trying to provoke the mom into committing a crime, just that she was upset at the mom's "I did nothing wrong" attitude and was calling her out on it). And the mom didn't just slap her or something, she grabbed Greylek by the neck and had to be pulled off her. It's pretty unlikely that you'd get a jury to buy that as a proportionate or justified response to what essentially amounted to a snarky comment. |
| 236 | *** Also, if I remember the episode correctly, the woman was the one who instigated the conversation that prompted Greylek's response in the first place. |
| 237 | [[/folder]] |
| 238 | |
| 239 | [[folder:Something that just bugs me to no end. In "Monogamy," if Nicole had been sexually active with both Richard and her lover around the same time, why on Earth would she tell Richard he wasn't the father of her child? There was no possible way she could have known that [[spoiler: and she turned out to be wrong]].]] |
| 240 | TruthInTelevision. A lot of women do the same thing in RealLife. It happens for one or more of the following reasons: |
| 241 | * She's an idiot who doesn't know how how conception dates work, leading her to either miscalculate them, or assume that they're accurate down to the exact day (in reality, there's a margin of error of a couple of weeks, so if even if she didn't have sex with her husband on the estimated date of conception, he could still be the father). |
| 242 | ** Adding to this, there are often misconceptions about a woman's cycle as it relates to when she can get pregnant. If she and her husband weren't having sex all that often, she could have thought the timeline didn't work for her husband to be the father when it actually did. |
| 243 | * Some nonsense about woman's intuition, as if a woman can ''feel'' who the father is. |
| 244 | * Wishful thinking. She wanted to have the baby with her lover, not her husband. |
| 245 | * She wants to hurt one of the possible fathers. |
| 246 | * On the flip side, she felt guilty about deceiving him so decided to come clean. |
| 247 | [[/folder]] |
| 248 | |
| 249 | [[folder:In ''Ridicule'', why is Elliot, the male cop, unsupportive of the man who is claiming to have been raped by women, while Olivia, the female cop, defends him from the people they question and the other ''male'' detectives?]] |
| 250 | * Because Elliot and the other male detectives didn't believe it was possible for a man to be raped by a woman. Yeah, they were holding the IdiotBall that week. |
| 251 | * The issue is why only females support the notion that men can be raped by women in this episode. |
| 252 | * Both Dr. Huang and Captain Cragen supported the man and Munch didn’t really say anything about it. The only people who attacked him and claimed he was making it up were Elliot and Fin who were both giant Jerkasses in this particular episode. |
| 253 | ** Fin didn't really attack the victim. At one point he mentioned that being handcuffed and sexually used by three beautiful women is something most men would be happy about, but he at least had the good sense to say this outside the victim's presence. |
| 254 | * In my experience (which admittedly isn't enough to be definitive), I've noticed that men usually are less likely to be sympathetic when a man is raped by a woman. Whether that's reflective of the overall population, I have no idea. |
| 255 | * The mothership series had an early episode which deviated slightly from the usual formula by having a victim be raped, not killed. At one point in that episode the prosecutors anticipated having a problem with female jurors believing a female victim. It's explained as a subconscious defense mechanism that allows women to feel safe by believing it could not happen to them. Elliot's attitude was likely intended to portray a male equivalent. |
| 256 | [[/folder]] |
| 257 | |
| 258 | [[folder:Why include Huang, Warner, Munch, Fin, and Cragen in the opening credits if they appear in 25% of episodes, and for only 5 minutes in those episodes?]] |
| 259 | * They still appear frequently enough to be considered part of the main cast. Cragen is the captain, plenty of reason to be in the opening credits. Munch and Fin are still important detectives, and in Munch's case, around the whole show. Warner is their go-to ME for every dead body they find, and Huang interviews every suspect/defendant that seems to have issues. |
| 260 | [[/folder]] |
| 261 | |
| 262 | [[folder:In that episode with the trans* woman, why do they assume that both she and the boyfriend planned a killing of his brother and that the boyfriend knew she was born a boy?]] |
| 263 | Even Huang, the smart one, said something like "She's the master here, so break the other one first." |
| 264 | [[/folder]] |
| 265 | |
| 266 | [[folder:In Turmoil, how come Olivia assumes Alex is the one who reported her and Elliot for misconduct and not the kid they assaulted a few hours earlier]] |
| 267 | In Turmoil Captain Cragen is reprimanded and suspended because of actions by Elliot and Olivia. Olivia blames Alex for it and claims she turned her back on them. Why does she think that Alex was the one who reported their misbehavior, when a few scenes earlier Elliot was seen jumping and beating a teenager while she stood around and watched. Elliot even identified himself to the kid. I think it would be more reasonable of her to assume it was the kid complaining about being attacked by 2 detectives. Also I do not remember if Cragen was removed before or after Elliot attacked his son in the squad room with Olivia again just standing around and watching (luckily for Richard his mother was there to stop his father). If it happened afterwards then there is a whole room of witnesses that might have turned Elliot in. |
| 268 | ** ConflictBall, if I had to guess. |
| 269 | ** Just before the complaint was made, Alex had been accusing them of misconduct for supposedly not turning over a statement (that was ultimately determined not to exist). When an official complaint was then made about the exact same thing, it seemed to fit that Alex could have made it, and they probably thought an ADA was more likely to report them (and know all the right words, etc.) than a random kid. |
| 270 | [[/folder]] |
| 271 | |
| 272 | [[folder:In Baggage who on the team was leaking info to the press.]] |
| 273 | I know this episode has already been mentioned twice on this page but in it the thing the chief of detectives seemed angriest about was that one of the detectives was talking to the press and giving them classified information. He gave Cragen an ultimatum to find this person but nothing ever came of it. |
| 274 | * There are always a gazillion people running around in the background in the squad room, chances are that one of them leaked it. |
| 275 | * The subsequent episode seems to suggest Dale did it, since he admits to leaking that episode's case in the mistaken belief that he was doing SVU a favor. |
| 276 | [[/folder]] |
| 277 | |
| 278 | [[folder:In Outcry, the press wants to use a video of the victim at a party and they say the cops can't prevent them from airing it because of the First Amendment. If I recall correctly, the Supreme Court ruled that the press can't withhold evidence in a police investigation, so why was this an issue?]] |
| 279 | * Because SVU exists in a universe where laws exist solely for the purpose of making the NYPD's lives harder, apparently. |
| 280 | * You're mixing up issues here. The press does have to turn over evidence if they are subpoenaed, just like anyone else under the precedent of ''Branz burg v. Hayes'''. But if they made a copy of the video, they have the right to air it under the precedent set in ''Florida Star v. BJF''. The cops cannot stop them. |
| 281 | [[/folder]] |
| 282 | |
| 283 | |
| 284 | [[folder:In "Bullseye" why didn’t they ask the little girl anything about her rapist?]] |
| 285 | She was alive and functioning through out the episode, I know the child was traumatized but if they asked her to describe something about her attacker she might have said young, longhaired or Scottish, which would have ruled out the innocent man whose life they ruined and was DrivenToSuicide. Instead they never even showed her a picture of the man and need the kid to pee on the floor before considering the dead man might be innocent. |
| 286 | * The attacker had a ski mask or something on, so they couldn't see any of his features. They could have done a voice ID, but at that point they thought they had the guy since he had the pictures of the rapes on his computer. Sure, they were hacked on by the real perp, but still... |
| 287 | [[/folder]] |
| 288 | |
| 289 | |
| 290 | [[folder:In the episode ''Identity'' there are two twins, and one of them is really a boy even though he's been made to look like a girl since he was unintentionally castrated when he was circumcised. The doctor handling them was molesting them and the twins kill him, by having one of them stay at a movie theatre and the other kill him so they can't use their DNA to identify which one of them did it. But the mutilated one had been on drugs for years to make him look like a girl, so that would show up in any DNA samples at the scene!]] |
| 291 | |
| 292 | * Besides the above plot hole, there's also how the team treated the situation when they found out. They chew out the parents a little bit until they understand it was an accident, although they're in a bit of a corner because they spent the whole episode telling the "girl" that she couldn't have been orally raped because the DNA they got off the perp (who had died after "she" bit down and he fell off a roof, don't ask) was male. So how do they handle this sensitive information that he's been living his entire life as the opposite gender? Why, the doctor's nurse barges in and flat out says that he's really a boy. But instead of treating this as a serious situation, where the nurse would be sued for causing god knows what level psychological distress, the detectives support her for telling the truth. Even though it would later get the [[AssholeVictim molesting doctor]] killed, showing that the twins did not take this revelation well. |
| 293 | ** "She" was begging the doctors to tell the truth and had always known something was wrong. The woman (who is another psychologist, not a nurse) came clean because she thought that was what was best for the patient and felt that the other doctor was biased because he wanted to protect his "experiment". She thought it was better for the kid to know the truth than to grow up being forced into a box they didn't fit into. |
| 294 | * Gender drug therapy doesn't affect DNA, it affects hormones. His chromosomes would still be male, regardless of how many hormones his parents gave him. |
| 295 | ** Yeah, but traces of the drugs would show up in whatever secretions/body parts they tested for DNA. So they could just run those tests after the DNA and find out which twin it was. |
| 296 | *** They dealt with that. It was explicitly stated that enough time had passed since he stopped taking the hormone therapy that it had worked it's way out of his system by the time of the murder. |
| 297 | *** However, they just said "perfect crime" and gave up without at least trying or jailing them both for conspiracy after the fact. |
| 298 | *** It would have been a waste of time to charge them with anything, since the simple fact that the other one could have done it is more than enough for reasonable doubt. |
| 299 | *** Except you don't have to prove which one killed him. To prove conspiracy, you only have to prove that one of them killed him(easily done, given the DNA), and then argue that they worked together, one killing him and the other creating an alibi. Conspiracy to commit murder carries the same penalty as murder. |
| 300 | *** True, but in order to make a case for conspiracy, you also have to prove that they ''did'', in fact, work together, which is a lot more difficult that one might think. For one thing, just because one twin's trip to the theater happened to create an alibi for the other twin doesn't automatically mean they planned it that way. While I'd say it probably wasn't a coincidence, the point here is that it ''could'' be one, which creates reasonable doubt on the conspiracy front. Without evidence of actual cooperation between them (a verbal or written agreement, for instance), any two-bit defense attorney could get an acquittal. |
| 301 | *** Hand the case off to [=McCoy=]. He's prosecuted people for conspiracy on less than this and won. |
| 302 | *** That's true, but in this case, you've got the sympathy factor to contend with. On a circumstantial case like this, there's more room for interpretation, and after hearing what the doctor did to the defendants, the jury would probably be more likely to go with an interpretation favorable to them than they would be for a less sympathetic defendant. And since the doctor's actions are the motive for the crime, there's little chance they'd be able to get it excluded (and if they did, the holes it would leave in their case would probably sink them anyway). |
| 303 | [[/folder]] |
| 304 | |
| 305 | [[folder:Trophy]] |
| 306 | For one, why reuse an episode title from the main series? Two, how do you have an expectation of privacy when you are intimidating the owner into letting you stay? What happened to inevitable discovery? Why not hold the guy on the stolen credit card? Can't you do a paternity test on the woman the criminal is taunting and try her mom's case? Also, [[Creator/RLeeErmey very awkward casting]]. |
| 307 | * For the first one, it's a different series, so I think they can do that if they want. The rest, I got no clue. |
| 308 | * The thing that annoyed me was that they didn't think to check his last cell mate until partway through the episode, yet my first thought (and that of the people watching it with me) was, "Check out who he went to prison with, and see if anyone got out recently, idiots!" The detectives [[IdiotBall suck at their jobs]] these days. Also, can you even make someone a legal guardian without getting their permission first? |
| 309 | ** An explanation for why they didn't check at first could be that they were so pissed off at the guy for shooting at them they didn't care about anything he had to say. Once they calmed down a bit, they checked his old cell mate. |
| 310 | ** Also, it's not really unreasonable for them to assume Gamble's the bad guy. All the evidence seems to point that way until they find out about the earlier rapes. It makes more sense for them to think the guy who lied to them and had just entered the house they were shot at from was guilty, even if it's ultimately incorrect. |
| 311 | ** As for why they couldn't use Vivian's DNA, the mother's rape is not a case that could be prosecuted thanks to the statute of limitations. They only tried to follow up on the old case in hopes of getting a lead on the rapist's identity so they could get him for the recent case. |
| 312 | [[/folder]] |
| 313 | |
| 314 | [[folder:What happened to Jo Marlowe?]] |
| 315 | Yes I know she was a CreatorsPet and everyone hated her and blablabla... But why is there no in-universe explanation for why she left? The new season starts and we see this random new ADA without any explanation. |
| 316 | * I'm a bit shocked that we got nothing about Marlowe's whereabouts. And to be honest, I never had any problems with her. Personally I always thought people hated her for the same reason they hated Dani: She dared to be [[DieForOurShip a woman with a close relationship/history with Stabler not named Benson]]. |
| 317 | ** Can't speak for anyone else, but I've never been a fan of the Benson/Stabler ship and I actually liked Dani, but I disliked Marlowe from the get-go. She was self-righteous, she treated everyone else like crap, the character dominated the show as soon as she turned up, and Sharon Stone's acting was abysmal. There was nothing likeable about the character whatsoever -- I liked Stuckey better than I liked her. That being said, I was annoyed that we didn't get an explanation for her sudden absence, despite being glad she's gone. |
| 318 | [[/folder]] |
| 319 | |
| 320 | |
| 321 | [[folder:Just how old is Calvin supposed to be?]] |
| 322 | The kid looks, sounds and acts like he's around 12, maybe a year or two younger, yet they occasionally have him do something that only a kid much younger would do -- drawing that picture in art class is already an odd thing to do for a kid his age, and it doesn't help that it looks like it was drawn by a 7-year-old. Olivia calling him "sweetie" doesn't help, either. Any kid over the age of 9 would resent that. I would chalk it up to SVU being clever and having him regress to childlike behaviors, since he never got to experience being a little kid with his mother, but there is zero confirmation of this in-universe -- they act like he's being a totally normal kid. Which leads me to... |
| 323 | I remember having free-drawing in my sixth grade art classes, and I can't even draw much better ten years later. It may be a bit sappy, but not neccessarily out of character. Also, "regressing"? I don't know where you're getting that from. He seemed perfectly normal, even if he had some abandonment issues. |
| 324 | * Considering his crappy childhood and abandonment problems, he was probably just supposed to be working out the kind of childlike expressions that never got him anywhere as a kid by taking a second crack at it. Media can't write kids for crap in general, but Calvin and Olivia got along as well as they did because they were giving each other what they needed at the same somewhat-stunted level. They were ''both'' too old to be acting the way they were to each other, but because it was so new and they were both enthusiastic about it, it worked out. |
| 325 | |
| 326 | [[/folder]] |
| 327 | |
| 328 | [[folder:All through out the episode where the teenage pedophile (Who has yet to commit a crime, mind you) turns himself in, the detectives are going on about how "no one is born a deviant" but then Olivia tells the kids mom "You didn't make him a pedophile. That's who he is." So...um...what?]] |
| 329 | * The differences are that the detectives were saying, "No one is born a deviant," or, "No one is born a child molester." No one starts off life automatically molesting children. Performing those acts is a conscious choice. When Olivia says, "You didn't make him a pedophile. That's who he is," she's saying that his sexual attractions were that way the moment he was born, in the same way someone is born gay or straight. Being a pedophile and being a child molester are not the same thing. Having urges and desires is very different from acting on them. The main problem with this episode is that despite these differences, the detectives treat the kid who tries to get help for his urges like someone who has already committed a crime, thus negating their own point. |
| 330 | * She may also be suggesting that he became a child molester for reasons having nothing to do with the mother -- she didn't ''make'' him that way, he just became that way. |
| 331 | [[/folder]] |
| 332 | |
| 333 | [[folder:"Doubt": Novak's closing argument]] |
| 334 | In it, she said something to the effect of "Why would the victim accuse the professor if he weren't guilty?" [[LogicalFallacies You fail logic forever]] Casey: assuming that all things being equal the alleged victim was telling the truth, didn't she make a false complaint of sexual harassment against Detective unStabler? Why would she have accused him of touching her if the video footage we saw of him catching her innocently on the apartment steps was clearly [[SarcasmMode doctored to fool the viewers?]] |
| 335 | * Actually it was more her saying that why would the victim go through all of the embarrassment and hell of a trial if she wasn't telling the truth but point taken. |
| 336 | [[/folder]] |
| 337 | |
| 338 | [[folder:The end of "Screwed" bugs me.]] |
| 339 | [[InsaneTrollLogic The detectives did some questionable things in past episodes, so the guy didn't kill anyone?]] And why is Novak in trouble? She didn't do anything. |
| 340 | * Don't think I've seen the episode you're talking about, but if you can raise large enough concerns about the legitimacy of the police working the case (such as finding evidence of racism, excessive violence, planting evidence, etc.), it can throw their entire investigation into doubt. During the OJ Simpson trial, doubt was cast on the legitimacy of the case because of taped evidence of some of the detectives using racial slurs in an unrelated case. If the defense attorney working the case could draw attention to the mountains of misconduct the SVU detectives perform week after week, it would cast doubts on the whole affair. |
| 341 | * Part of the problem was the fact that Darius screwed the investigation in the prequel episode "Venom". As in Darius handed EVERYTHING, including DNA evidence and a full-blown confession to SVU, but had everything tossed out through some BS legal loopholes that Darius KNEW to exploit to get himself off on the murder charge. Because of that, the SVU detectives needed to look for entirely new evidence, anything OUTSIDE of everything he handed them in that excluded confession. Casey was attempting to resurrect what she could of the investigation via testimonies of Fin, Elliot, and Olivia - and having them testify about Darius' character, demeanor, intentions, and connections to the murder investigation, as well as the relevance of the little un-tainted evidence they had. What Darius was trying to do was destroy the detectives' credibility -- something that was all too easy to do because a cop that had a grudge against Cragen that had access to SVU's jackets was actively handing all their records over to Darius -- in order to make the jury doubt their word. So yeah, credibility of investigating detectives shot = entire investigation questioned = suspect walks away free. |
| 342 | [[/folder]] |
| 343 | |
| 344 | [[folder:Don't they have metal detectors?]] |
| 345 | Is it just me, or is the Manhattan SVU precinct the most dangerous place to be in the city? It seems that every other week, some perp pulls a gun or a knife. I get that all the cops carry guns, but shouldn't they at least have civilians walk through metal detectors on the way in? My middle school shouldn't have tighter security than a police station. |
| 346 | * Chalk that one up to holding the [[IdiotBall Idiot]]/ConflictBall, I guess. |
| 347 | * No, the most dangerous place in the city is Hudson University, the rape capital of the world. |
| 348 | [[/folder]] |
| 349 | |
| 350 | [[folder:Entrapment]] |
| 351 | Is it just me, or do the detectives on the show straddle the line between sting operations and entrapment? Every other time they set up some poor schmuck I end up wondering whether what the police are doing is actually legal. |
| 352 | * Can you give an example? |
| 353 | ** I can give an example. In one episode, a convicted child molester is released from prison. After a young woman is raped, the cops assumed he did it. So Stabler decides to go undercover as just released convicted child molester as well to see if he did. Stabler decided it was a good idea to coax the guy back to the slammer. In the end, the guy fell off the wagon and kidnapped the girl. Stabler saves the girl and kills the molester. Of course, the molester DID in fact call out Stabler on his assuming nature for basically trapping him to rape again. Not only that, but the fact that the guy is now dead, we never learn if he did in fact rape the other girl. |
| 354 | *** IIRC, Stabler had just given up on testing the guy when he showed up in a van with a party in the back, so to speak. The whole thing is morally dubious, cause SVU. |
| 355 | ** Entrapment is a defense that works much more often in television than in real life. In answer to your question, use the following standard (which is the actual legal standard for entrapment: Law enforcement lures, baits, or provokes an ordinarily law-abiding person into committing a crime that he would not have committed but for the government intervention. This is how undercover sting operations, such as drug buys, work. |
| 356 | ** Were he still alive, the above defendant wouldn't have a case for entrapment because ultimately, he took the girl of his own free will. While you could make the argument that he might not have if Elliot hadn't set himself up as the perfect partner in crime, it's clear from those events that Elliot didn't actually force him to do it. That said, it seems like SVU was going out of their way to ruin the guy's shot at rehabilitation, which certainly says something about their moral character. |
| 357 | ** The guy's not dead. He was unconscious at the end of the episode and supposedly received medical attention immediately after. |
| 358 | [[/folder]] |
| 359 | |
| 360 | [[folder:Harassment or Good Detective Work?]] |
| 361 | This may be a case of TruthInTelevision, but how much investigating can the police do if the victim does not want to report the crime? It's true that they just have the victim's best interests at heart, but it seems like in a lot of the episodes Benson and Stabler (usually Benson) really cross the line and are just flat-out harassing the victims. I can't even count how many episodes start out with a girl waking up in the hospital after being attacked, only to refuse to cooperate with or lend anything to the investigation. And every single time the detectives (again, usually Benson) browbeat her until she agrees, sometimes going as far as arresting them for some minor charge in order to get them to cooperate. And their favorite line to use is "if you don't help us he's just going to do this again to some other poor girl," which is an extremely manipulative way of essentially saying that the well-being of any potential victim is in the current victim's hands. |
| 362 | ** In some cases, it's not entirely in the victim's hands. The police are obliged to investigate every report of a crime they receive, whether the person who placed the report is the victim or not -- obviously if the victim is willing to cooperate it makes their job easier, but they still have to investigate the original report to the best of their ability even if the victim doesn't want them to. I believe that some professions (such as doctors and nurses) are also legally obliged to contact the police if they believe that someone they're treating is the victim of a serious offence, meaning that again, the victim doesn't necessarily have a say in whether the police launch an investigation. As for the point about harassment, I suppose it depends on your viewpoint. Sometimes they arguably do cross the line (but then, given that this is a drama series we're discussing, it's arguably adds more drama if they do so rather than if they rigidly respect boundaries to a fault), but on the other hand it seems quite obvious that the police would rather persuade the victim of a crime to help them convict the criminal. One way to do that is to appeal to the victim's sense of justice and empathy, and make the entirely reasonable assumption that they wouldn't want anyone else to suffer like they did at the hands of the person who hurt them. Emotionally manipulative it may be, but that's part of the dilemma of being a cop, I suppose. |
| 363 | [[/folder]] |
| 364 | |
| 365 | [[folder: Huang saying that he thinks Drew is lying in "Privilege"]] |
| 366 | * Okay, so Drew is suspected of murdering his former girlfriend. He takes a polygraph in an effort to prove his innocence. He passes with flying colors. Huang explains that while he display a "guilty" (read: deceptive) response on a control question about stealing from a friend, he displays a truthful response on the question about whether he murdered Carmen Trancoso. Huang says that he suspects that Drew manipulated his physiological response to the control questions so that his guilty response wouldn't stick out when he answered the relevant questions. When asked if the graph readout could mean that Drew actually is telling the truth, Huang admits "It could, but I think he's lying." That's it. The whole explanation of his point of view is "I think he's lying." At no point does he present a single piece of evidence that contradicts the polygraph's verdict of truth. So, Dr. Huang, it's okay to completely ignore established evidence in favor a gut feeling? |
| 367 | ** Firstly: Polygraph tests don't produce ''established evidence'', they produce test results that have to be verified and interpreted by the tester, just like any other. Huang's statement (that he, the tester, thought Drew was being deceptive, but the polygraph didn't catch it) is saying the test is ''inconclusive'' and therefore useless. |
| 368 | ** Secondly: Drew ''was'' lying, and Huang was right not to blindly trust the machine. |
| 369 | ** Well, okay, but the fact that Huang turned out to be right about Drew lying doesn't make it any more reasonable for him to have assumed that in the first place, especially since he even admitted that the results could just as easily be interpreted to mean that Drew was being truthful. (See above). It almost seems like he said that because the writers needed a reason for Drew's truthfulness to be in question. Also, if the test is inconclusive, then the results are just as useless for arguing that that he's lying as they are for arguing that he's telling the truth. This sort of thing is the reason polygraph results aren't admissible in court: Too much hinges on the interpretation of the tester. |
| 370 | *** Which is why they don't use it in court. Drew ''was actually lying'' and Huang relied on his own examination over the test results, ''which is why the test results weren't used for anything except a chance for him to observe how Drew took the test''. It's not "established evidence", it's part of the investigation. |
| 371 | |
| 372 | [[/folder]] |
| 373 | |
| 374 | [[folder:Don't bother with backup]] |
| 375 | * In the episode "Folly," the unit convinces a male escort to wear a wire while speaking to a woman who has been sending other escorts out to die. Okay, reasonable enough. However, the unit is simply waiting in the car, listening when she finds the wire. They hesitate, then eventually mobilize and then... wait outside her door until they hear the escort screaming. My description doesn't do it justice, but the length of time between them ascertaining that their plant was in trouble and actually doing anything is astonishing. Not to beat a dead horse here, but if it were a female victim they would have barged in the second their informant was even slightly in trouble. |
| 376 | ** The fact that she found the wire on him is another Headscratcher. They knew that the two were in a sexual relationship and that she's a very high-powered woman... given the inevitability of her feeling him, they should have hidden the wire better. |
| 377 | [[/folder]] |
| 378 | |
| 379 | [[folder:Prosecution can't bring new evidence to court?]] |
| 380 | I don't know much about American or New York state law, so here's a law question: I just watched an episode about a mother shaking her baby, leading to brain damage. In that episode, new evidence comes up during trial, which the prosecution isn't allowed to bring up in court. Is the law really like that? I'm not saying that the defense shouldn't be allowed to consider the new evidence - they should - but things can change outside of investigation or prosecution control. |
| 381 | * I remember the episode though I don't remember what happened exactly, so I'll amend this once I come across the episode (which I'm pretty sure is called "Shake") and watch the court part. That said, the only reason I can think of is that all evidence regardless of which party discovered it needs to be looked over by both the prosecution and the defense in order to prepare for a proper argument/counter-argument once that evidence is brought up in court. |
| 382 | * In that episode, it's a combination of the fact that the prosecution has already rested (meaning they're not at a point in the trial where they're the ones in charge) and the fact that the evidence itself is slightly iffy -- it relates to a change in the child's condition that doesn't actually reveal anything new about the crime itself. If it had actually been evidence with serious value, the ruling might have been different. |
| 383 | [[/folder]] |
| 384 | |
| 385 | [[folder:The episode ''American Tragedy'']] |
| 386 | * The detectives routinely ask the same questions of the victims of rapes: Did you ''see'' anything? Did you ''feel'' anything? Did you ''smell'' anything? Yet the detail of the rapist smelling like kitchen oil only comes up after the rapist is caught and Mehcad (the boy mistaken as the rapist) is dead. IdiotBall PlayedForDrama writing in full effect? |
| 387 | * Jolene Castille acts scared for her life, and then goes full on racist following the revelation that she shot an innocent boy, going so far as to defend her actions (which we all have right to do) using a line ripped from headlines about the rapist in question that was somehow leaked to the press. I get that witness testimony can change, but why didn't Barba bring up that amendment to her testimony in court? |
| 388 | ** Not only that, while Rollins was fingerprinting Castille, Castille recognizes Rollins from Georgia through her accent. The next thing Castille says? "How'd they rope [Rollins] in this, honey? You know if we were back home, you know they would have given me a medal." Uhh... why didn't Rollins bring this up with Barba? |
| 389 | *** Could be that she did and we just don't see it happen. Could be that she didn't consider it necessary when it's already established beyond a reasonable doubt that Castille is a racist, especially keeping in mind that the detectives generally don't want to spend any more time with Barba than they really need to. |
| 390 | |
| 391 | [[/folder]] |
| 392 | |
| 393 | [[folder: Stabler's departure]] |
| 394 | * For several years, Stabler has been a serious loose cannon. He's beaten suspects, violated civil rights, bent & twisted the law, and admitted to actually fantasizing about killing perps. He's been reprimanded, investigated by Internal Affairs, and criticized in the press. But, throughout, he's stood up to it and pretty much refused to change his ways. And, yet, in the end, when IAB threatens him over an entirely justified, fully witnessed shooting of an armed assailant who had already shot several people in the middle of the squad room, Stabler just quits and doesn't even attempt to fight for himself. Huh? |
| 395 | ** I'm pretty sure the issue here is the fact that the shooter in question was a girl who was around the same age as his kids - a girl that he heavily sympathized with throughout the episode. And then he ended up shooting and killing her. Regardless of why he shot her, the fact remains that he killed someone that could have been his own daughter, which was probably much harder for him to personally reconcile than just shooting a bad guy of the week. (Beyond the scope of the series continuity, Chris Meloni decided not to come back to the show after Season 12 due to disagreements over his contract, so the sudden excuse is probably just something they came up with on the fly.) |
| 396 | ** Yeah, the suggestion seems to be not that he can't fight IAB, but rather that he retired voluntarily because he was personally traumatized to the extent that he didn't want to keep doing that job anymore. |
| 397 | [[/folder]] |
| 398 | |
| 399 | [[folder: "Pornstar's Requiem" Verdict]] |
| 400 | Three things bugged me about this episode: |
| 401 | * Why didn't the District Attorney re-direct the victim when the Defense Attorney argued that she performs in rape roleplay porn so there was no way for the defendants to know she wasn't consenting? It wouldn't be that hard to ask "When you perform, do you give consent offscreen to your costars who pretend to rape you?" |
| 402 | * Why did the Judge set aside the verdict? It seems like there was enough evidence to convict and it was up to the jury to decide who was telling the truth, the victim or the defendants. The jury didn't disregard any of the judge's instructions. If I was on that jury, I would've ended up in Contempt of Court for asking why the Honorable Son of a Bitch wasted my time forcing me to hear details of something I don't want to hear for no good reason. |
| 403 | ** Law isn't a machine. It's run by humans that are easily manipulated and loaded with their own biases. Cases can get thrown out for that shit far more commonly than you'd give it credit for. Anyway, given the talk and reasoning the judge gave, it sounds like the traditional narrow-minded "You work in porn so you don't respect yourself." bullshit notion. Also, the conversation between Dodds and Benson indicate that the University of Cornwell has some political influence on the movers and shakers. Coincidentally, while not all women or men star in rape porns, you'd be surprised how often judges are quick to throw out rape cases or cases of domestic abuse because of sexual history. They're not supposed to, but whoops, there it is. |
| 404 | ** This is another example of HollywoodLaw. In New York, a guilty verdict can't simply be set aside just because a judge disagrees with the jury. |
| 405 | * How didn't that end with everyone giving up? The DA bitches at the judge. The cops walk away. The victim goes back to porn because "With all my choices taken away, this is the only choice I have left." This case screamed "appeal on 6th Amendment grounds". Every episode starts by mentioning how dedicated these people are and they end the show with "Sorry you couldn't get justice. Enjoy getting trained." |
| 406 | ** There seemed to be notions on all angles that the detectives and Barba were ready to fight back. Barba was ACHING to go back to trial and possibly for that Judge's neck and job. The problem is, they can't pursue the matter without the involvement of the person who was actually harmed, and Evie ''has'' given up and refuses to continue being a party to the case. (To be fair to her, seeing her rapists get convicted of rape only to be released because the judge thinks "I'm nothing more than a whore" would throw out the fight in many people.) Once she's seen what she saw in that courtroom, that was it for her. She was broken and victimized by the same legal system that was supposed to protect her. |
| 407 | [[/folder]] |
| 408 | |
| 409 | [[folder:The 'Svengali' pizza bomb]] |
| 410 | So, after she's been receiving threats and signs point to a stalker trying to get her off the case/shut her up, Olivia receives a mysterious pizza at the precinct - she didn't order it, and seems weirded out by it. But, she just orders Fin to toss it out. Everyone else is present, and ''[[TooDumbToLive nobody at all seems suspicious of this mystery pizza sent specifically to Liv.]]'' In fact, as Fin's about to go throw it out, Chester actually asks if he can have the pizza so it doesn't go to waste, then carelessly tosses the box on his desk - causing it to explode. This is season 9, and ''all'' of the detectives present should have known better than to treat such an occurrence so glibly. Mysterious, un-ordered food ''in a box'' showing up at the precinct for a detective who's been threatened on the current case? ''Nobody'' found that suspicious and worthy of caution and investigation? How long have these people been doing their jobs, again? It's very hard to believe the thought that it might have been a trap ''never'' crossed the mind of ''anyone'' present there. It makes them all look irresponsible and downright stupid. |
| 411 | * IIRC, Olivia was distracted during that scene and was just about to leave when the pizza arrived, and she wouldn't have connected the pizza with the death threats. When she told Fin she didn't order it, I imagine he presumed someone else ordered it and it had been misconstrued as Olivia's. Lake was sitting a few feet away and probably didn't hear Olivia saying she did not order the pizza, and may not even have been aware it was meant for Olivia. Overall, chalk the whole thing up to complacency and a little bit of communications breakdown. The SVU squad have been threatened with death many, many times before then, they've never (I think) been targeted inside their own precinct before. |
| 412 | [[/folder]] |
| 413 | |
| 414 | [[folder: Did they just retcon Kathleen Stabler's problems]] |
| 415 | In "Crush" Olivia thought Kathleen would be able to get through to a teenage abuse victim. Kathleen told the victim that she used to let boys use her, have sex with her, and hit her. Two problems: 1) Kathleen was bi-polar, the victim was not; 2) while Kathleen did express regret over her manic sexual activity, there was never any indication that she was physically abused. Do the writers just think that the problems of young blonde girls are all interchangeable? |
| 416 | * I'm not sure Kathleen's mental health was relevant here. Also, given the circles she was running in, it's possible that she was abused and we just didn't see it (and more to the point, neither did Elliot...Kathleen might have told Olivia about it in confidence). |
| 417 | * Given said manic sexual behavior, it's not too much of a stretch to think she might have ended up with at least one or two guys who hit her, if only as one-night stands. |
| 418 | [[/folder]] |
| 419 | |
| 420 | [[folder: Manic. Is the mother really legally responsible?]] |
| 421 | * This is actually from an entry on "Unintentially Unsympathetic" on YMMV. |
| 422 | |
| 423 | * In "Manic", the mother had given her son a drug called Aptril that resulted in a psychotic breakdown that led to the deaths of two teenagers. The mother claims that she was overwhelmed. Insurance wouldn't pay for therapy, the school was pushing her to medicate him and out of the blue a medication arrives in the mail that seemingly solves her problems. She ignores a letter with specific instructions that was included with the drug. |
| 424 | |
| 425 | * Trouble is, even if a prescription drug is FDA approved and being given to patients that had been previously prescribed the drug, a ''pharmaceutical company isn't allowed to send prescription drugs in the mail without a prescription''. Some patients may no longer be taking the drug, or are on a different medication that is supervised by their Doctor. Even if they included clear instructions on its use, Aptril is a powerful anti-depressive that shouldn't be mailed to ''anyone'' without a prescription ''in the first place''. |
| 426 | * So, is the CEO responsible, the mother for ignoring instructions or both? |
| 427 | ** '''The mother''' is responsible for the deaths of the students her son killed. The CEO is guilty of the tangentially-related crime of mailing drugs directly to patients without prescription, ''but that doesn't apply to her''. Here's my breakdown on that: |
| 428 | *** '''Mom DID have a prescription for Aptril, but her son did not.''' Her doctor submitted his patient information, which included her, based on already-existing prescriptions, to the drug company so that they could receive necessary medicine for free, the drug company did not send her dangerous pills out of nowhere for no reason. |
| 429 | *** '''Mom chose not to get treatment for her son prior to this incident out of fear for his image'''. She denied the treatment her son's school wanted because she didn't want him to be "labeled". She wasn't concerned for his health, she was afraid for his reputation. She doctor-shopped for one who said Joe didn't need pills, but that doctor wasn't approved by her HMO, so instead of finding an ''approved'' doctor that would support her choices for her son, she gave up completely and fed him pills without bothering to read the warnings. |
| 430 | *** '''Mom chose to ignore the warnings provided with the medication that was sent to her, not to her son.''' They were her pills, sent to her, for her use, under her prescription, with her doctor's permission. She chose to give that medication to her son explicitly against the instructions she was given ''and'' against her own son's wishes! Just because Aptril is a popular drug and the school refused to allow him back without some kind of treatment, it doesn't absolve her of the responsibility to actually take him to a doctor for an evaluation and secure a prescription for him under proper medical supervision. The show frames her as overworked and overwhelmed, so doping up her son with whatever drugs she found on the ground in front of her house one day is understandable, but that doesn't change what she did: she gave her son medication not prescribed to him,''against his will'', because it was faster, cheaper, easier, and most of all ''less embarrassing'' than just pulling him out of school for a few weeks while she called the doctors on her HMO's approved list to find one who would work with her. It's possible that a doctor could have done exactly the same thing and gotten exactly the same result and those two kids would have died, it's possible that Joe would have the same bad reaction and killed his classmates, but if a ''doctor'' had prescribed it, the doctor probably would have known that a pill you take every day and a pill you take every week have to function very differently in a body, and would have started Joe on the reliable once-a-day version that was so successful among kids already, ''not'' the new weekly version prescribed to middle-aged women. Bottom line, those kids are dead because Joe's mom is an idiot, but Big Pharma is the enemy for giving out free medication to people who need them because... they asked doctors which patients were too poor to afford their anti-depressants, and sending them free ones. |
| 431 | |
| 432 | * One more thing: something very similar happened in real life. |
| 433 | ** https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/us/prozac-mailed-unsolicited-to-a-teenager-in-florida.html |
| 434 | |
| 435 | * Law and Order franchises have this motif where they rely on tenuous moral causality chains to bust corrupt corporate executives, causal chains which would never fly in real life. If mom physically abuses or emotionally neglects her son because of a harmful medication she was taking, and he snaps and shoots up a school as a result, who's criminally responsible for the killings? In the real world, only the shooter himself (insanity defenses are far less viable in the real world than on law and order). But law and order has only one means available to deal with social problems, so real-life problems have to be shoe-horned into the proper mould. |
| 436 | [[/folder]] |
| 437 | |
| 438 | [[folder:The judge recognizing his son in "Liberties"]] |
| 439 | * In the episode "Liberties", a judge recognizes a defendant as his long-lost son after the man quotes a line from a story the judge had read to him as a child. But it's not like he made that story up, it's a fable that's widely available; plenty of people unrelated to the judge would also be familiar with it. Why does he immediately conclude, or even suspect, that this man is likely his son (who is not just missing -- he was supposedly confirmed to be ''dead''), rather than the far more probable explanation that he was just another person who had read/heard the same fable that the judge used to read to his son? |
| 440 | ** CommonalityConnection? The judge knew one person that would know the story, and his mind would (automatically) jump there even with "evidence" why the son would be around? |
| 441 | *** That still doesn't explain why he took it so seriously. Yes, it would make sense for the thought to ''cross his mind'', but once the moment had passed, most people would logically realize that what they're thinking is impossible and conclude that it's just wishful thinking. But the judge -- who is established as being extremely rational and a careful thinker -- somehow lands on the ultimately true, but virtually impossible, answer rather than ever realize the overwhelming likelihood that it's a coincidence? |
| 442 | *** I think you are underestimating the extent to which people, even people who pride themselves on their rationality, believe things to be true because they desperately need them to be true. And in this case the judge didn't need the man to be his son in order to justify investigating, he merely needed it to be possible, and iirc his son was not confirmed dead at this point, merely assumed dead. The standard trope is that parents of missing children will go to the ends of the earth to track down even the smallest chance of finding their loved ones, this guy even sent stabler in with an implied brief to coerce the boy's supposed killer into giving up his location. I can't imagine this character going, "you know, he's almost certainly not my son so I'm not going to bother running his dna." This is an issue that cuts through the veneer of his rationality, as demonstrated by his other behavior during the episode. Also, i'm not sure the fairy tale is supposed to be well-known (out of universe i've never heard of it), let alone so common that lots of people would go around quoting it in adulthood. It may be that this is a line out of some musty, forgotten old book that only two people in the world still care about. |
| 443 | ** It's still a long shot, but maybe after the quote got his attention he looked closely into the defendant's life. His age, where he lived, some facts about his "father", etc. And possibly all of that just added up together well enough that he asked Dr. Warner to run a DNA test. And after that he was sure. |
| 444 | [[/folder]] |
| 445 | |
| 446 | [[folder:Why would the mother in "Stranger" pretend to think the girl was her daughter when she knew she wasn't?]] |
| 447 | * At the end of "Stranger", it's revealed that the mother had known for years that her daughter Heather was dead and therefore she couldn't have truly believed Kristen was Heather, so why would she pretend that she did? No, she couldn't say ''how'' she actually knew, but she could have just said that the girl didn't look like Heather to her (which is true, there ''were'' some differences that couldn't be accounted for by the passage of time/supposed weight loss) and/or played the "mother's instinct" card, and once it was confirmed that the girl was not in fact Heather, no one would have had reason to think there was more to it. Instead she played along with the charade, which meant bringing renewed police attention to the original event of Heather's disappearance and thereby making it more likely that the secret would be discovered. |
| 448 | ** Insisting that the person of interest is a fraud is more likely to bring heightened police attention than playing along and hoping no second shoe drops. Moreover calling the fraud out means producing a rupture in the family, with the sister who believed the fake sister was the real deal. The mother's personality is such that she covered up her own daughter's murder in order to avoid blowing her family apart, accepting a fake daughter into the home just goes along the same lines. And when you have to actually justify yourself in continued conversation, refusing to give more than a trivial justification of your position is not going to go over well, unless you are a committed liar it's going to be obvious there's something you're not saying. The main point, though, is that once you've been living someone else's charade for years, continuing the charade becomes ingrained instinct. |
| 449 | [[/folder]] |
| 450 | |
| 451 | [[folder:"Confess Your Sins to Be Free". Burton Lowe. ]]Why is it assumed that Lowe raped that woman, if they were both drunk? Yes, she couldn't give consent, but could he? He was so drunk he couldn't even really remember what happened, but somehow it's not treated as if he wasn't able to consent? |
| 452 | ** SVU tends to have a weird policy on this that they never state directly because it'd highlight the episodes that veer off into straight up double standard. A person is responsible for ''what they do'' when they get drunk, but not ''what is done to them'', because if you punish a person for not sufficiently defending themselves against attacks, that implies the attacker has the understood right to attack them; that's called victim blaming. |
| 453 | *** If a guy gets drunk and forces himself on a girl, he's still responsible for his actions because he's the one who chose to act, the issue caused by the alcohol is his diminished ''judgment''. |
| 454 | *** If a girl gets drunk and a guy forces himself on her while she's clearly incapacitated, she's not responsible because she ''didn't'' choose to act, the issue caused by the alcohol is her diminished ''capacity to consent''. |
| 455 | |
| 456 | [[/folder]] |
| 457 | |
| 458 | [[folder:What was April from "Design" trying to achieve by pretending to be suicidal?]]She was successfully running her con, scumming potential parents for their money. All she had to do was to disappear quietly before they suspect they are never getting the baby. Instead she attracted attention to herself by faking suicide attempt which allowed the police to connect the dots. What was her plan?[[/folder]] |
| 459 | |
| 460 | [[folder:In "Responsible", why didn't they just arrest the teens for underaged drinking and send them to rehab instead of threating them with prison for "criminal Trespass" if they don't stop drinking?]] |
| 461 | In "Responsible" a group of underaged kids have a party where they start drinking. This leads to one of them dying. Four of the kids are arrested and charged with "Criminal Negligent Homicide" and "Criminal Trespass". The former of which they are cleared of when it's discovered they didn't mean for the girl to die, and it was just a tragic mistake. The later crime, they get convicted of and are forced to stop drinking on threat of being thrown in Juvie. |
| 462 | |
| 463 | |
| 464 | What the heck?! criminal Trespass is a pretty trumped-up charge to throw them in prison for, considering they were just a bunch of kids who have been invited to a party and would have no way of knowing going to the party would fall under this imprisonable offence. Seems like a pretty harsh way of stopping them drinking. Even worse is that Stapler even calls the judge out when she refuses to jail them for disobeying her orders. |
| 465 | |
| 466 | |
| 467 | Err... Did I miss something? I thought the whole point of underaged drinking laws were to protect children. I fail to see how convicting children with a trumped-up crime so you can blackmail them into not drinking or throw them in prison with a bunch of violent criminals for God knows how many years is "protecting" those children |
| 468 | |
| 469 | |
| 470 | Wouldn't a more appropriate response to be to have them arrested for... oh, I don't know... underaged drinking?! I.e. the crime they were willingly and knowingly committing? That way they could have them tried at a Juvenile Court who could them have them sent to a rehabilitation centre to cure them of their drinking problems. In fact, this is what they do with Becca, so why not the others? |
| 471 | |
| 472 | [[/folder]] |
| 473 | |
| 474 | |
| 475 | [[folder: Post Graduate Psychopath]] |
| 476 | |
| 477 | Henry tells Amanda he would never hurt Jesse because she's "not on his list" yet earlier in the episode he ties up, tortures and rapes Libby Blandon, the daughter of his former psychiatrist and someone who didn't even know him. So clearly he is not above hurting your child to get back at you. So why does he tell Amanda he would never hurt Jesse? |
| 478 | |
| 479 | And no, Jessie Rollins being a small child while Libby Blandon was Henry's age isn't a valid answer considering he also murders his 5 year-old half brother Arlo earlier in the episode so we know he's not above killing children. |
| 480 | * Don't forget, Henry's a master manipulator, so just because that's what he says it doesn't mean he means it. Even if he's sincere that he would never hurt Jesse (and that's a big "if"), his reason likely has more to do with self-preservation than anything -- he knows hurting a cop's kid would put a target on his back. |
| 481 | |
| 482 | [[/folder]] |
| 483 |
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