All spoilers are unmarked per policy for recap pages. You Have Been Warned
Written By Richard Sweren and Celine C Robinson
Directed By Christopher Misiano
A 13-year-old girl disappears from a rec center while on a school trip and while SVU initially suspects a stranger, the girl is soon found unconscious inside the recreation center, stripped to her underwear. After she dies from her injuries, the case becomes more complicated when it is discovered that her organs were illegally harvested without parental consent by a surgeon with a flair for forging signatures. Stone then takes the hard decision to take the extremely controversial and complicated case to court, hoping to get justice for the deceased girl and her mourning family.
Tropes
- Downer Ending: A double downer in fact: the doctor who illegally harvested the girl's organs is convicted of 32 counts of forgery, and despite avoiding jail time, loses her medical license, while the boy she was trying to save with her well-intentioned but illegal actions succumbs to his illness at the end before another heart can come through for him.
- A triple downer if you count with Benson and the girl's parents, who will now have to live with the fact that they condemned another innocent child to die all for the sake of following the law and out of anger of being deprived of the choice to donate their child's organs respectively.
- To Be Lawful or Good: The episode focuses on this dilemma. After the 12-year-old Victim of the Week dies due to an accident from a prank gone wrong by her friends, the doctor illegally harvests her heart and arranges for it to be sent to a boy in Buffalo who has been on the waitlist for three years.
- First, Benson must choose between allowing the helicopter with the heart to leave for Buffalo, violating the girl's parents' right to choose whether to donate or not and their on-the-spot decision not to do so in order to save the boy's life, or taking back the heart and potentially condemning the innocent boy to die. She chooses to take back the heart. Notably, Benson feels extremely conflicted about it, and both she and the girl's father eventually conclude they should have let it go. At the end of the episode, it's revealed the boy indeed died without the girl's heart.
- Second, the doctor is arrested for forgery, and this question is put to the jury. They choose to convict.
