Allison Leotta's Blog, page 15

Reruns and Cover Art

Tonight was an SVU "Special Double Episode Encore," which turns out to be … two reruns.  Click these links for my take on "Personal Fouls" and "Spiraling Down."  One interesting thing to note is that "Personal Fouls" — an episode about a basketball coach who sexually abuses the underprivileged boys who sign up for his charity — aired before the Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky scandal broke.  Don't know how the SVU writers managed that one.

In personal news, my publisher has proposed two possible covers for my next book, "Discretion."  The plot revolves around a political sex scandal that ensues after a high-priced escort is thrown from a balcony of the U.S. Capitol.   The book is coming out in July, but meanwhile, there's been lots of debate about which cover to use.  What do you think?  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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Choice #1

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Choice #2

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SVU Episode #13-12: Official Story

Recap: The billionaire CEO of a private military security company (I didn't catch its name – let's call it SmackWater) is drugged, kidnapped, sodomized, and left alive but half-naked and bound in a park. The initial suspects are some scruffy Occupy Wall Street protestors, but our detectives soon track the crime to a clean-cut man whose military daughter was gang-raped by four SmackWater employees while she was working in Iraq. The daughter went to a party and was drugged and gang-raped so brutally she can no longer have children. After the rape, the company locked her in an interrogation room for 72 hours, before one kindly guard finally allowed her to call Dad. The U.S. government won't do anything about the crime because "this company's got a lot of juice in Washington." Dad admits he sodomized the CEO with a baton in order to exact his own vigilante justice.

Cpt. Cragen tells the detectives not to go investigating a gang rape that took place outside their jurisdiction, but come on, Olivia's not going to let that go! With the help of Harry Connick, Jr. (looking dapper as a DA), our detectives hone in on SmackWater. They talk to the army doctor who performed the sex kit on the woman in Iraq. At first, the doc says she witnessed the after-effects of a brutal rape. But when she's called to the Grand Jury, she does a 180 and claims she doesn't remember that particular case at all.

The SmackWater CEO is clearly behind this change of heart. He shows up at the police station in a tux and threatens Harry in front of three police officer. "Is this the battle you want?" the CEO snarls. "Because war is my business. And business is good." (Hm. With all the legal advice this CEO was getting from his voluptuous lawyer, I'm surprised she didn't tell him, "If you're going to threaten a DA, do it outside the presence of the NYPD.")

Immediately thereafter, Dad is shanked in prison, the kindly guard is killed with vodka, Olivia's apartment is ransacked, and the daughter is brutally attacked in her workplace.

The war is on.

But these quasi-military types are no match for our good detectives. Nick and Ice-T skillfully flip one of the contractors, who finally admits that the CEO gave orders for the daughter to be held and the evidence of her rape destroyed in Iraq. The CEO and all his cronies are finally led away in handcuffs.

Sobbing with joy, the daughter joyfully calls Dad. "We did it!" she exults. (Emphasis on the we.) Nick and Olivia exchange a glance. Although the daughter has just incriminated herself in the CEO-sodomizing activities, SVU gives her a pass. (Another woman behind a sex crime! Check out my nits and some readers' thoughtful comments about this very topic from last week's show.)

In the final scene, Harry and Olivia, who have been flirting all episode, kiss on a street corner. Go Olivia! She seriously needs some Elliot-rebound action. But when a taxi pulls up, Harry bundles her into it, and she heads home alone. Curses.

Verdict: B-

What they got right: This was similar to the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a female contractor with the private security company KBR, who claimed she was drugged and gang-raped four days after the company sent her to Iraq. She also claimed KBR held her in shipping crate for days before allowing her to report the crime to the authorities, and that KBR took other steps to hide the assault. No criminal prosecution was brought, but Jones sued KBR civally in federal court (the facts were more muddled at trial). Jones lost, and is now on the hook for KBR's legal fees.

[image error]There have been all kinds of allegations against employees from companies like KBR and Blackwater, for crimes ranging from the mundane to mass murder. Charges have not come quickly, in part because of the difficultly of prosecuting crimes committed by non-military Americans on foreign soil. Unlike US soldiers, private security companies are not accountable under military law, and there is debate about whether and to what extent American and international criminal and civil laws apply to private defense contractors. As the government continues to use private contractors to conduct our wars, we need new and stronger laws to address the crimes their employees commit.

The scene where the doctor suddenly lied in the Grand Jury was also spot-on. I've had countless cases where a witness told me one thing one day, then gave a completely different story under oath in the Grand Jury. Often, they were blackmailed or threatened, just like the doctor here. And sometimes those witnesses were charged with perjury.

What they got wrong:

Actual times a CEO in a tuxedo has  shown up in a police station = 0.

In an actual investigation, this case would have ended after they arrested Dad for sodomizing the CEO. "He doesn't want us looking into what happened in Iraq," Amanda said. "Neither do I," Cragen answered wearily. That would have been it, no more paperwork, no more commercial breaks. Most police officers will take any legitimate excuse to stop working on a case. They've got enough crime taking place down the street to keep them completely overworked. No officer's looking for a creative way to get himself onto a cold case that happened in Iraq.

That brings me to my biggest complaint. What was up with the corporate crime spree? At the beginning this company was facing  one very old, very difficult-to-prove sexual assault, which the feds had declined and the Manhattan DA didn't have jurisdiction to prosecute. To cover up that incredibly weak case, the company: (1) threatened Harry, (2)  killed the guard, (3)  tried to kill Dad, (4) assaulted the daughter, (5) burglarized Olivia's home and (6) destroyed her property.  The mayhem was obviously and traceably perpetrated by SmackWater, which is now on the hook for homicide and obstruction of justice, among other things.  In the real world, this company would have fought  the caseby deploying an army of pinstriped but nevertheless ferocious lawyers.

One final thing they got wrong: letting Olivia ride away in that taxi alone.

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SVU Episode #13-11: Theatre Tricks

Recap: Tonight's episode was like an acid-trip combination of the movie "Eyes Wide Shut" and that episode of 30 Rock where Liz gets mad because her boyfriend is so good-looking that he gets better treatment than everyone else. Our SVU writers must've made a New Year's resolution that in 2012 they'd tread as close as possible to the line of network-TV sexual-content tolerance without actually crossing into an "R" rating.   Even Ice-T's wife was surprised by what they had her wear in her sexy cameo.  (According to The Huffington Post, Coco said 'Wait, hold up! NBC is OK with this?'")  There were some seriously eye-popping scenes, and some nicely artistic renderings; no one can complain that the show wasn't intriguing. But the plot was so far-fetched, the lacy lingerie so pervasive, the goat masks so perfectly burnished (goats again!), that this was more like a fraternity fantasy of what a sexual assault case looks like than an actual case.

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We open in a kinky interactive theater that's performing a show about Dante's nine circles of hell. In dimly lit rooms, black-clad theater-goers are handed golden masks of animal faces and told "No one here knows you. No one will judge you." The eerie masked audience stands solemnly before a raised dias. The way the stage is set up, you're just waiting for the animal sacrifice or ritual sex to begin. And so it does. During a scene about infidelity, two masked members of the audience step forward, hold down the beautiful and barely-clad young actress, and violently rape her. The audience thinks it's part of the show. But it's real, and the young woman is devastated.

Here's where the real craziness begins. Because it turns out that this young actress, Megan, has been targeted, stalked, assaulted, or set up by – count 'em – four separate perverts in the last few weeks. There's the horny director using professional leverage to pressure her to have sex with him. There's the creepy cyber-geek stalker guy who's wired her house with motion-detector cameras to videotape her while she's in the shower. And there's the judge who met her on SugarBabies.com, a sleazy matchmaking site where young women emulating Victoria's Secret models find rich older men who want to trade cash for sex. The judge is the one who raped Megan on stage.

But this is SVU; we're not done yet. The judge produces emails showing that Megan instructed him to rape her on stage — she wrote that it was her fantasy. The judge didn't mean to rape anyone, he was just role playing. Is it possible there was actually no crime? Was this just a setup by Megan to get publicity? Through good detective work and the magic of Gilbert Gottfried's hilarious police tech character, our detectives find that Megan didn't send those emails. That was done by Megan's dumpy, small-town, best-friend roommate who moved to the Big Apple with Megan a few months ago to seek fame and fortune on the stage along with her. (Was it just me, or did you know Plain Jane was the perp from the moment she thoughtfully handed Megan that frappucino?)

Plain Jane was pissed because Megan was getting all the good roles. Jane was the better actress. Hell, Jane even slept with the director and Megan didn't, but Megan still scored the lead in "Nine Circles." Jane was tired of watching how easy everything was for Megan, how generously everyone treated her because of her pretty face. So Jane joined SugarBabies.com, met the judge and learned his dirty little secrets, and somehow orchestrated the whole thing so that her best friend would be publicly raped while on stage. Oh, and this brilliant criminal mastermind also confessed the entire setup to the two detectives who casualy mentioned that she must have been bummed that she didn't get the role.

Verdict: C+

What they got wrong: In real life, the rapist would have been that first guy, the creepy geeky cyber stalker. Our writers really had to write circles around themselves to make it not be that guy.

Once again, SVU answers the question of Whodunnit? with a well-spoken, well-educated, upwardly-mobile young woman. At least Jane was unattractive, unlike the usual perky cheerleader type (actually, with a little eyeliner, I'll bet that actress could be quite cute. Poor girl — finally her big acting break, and she's unfairly cast as the ugly roommate. Anyway…). Needless to say, the vast majority of sex crimes are committed by men. In 12 years as prosecutor, I had two or three cases where a woman committed a sexual assault against another woman. One case involved a male bartender and waitress who, together, sexually assaulted another waitress in the restaurant after hours, in an attempted threesome that went terribly wrong. That's very rare. But if you watch SVU, you'd think that young women are the ones committing all of the crimes in America.

Cpt. Cragen sagely explained why the DA wouldn't take the case against the frisky director: "Everything linking him to the crime is circumstantial." This is an annoying misconception that TV crime dramas perpetuate. There are two kinds of evidence in any trial: direct and circumstantial. Direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly, without an intervening inference. Circumstantial evidence is evidence in which an inference is required to connect it to a conclusion of fact, like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. Both can be powerful and effective.  Here's an example my evidence professor always used: If you're in a movie theater and someone walks in shaking off her wet umbrella, that's circumstantial evidence that it's raining outside. If someone just walks in and says, "It's raining outside," that's direct evidence that it's raining. Any judge in America will instruct the jury that circumstantial evidence must be given just as much weight as direct evidence. In this episode, the reason the DA couldn't bring the case against the theater director was that they didn't have any evidence connecting him to the crime.

What they got right: I'm having a hard time here, because I've never remotely heard of a real case even close to resembling the one portrayed tonight.  I've seen plenty of ski masks, but no golden animal ones, and never a beautiful victim being targeted by four glamorously insane people at once.  Still, here goes:

Megan's cyber-freak stalker was a man she knew and trusted. Usually, stalkers are like that. They are friends, neighbors, co-workers, ex-girlfriends, or (very often) ex-boyfriends. Stalkers tend to become obsessed with people they already know. Stalkers tend to be men. And stalkers can be fairly high-functioning professionals, despite the mental issues that lead them to stalk.

The victim had no vaginal trauma and no DNA on her person. Finally. I think the writers put this in there as a red herring, for you to think, "Aha, no vaginal trauma, maybe there was no rape, and this was all about the publicity!" Even if it was just a trick of plotting, it got a key real life detail right:  in most sex cases, there is no trauma. And the lack of DNA simply means the perp used a condom.

The detectives shut down the whole theater because it was a crime scene, despite the director's protests that he had a play to put on. The police can do that, even when there's a standing-room-only crowd. I've seen cases where entire houses were dismantled: fireplaces removed, drywall taken down, sinks and plumbing torn out to be sent to the FBI for crime-scene processing. Once the theater became a crime scene, tickets for upcoming nights would lose all their value on eBay.

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Law & Order: Christmas Intent

With SVU on haitus until 2012, we could all use a nice over-the-top interrogation, right?  This is definitely worth a watch:

I particularly liked the part where the letter was written in ink from a squid that only comes from the North Pole.  That reminded me of an episode where SVU's medical examiner found that a mushroom salad in the dead woman's stomach was made with rare and precious South American mushrooms, which helped the detectives pinpoint the ecology-professor killer.

Well, that's all for 2012, unless it turns out that some presidential candidate has been groping his interns, in which case I won't be able to stay away from the blog.  In the meantime, there's still time to vote for this blog as the best "For Fun" blog in the ABA competition  – we made the top 100, but now we're aiming for #1.  Thanks for all your support this year; it really means a lot to me.  I hope you have a great holiday!  See you back here in January.

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SVU Writers Meet My Challenge!

If you're as big a fan of SVU as I am, you can imagine my delight when I got a comment on last week's blog — from the SVU writers room!

As you may recall, I took issue with the goats in the gypsy camp of the Lost Traveler episode. "In my 12 years as a prosecutor," I said, "I never saw a goat."  Then I challenged the writers to work a dolphin into a future episode.

A couple days later I found this email in my inbox:

Dear Allison,

On behalf of the SVU writers room, we think your blog is very good. Our showrunner brought it to our attention recently, and we've all been enjoying it very much.

We have one bone to pick, however. RE: the dolphin. The '08 writers room already went there. See the below link.

Keep up the good work!

Scott McCarrey

Writers' Assistant, Law & Order: SVU

Swingline Productions

After I finally stopped laughing and picked myself off the floor, I realized several things: First, there is nothing that SVU shies away from, and little that they haven't covered. Second, dolphins are not sexy. (Actually, I already knew that one.) Third, and most importantly: don't mess with the SVU writers room.

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SVU Episode # 13-10: Spiraling Down

Recap: This was a great episode, with a realistic depiction of teenage prostitution, and some intriguing personal drama for our detectives.

A pink-cheeked 14-year-old runaway from the suburbs emerges from a subway stop. A charming pimp standing on the corner glances at her and immediately recognizes a certain vulnerability for which he's always on the prowl. He sweet-talks her to a fancy hotel room, where he plies her with champagne, strawberries, great sex, and a Tiffany necklace. She's ecstatic at her thoughtful new boyfriend. Soon, he convinces her to sleep with his friends to pay for luxury goods, and then she's turning dozens of tricks a night with strangers the pimp brings to their now-much-dingier hotel room. When she tries to leave, the pimp beats her.

At the police station, the girl's handsome, distraught father asks for Nick by name, saying he (Dad) has been deployed in Iraq with Nick's wife. Dad begs Nick to find his daughter. Tracking the girl's cell phone on the incredible "NYPD Location Triangulator," the police hone in on the fleabag hotel. They arrest the girl.

At first, the girl won't talk to the police, saying the pimp is her boyfriend, and "he loves me." The detectives go to Facebook, find a photo of the pimp cuddling his two kids and babymama, and show it to her. She finally talks, leading the police to her pimp. They eventually flip him too, and he offers up his clients in return for a deal.

Oh, by the way, the girl casually mentions that Dad was seeing some woman in Iraq. Nick tries not to flinch. He sees where this is going. Oh, poor Nick.

They doesn't normally prosecute johns, but Olivia convinces the DA that the policy should change. They set up a sting, in which the girl's clients show up and are arrested. Among the clients is the requisite sports star, a retired All-American quarterback.

Seems like a slam-dunk case until they learn that the QB is suffering from dementia caused by too many blows to the head. His wife confides to Olivia that he's been acting crazy, getting in so much trouble they can't pay their legal bills. Olivia gives the wife a card for Ellis, a hotshot defense attorney and her new friend. Olivia isn't supposed to do this.

Olivia explains her ethical lapse to Ellis himself, during a decidedly romantic walk in an elevated garden. She says she feels sorry and personally responsible for the QB – but it's clear that she's also there because she shares a connection with Ellis himself.

Continuing the personal drama, we finally see Nick's pretty soldier wife during a Skpe call. She's way too defensive when Nick casually asks about the girl's Dad. It remains unsaid, but she's obviously having an affair with the guy. (I liked the subtle way this storyline was established . . . and I can't wait to see how Nick responds.)

The case against the quarterback goes to trial, and things are looking bad for him.  He seems like a conceited jerk during cross-examination. "Wait!" Ellis stands up. "I need a moment with my client." As Ellis and the QB confer in the hall, we see the QB is batshit crazy but too proud to admit it. They go back in the courtroom, and Ellis skillfully brings out his client's dementia during re-direct. The QB is found not guilty by reason of insanity.

During a press melee on the courthouse steps, the QB realizes the depth of his despair, grabs a gun from a fawning cop, and shoots himself. He dies in a bloody heap in his wife's arms. (Most SVU defendants die by the end of the episode. I appreciated that this time at least we got to see the trial before the defendant was ritually slaughtered.)

Verdict: A-

What they got right:

This was a very accurate depiction of how pimps commandeer underage girls. Many pimps have a sixth sense when it comes to someone who will go home with them. At first, he's the world's best boyfriend. Then he'll ask her to sell herself, like it's a gift to him, like he'll respect her more if she does it.   Once she's gotten over the mental hurdle of selling herself, he'll use violence to keep her in line. These girls often think the pimp is their boyfriend and refuse to testify against him.

This episode also showed one effective tool to break the girl's loyalty: showing her that the guy is seeing someone else. In this case, they used Facebook. In many of my cases, we used recorded phone calls from jail, where the pimp told Prostitute #1 that he loved her more than Prostitute #2, and that #1 was prettier and smarter, to boot. Prostitute #2 could usually be convinced to testify against the pimp after hearing that call.

It's also true that many jurisdictions don't prosecute johns. Some offices say this is similar to the policy of not prosecuting drug users – they only go for the bigger fish. But many feminists have argued that the policy is part of an old-boys network, and that DAs don't want to embarrass their powerful male friends who are inevitably scooped up in stings like this.

The QB's wife said that their family lawyer wouldn't help them any more because they'd racked up too many bills – many private lawyers would call that a Rule One violation, Rule One being that you have to get paid.

I also appreciating that Nick took the 14-year-old to the empty courtroom before trial to practice her testimony. That's great prep work. It's helpful for a child witness to see what the room's going to look like and where she'll be sitting, and get comfortable telling the painful truth in that stiff setting. We have a program called Kids Court which does just that.

It was true that Olivia shouldn't have suggested Ellis to the QB's wife. It's a conflict of interest. How could the wife even trust Olivia – maybe she was suggesting some hack? In this case, Olivia was actually trying to help the defendant, which violates her duty to the police department. Olivia took a distinct step away from the SVU and toward Ellis in this episode.

What they got wrong:

Man, would I love to get my hands on that NYPD Location Triangulator. We'll probably have to wait a few decades before it's available in real life, though. Now, if we want to know where a cell phone is, we subpoena the phone company, which sends a bunch of documents noting the nearest cell tower the  phone was pinging off. The cell towers are usually miles and miles apart. You can tell what county your guy is in, but not what block. You certainly can't pinpoint an apartment building based on the cell phone. And only in very rare cases do you get any information in real time; usually you're getting it weeks later. There are no wide-screen plasma TVs or blinking red dots. Looks great, though, I can't wait!

Ellis stood up and said that he needed a word with his client during the QB's cross-examination. There are no Time-Outs like that. An attorney can't even talk to his witness about his testimony in the middle of it, much less call for a break to coach him. The witness needs to make it through his entire testimony without consulting his lawyer. Anything Ellis wanted to say to his client, he should have done before the guy took the stand.

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The ABA named this one of the best blogs of 2011

For the second year in a row, the American Bar Association named The Prime-Time Crime Review one of the best legal blogs of the year!  As America's leading organization for lawyers, the ABA had over 1,300 blogs to choose from.   I'm honored to be included along with sites like Above the Law and The Volokh Conspiracy.

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Thanks to everyone who stops by, comments, and recommends this blog to their friends!  It has been a lot of fun for me, and it's great to see that folks are enjoying it.  That will help keep me going next time I'm chugging coffee at 1 a.m. to nitpick about Miranda rights and DA cleavage. If you like this blog, please go to the ABA site and vote for it as THE best "For Fun" legal blog of 2011.  I really appreciate the support!

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SVU Episode #13-9: Lost Traveler

Recap: The real-life story behind this episode was hard to stomach, and the story was hard to watch even as a fictional SVU episode. I was actually relieved by the moments when the writers got something ridiculously wrong, because at least that created some levity in an otherwise horrific case.

In this episode, a little Romani boy is excited when his parents allow him to walk to school alone for the first time. But on the way home that afternoon, he disappears. At first, his parents believe he was killed because they stopped paying their tithes to the Rom-Baro, the head of their tight-knit clan. But soon they get a hopeful sign that he's still alive: the boy's voice mailbox, which had been full, is now accepting their messages – he must have deleted earlier ones, they think, and still be alive. With the help of Gilbert Godfrey (in a terrific cameo as a snarky police tech geek), our detectives discover that the person deleting the messages was actually a slimy British reporter who hacked into the boy's voice mail to try to get a story.

Soon, the boy's body is found in a construction site. The little body is covered with cigarette burns, and the boy wet himself from terror. The detectives hone in on a mentally-retarded Romani man named Mark (with Amanda – always more of a pit bull – arguing that Mark's the killer, and Nick – always slower to judge – voicing his doubts). They track Mark to a woodsy gypsy encampment, complete with a bonfire and corral of goats, and arrest him there. But they soon discover that the killers are actually two pretty, lip-glossed tweenage girls who were the boy's schoolmates. The girls teased the little boy for being a "gypsy," then burned him, and when that got out of hand, they strangled him with his own scarf.

Verdict: B-

What they got right:

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This episode was based on the horrific death of little Leiby Kletzky. This July, the parents of the eight-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy allowed him to walk home alone from day camp for the first time. It was only seven blocks, and they'd practiced with a dry run. But Leiby got lost in his close-knit Brooklyn neighborhood and asked a stranger for directions. That stranger took the child home, killed him, and dismembered him, police say. Most of Leiby's body was found in a dumpster. His feet were found in the man's freezer.

The terrible journalist was based on the real phone-hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and other newspapers. Reporters hacked into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and the British royal family to get exclusive stories. Most despicably, they hacked into the phone of a murdered 13-year-old girl named Milly Dowler, who disappeared on her way home from school. They listened to her voice messages; when her voice mail box filled up, they wanted to hear more incoming messages, so they deleted messages that had been left in the days immediately after her abduction, not only raising the hopes of the girl's family, but destroying crucial evidence in a homicide investigation. Murdoch's company is now under investigation by British authorities, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

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What they got wrong:

Goats. I was a prosecutor for 12 years. I handled cases in twenty different states and the District of Columbia. Never once did I see a goat. I loved that the writers themselves laugh about this:

David Matthews, I challenge you to work a dolphin into your next episode.

Dangerous search warrants. When the detectives searched Mark's room, he, his mom, and the creepy Rom-Baro all hovered nearby as the detectives flipped over his mattress and rifled through his underwear drawer. Detectives, secure your scene, please! Any of these leering civilians could've jumped you. Every real police officer knows that the first step in executing a search warrant is securing the scene. Usually that involves corralling all civilians in an area that isn't being searched, frisking them, and having at an officer guard them while the search is done.

Adorable tween killers. We've seen a lot of them on SVU. The housemaid's middle-school-aged son who killed the Ambassador's boy in "Blood Brothers." The beautiful heiress who killed her society rival in "Wet." There are real predators out there. They typically aren't cute high school girls.

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TV's Lady Cops

Hey folks!  There's no new SVU episode tonight, but I think you'll get a good laugh from this clip about TV's female cops.  See you next week to dissect a new episode.  In the meantime, have a very happy Thanksgiving!

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SVU Episode #13-8: Educated Guess

Synopsis: A patient in a mental ward opens a door and glimpses a woman being raped. SVU's detectives find the woman matching the victim's description: Gia is another patient on the mental ward, and she claims nothing happened. But our SVU detectives persist. They learn that Gia's father had schizophrenia and was institutionalized when Gia was a girl. Mental illness runs in her family. Gia's aunt and uncle supported Gia and her mother after Dad was gone; Gia's mom basically became their servant.

Gia agrees to a sex kit, and semen is found inside her. But she still won't say whose it is. The sex kit also reveals that Gia has vaginal scarring, which prompts Olivia to guess that Gia's been raped for years. "Even if she was raped," Amanda says, "who will believe her?"

"Which makes her the perfect target," Olivia says.

Evidence points to a hospital guard who unwisely talks to the detectives while his union rep is there, but before his lawyer has arrived. (I don't know any union rep who'd let that happen in real life.) The guard says, "I know the law – anyone at a mental institution isn't capable of consent." But then he goes on to admit that Gia asked him to get her a gun, and performed oral sex on him in return. "It wasn't sex!"  The guard protests. "It was just a BJ!"

Turns out, Gia wanted the gun to protect herself from her uncle. He's been molesting her for years, since her father went away. The fact that she was locked in a mental institution didn't stop the uncle – he stole an employee ID badge, disguised himself in hospital scrubs to look like a doctor, and snuck into the building so he could rape her there.

Nick confronts the uncle, who claims that he and Gia have a longstanding consensual romantic relationship. Gia swears he's lying. The detectives get a search warrant for the uncle's home and find a box full of pictures of Gia as a naked, fourteen-year-old girl. They haul the uncle off to jail.  (They only mention assault charges, but I'm thinking they've got strong child porn charges, too.)

Verdict: B

What they got right:

Cases involving patients with severe mental illnesses are common, and, as this show portrayed, difficult to try. A mentally-ill victim might not be able to think in a linear way, tell a chronological story, or focus long enough to tell you everything that happened to them. Sexual predators know this, and prey upon the mentally ill.

The guard in this episode was right: patients in mental institutions aren't legally capable of consent. Most jurisdictions (including NY and DC) have laws making it illegal for prison guards to have sex with prisoners, teachers to have sex with students, and mental-hospital employees to have sex with patients. There's too much of a power differential. If you're a prison guard, get a Match.com account, go to your local bar, or pretend you need help in the cookbook section of Barnes & Noble. But don't mix it up with your clientele.

I had a case involving a prisoner in a jail, who claimed that a prison doctor performed oral sex on him during an exam. The prisoner had oozing penile sores, and it seemed unlikely that a doctor would want to put that in his mouth. But the detective had diligently swabbed the prisoner's penis, and DNA testing showed the doctor's saliva there. I still remember what the victim said when asked why the doctor would do that to him: "It's some fucked up people in this world."

What they got wrong:

For a guy who was so smart about consent, tonight's guard was really dumb about what constitutes a sex act. The fact that Gia performed oral sex on him, rather than the "traditional" kind, doesn't change his criminal liability at all. He's still going to jail.

Every victim on SVU has vaginal scarring. In real life, it's very rare. This is anatomy that can stretch to fit a baby. This is actually a real problem that shows like SVU create for real sex-crimes prosecutors. In trials, I often had to put an anatomical expert on the witness stand just to explain the absence of intimate injuries. Jurors have been badly conditioned by TV crime dramas to expect them.

Uncle Scumbag isn't going to break into a hospital to molest his niece. Sadly, I had uncle cases all the time. They usually involved a potbellied 45 year-old-uncle and a scared 13-year-old niece.  All of these assaults happened inside the home (his or hers). It's a crime of opportunity. It's rare to see an uncle molest his niece anywhere except a family home or car – and I never saw a single uncle dress up, steal an ID badge, and break into a hospital to continue his sexual assaults. It just doesn't happen. In real life, this uncle would've moved on to his next niece or granddaughter.

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