Headscratchers / Law & Order: Special Victims Unit S4 E14 "Mercy"

• Andrea abandoned Sarah in a cooler and she and Daniel had her funeral by burying an empty coffin. What did she have to gain by disposing of her dead child? If she didn’t want Sarah’s true paternity to come to light, why not opt for cremation?
  • Dumping Sarah's body (which inevitably posed the risk of discovery) only made her look guilty, and like she was trying to hide something.
  • It was said she was distraught after she killed her. Probably she dumped the body first and only then realized she still needed to organize a funeral.
• At the beginning of the episode, the detectives determine that Sarah's body was dumped somewhere in the general vicinity of Hudson University, and they proceed to get a warrant for the university's clinic records, tracking down all women who had positive pregnancy tests earlier that year. This comes across as quite foolish, as they have no way of determining if the child's mother was a student at the university in the first place, or if she took a pregnancy test there (she may very well have just gone to a private clinic or done a home test).
  • The entire point of this part of the episode seems to be that going through someone's gynecology records is messy and makes people angry, but it makes little sense storyline-wise.
  • At one point, the detectives suspect 15-year-old Patty Swanson is the mother of the deceased infant, forcing her to reveal to them and her parents that she had an abortion. Several holes exist in this part of the plot:
  • How could Patty have carried the pregnancy to term, given birth, and then murdered the infant without her parents knowing that she had been pregnant? The detectives should have realized this.
    • At that point the detectives were not 100% sure her parents didn't know that. She could've been lying to protect them and their surprised reaction could've been an act. While they were pretty sure the story was true by the end of the interview, they still checked with the hospital to be thorough.
  • Why did Patty's older sister fly back to the States from France in order to let Patty borrow her university student ID and get a pregnancy test while assuming her sister's identity? Why not just instruct Patty in how to buy and use a home pregnancy test?
    • She could've returned to comfort her sister and support her while she's getting tested. Also Patty could've been refusing to buy the test herself for the fear of her father somehow finding out.
  • How did her sister, who flew all the way back to the U.S. to help Patty get the pregnancy test not know that Patty had gotten an abortion months earlier (rather than given birth, as she would have by that point)?
    • That is answered in the episode. The sister said Patty later told her the test result was false-positive and she was never pregnant. Apparently the sister believed her and didn't question the story until after the detectives found her. After she realized Patty lied to her she just didn't know what to believe.
• Did she really euthanize her infant in order to hide her affair? I'm surprised so many people think this is the ambiguity of the episode, because A) she seems sincere in her grief and not sociopathic, and B) euthanizing her infant once it's known to have tay-sachs (as seen here) doesn't actually cover up the affair. My understanding was the moral dilemma of the episode was whether or not one should use a patently insincere legal theory to poison the jury against the guilty party.