Allison Leotta's Blog, page 21
March 9, 2011
Rerun of "Possessed"
Tonight, SVU ran reruns of "Possessed" and "Penetration" — you can see my blog on those episodes by clicking on the titles.
Meanwhile, here's some fun stuff to sate your SVU appetite:
(1) An article announcing that John Stamos will guest star on SVU this spring, instead of replacing Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, as some TV execs had suggested. Stamos might not have Tiger Blood, but I think he'll be Winning on SVU.
(2) A meticulous and goofy analysis of Law & Order's conviction rate. As a law geek myself, I liked this. Thanks to a hip reader named John for emailing me about this one.
Enjoy and have a good week!
All view expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
March 6, 2011
March 2, 2011
Rerun of "Pop"
Tonight's SVU was a repeat of "Pop." Click here to see my review of that. In the meantime, I'm thrilled to welcome guest blogger and sex-offense-prosecution expert Roger Canaff! Check out his guest blog below.
The Top Five Things Hollywood Gets Wrong About Prosecutors — a guest blog by DV expert Roger Canaff
My colleague Allison's "top five" post on what crime dramas get wrong inspired me to pen something similar, namely the top five things that just plain annoy me when I see my life as prosecutor depicted by Hollywood. In no particular order, here they are:
1. The Grand-Central-Station-sized apartments and offices. Yes, the one with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the major city in which the show is set. Believe me, if I knew the office that paid this well, I'd be camped out offering to sweep up at night. Between crippling law school loans and starting salaries not too much higher than the age of the young ADA herself, the crib isn't going to look like this unless she's independently wealthy. Likewise, office space for ADA's is seldom mahogany-paneled and cavernous. If we just have our own door to shut behind us, we're grateful.
2. The thirty-year-old superstar. Before I'm justifiably accused of just being jealous, I'll point out that there are places in the U.S. where very young ADA's do get seriously major cases. But those places are usually far, far away from the glittering lights those huge apartments look out over on TV. Major city ADA's in particular usually wait years for the big cases, even when demonstrably gifted and hard working. Similarly, the savvy, street-wise homicide dick is normally not a cocksure, 25-year-old with perfect hair and expertly tailored suits.
3. Sex, sex, sex. Okay so maybe I AM just really jealous. But seriously- I've prosecuted in three jurisdictions, taught in dozens more, and I've yet to find the free-love bacchanal environment depicted in the typical crime show. Without a doubt, a bigger DA's office can and will have it's share of incestuous hooking up, and young female prosecutors in particular are sometimes chided for "going cop" by jealous male counterparts. But the way I've seen it depicted – judges and lawyers, lawyers and lawyers, judges and perps, lawyers and cops and bailiffs and the Fed Ex guy (and much of this occurring between court calls), I don't see how any of them could stay awake long enough to try a case.
4. The effortless bon mot. I know, it's TV; that's why no one has offered to watch my actual life, which involves repetitive, profanity-laced preparation for anything I have more than hour to get ready for. But it's not just that everything on TV looks unrehearsed. Equally annoying is the lengthy quote from the long-dead Supreme Court justice flawlessly evoked at the perfect moment. Or the pincer-like line of questioning that flows effortlessly, based on a surprise revelation that popped up on a bathroom break.
5. The ever-grateful victim (and everyone else). Domestic violence is an area of prosecution that often yields little more than contempt for the ADA involved. There is often a point reached where literally everyone in the courtroom seems to hate you; the judge, the victim, the perpetrator, the cops involved, the court reporter, etc. It's often tragic and not to be made light of, but the idea that all victims of crime are thrilled with the system's involvement in their lives is misleading at best. No, they don't all gaze at you dewey-eyed like Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca and whisper "God Bless You" when it's all over. There are times when doing the right thing has to be its own reward. Otherwise, there's alcohol. And that, TV does sometimes get right. Except most of us don't drink in the office from crystal decanters.
Roger Canaff was a prosecutor specializing in sex crimes and domestic violence in Virginia and New York for over ten years. He has been employed as a Highly Qualified Expert for the Army's Judge Advocate General (JAG), where he trained and advised military prosecutors about sex crimes and other special victims' cases. Currently he serves as president of End Violence Against Women International. Read more at www.rogercanaff.com.
*All views on this blog are those of the author's, alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice or any other government agency.
February 24, 2011
SVU Episode #18: Bully
Summary: A rich businesswoman is found dead in her apartment above an art gallery. Her neck has been slit by a glass shard, she has a blood alcohol level of 1.6, her panties are around her ankles, and she has anal trauma. Elliott and Olivia soon focus on the luxury wine company where the victim worked as a bookkeeper. The company marketed itself as a happy wine-making family, but the CEO was actually a terrible boss who berated and slapped her employees. The employees put up with the abuse because the company was about to be sold, and if they hung in there, they'd get rich. But the victim took videos of the CEO slapping her, and the other employees feared she'd leak them and ruin their deal. Elliott and Olivia ultimately discover that a handsome wine salesman went to the victim's house and tried to seduce her into handing over the videos. When she declined his advances, he pushed her into the coffee table, where the broken glass lodged in her neck. Hoping to make it look like an accident, the salesman inserted a bottle of champagne into her anus to intoxicate her and make it look like she stumbled into the table while drunk.
Verdict: B
What they got right and wrong: A person can get drunk by "ingesting" alcohol through their vagina or anus. This has been a trend in recent years: college girls soaking tampons with vodka and inserting them in their nether regions. The girls say they like getting drunk without the calories or beer breath (that last part is wrong, since the body gives off alcohol fumes through the lungs regardless of where it's ingested). Medical experts say doing this can cause terrible damage to the vagina:
Back to the crime. The key to intoxication through the anus or vagina is the bloodstream. The alcohol makes its way across the thin epithelial barrier and is carried directly into the blood, which then travels around the body intoxicating the person. So – this method of intoxication wouldn't work for a person who's already dead. If you insert a champagne bottle into a corpse's anus, you won't intoxicate the corpse – there's no bloodstream to carry the alcohol around the body.
Maybe the killer inserted the champagne bottle while the woman was in the process of dying, but not yet dead? It's hard to imagine there'd be enough time, with the carotid artery cut and the woman bleeding out, to get her blood-alcohol level all the way to 1.6. Even if there was, can you imagine the mess that would make? As she's spurting blood from her neck, the killer lifts her off the broken glass table, turns her over, undresses her bottom half, manages to get the bottle in the right place and hold it there … He would be soaked in blood and champagne and likely leaving bloody fingerprints and footprints all over the place. The Medical Examiner said that there was no DNA or fingerprints, and speculated that the killer wore gloves, suggesting a meticulously executed murder. But it turned out this crime was an accident covered with improvisation, which would be much messier than that.
Sorry to stray from my usual legal analysis, but there wasn't much law on tonight's show, and as a mystery writer, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill people in unique ways. I appreciated SVU's creativity tonight but (as usual) had to do some nitpicking. After blogging about this, I really need a beer . . . via the traditional route, thankyouverymuch.
If you're interested in seeing how they filmed some of these scenes, click here.
All the views expressed on this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
February 17, 2011
SVU Episode #17: Pursuit
Summary: Debra Messing guest-starred as a TV journalist hosting an intense version of Dateline's To Catch a Predator. (How intense? Debra tased one of the predators. Holy civil liability, Batman!) In her spare time, Debra is obsessed with hunting down the man who killed her sister 25 years ago. She is very public about her hunt, which gets the killer upset. The killer starts stalking Debra. The police discover he's killed forty-three women. Along the way, he slices the throat of the salty, alcoholic DA. (Whoa! I kind of jumped off my couch when that happened. I wasn't expecting any of our recurring characters to get killed.) In the end, they catch him and he confesses to all of his crimes.
Verdict: B-
What they got wrong: I laughed at the subplot where the bearded guy caught on Debra's show was actually just a concerned citizen at the house to help the girl. Come on. Half of the men caught on To Catch a Predator (carrying condoms, lube, and teddy bears) claim they're there to help the girl rather than have sex with her. It's never true. It took me approximately 30 seconds to find such a clip on YouTube:
Maybe I'm just super-skeptical as a sex-crime prosecutor, but I think the idea of a computer-hacking concerned citizen who goes to the Predator house to stop a statutory rape, rather than perpetrate it, is totally unbelievable. Men who have sex with kids have a variety of lame excuses, but this one was particularly silly.
And I've never heard of a serial rapist who stalks one of his past victim's family members – no matter how vocal she is about trying to catch him. Attackers like that tend to pick their victims based on things like proximity (someone they see every day), studied vulnerability (choosing the one woman in an apartment complex who keeps her sliding doors open at night), or the random bad luck of wrong place/wrong time.
What they got right: Debra's assistant, who was dating the serial killer, couldn't believe he was a bad guy. Even though there were all kinds of weird things in their relationship (he couldn't be reached on a phone, he asked about Debra all the time), the assistant thought everything was hunky-dory. This interaction is really common. Women in love are reluctant to believe their boyfriend is a bad guy, even if the evidence is loud and clear. A girlfriend might delude herself just so she can keep thinking that her serial-rapist-boyfriend is actually just a nice guy who loves her dearly. These guys often employ charm to do their bad deeds: both to lure victims, and to get unwitting accomplices. The fact that the stalker used Debra's assistant to get access to Debra didn't seem far-fetched to me.
As a side note, did anyone else notice that this was yet another episode where Elliot and Olivia were apart most of the time (with Elliot video-conferencing from Quantico)? Some commenters have speculated that the actors haven't been getting along. I wonder. Post a comment if you've heard anything about that!
All the views on this website are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
February 14, 2011
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day is a notoriously tough day for domestic violence – which is why I started my novel, "Law of Attraction," there. Check out this excerpt if you'd like a glimpse of Valentine's Day in D.C. Superior Court. I hope your own Valentine's Day is much better!
CHAPTER 1:
The courthouse coffee was terrible, but the morning after Valentine's Day was no time for a domestic violence prosecutor to go uncaffeinated. Anna poured the inky brew into a Styrofoam cup, took a sip, and grimaced. Scalding and bitter—a fitting start to a day of sorting through last night's crimes. At least she'd have help. Anna pulled out her cell phone and called her officemate.
"DV Papering," Grace answered in crisp singsong.
"Hey, I'm in the cafeteria. Want some coffee?"
"That'd be fabulous." Grace hushed her voice. "And grab a bunch of napkins. There's a woman bleeding all over your chair."
Grace had been a prosecutor for four months, but Anna was still new enough that the information jolted her. "Should we call an ambulance?"
"She's okay. A lot of scrapes and bruises, and a very messy nosebleed. Nothing life-threatening. I can cover till you get here. And can you snag me a muffin? I'm starving."
"Sure. Be right there."
Marveling at Grace's calm, Anna grabbed a muffin and got in line to pay. Three people stood in front of her: a tall guy in a dark suit, a man wearing a Redskins jersey over a blue collared shirt, and a buxom woman in fishnet stockings and a spandex miniskirt. Lawyer, Anna guessed of the first man. Then a policeman, hiding his uniform so courthouse visitors wouldn't ask him questions. And a prostitute, just getting off work, here to see her probation officer. The one thing Anna liked about the courthouse's grim basement cafeteria was its democracy. The cop might arrest the prostitute later tonight, and the lawyer might skewer the cop during cross-examination, but everyone had to wait in the same line to get their corned-beef hash.
After paying, Anna hurried to the napkin dispenser, but the tall lawyer who'd been ahead of her took the last ones.
She looked at him in dismay. "Actually, I really need those," she said, nodding at the napkins in his hand.
Something about the man's dark hair and lanky figure seemed familiar, but out of place. His tailored suit and buttery leather briefcase were common in the federal court next door, but marked him as several income brackets above the D.C. Superior Court crowd. He probably worked for some big Washington law firm, in one of the high-paying jobs she'd turned down to work for the government.
The man glanced down at her and suddenly grinned. "Anna Curtis! Hey! It's been a while."
"Hi, um . . ." She shook her head.
"Nick Wagner. Harvard Law School. I had a ridiculous beard? And hair down to here." He tapped his shoulder and blushed slightly. "Your team beat mine in the final round of Ames Moot Court. Kicked our asses, in fact."
"Nick! You used to play guitar in the Hark during Friday happy hour."
"You got it." His smile widened. "I guess you made more of an impression on me than I made on you."
"Sorry—I'm just in a rush, and focused on those napkins."
Nick placed them ceremoniously in her palm. "Some kind of food spill emergency?"
"Thank you. Bloody nose. Abuse victim in the Papering Room. So—I've got to go." Anna began to walk out of the cafeteria, looking over her shoulder with regret. "I'm sorry I can't really talk now."
Nick hurried along with her through the labyrinth of the courthouse basement. "So, you're a prosecutor—and you pulled papering duty on the day after Valentine's Day? What'd you do, run over the U.S. Attorney's dog?"
She had to laugh. Papering was the most despised assignment in the U.S. Attorney's Office, a task only the greenest prosecutors could be compelled to do. Anna would turn arrests from the last twenty-four hours into criminal case files: typing information into a computer, two-hole-punching police paperwork, condensing lifetimes of violence into slim manila folders. The tedium was broken only when a victim came to tell her sad story in person. And Valentine's Day was notoriously the worst time for domestic violence. People were two-timing each other, or paying too much attention to their baby's mother and not enough to their wife, or just plain forgetting a card. It was surprising how often a lovers' quarrel turned into a trip to lockup.
"I just started in January," Anna explained, "so I'm still in the hazing period."
"Well, we should catch up sometime."
"Sure," she said as they rounded a corner. A crowd of police officers lined the hallway outside the Papering Room. She'd never seen so many blue uniforms in one place before. It was going to be a long day.
"How about dinner tonight?" Nick asked.
"I don't know." Anna glanced sideways at him without slowing her pace. Despite the poor timing, it was a tempting offer. She'd been feeling homesick and disconnected in her new city. It'd be nice to talk with a law school acquaintance. She stopped in the doorway to the Papering Room and handed him her business card. "Call me. Let's see how things look later."
"I will."
He smiled at her: a warm, radiant smile. Despite herself, she felt a natural pull toward him. This might not turn out to be such a bad day-after-Valentine's Day after all.
That thought died as she walked into the Papering Room.
A tiny woman sat at one of the two sagging desks, flanked by Grace and a uniformed policeman. Blood had soaked the woman's white button-down shirt and spattered the gray linoleum at her feet. A few dark red drops flecked the bottom of the mint green cinder block walls. Her beautiful brown face was marred by two black eyes so swollen they were nearly shut. Raw red abrasions covered her left cheek in a messy cross-hatch pattern. She held a piece of bloodstained office paper to her nose and rocked herself back and forth, moaning softly.
Although Anna had read a lot of police reports describing gruesome injuries lately, she hadn't seen a woman this badly scraped up since her childhood. A wave of memories, guilt, and anger stunned her into a momentary paralysis. But today was her day to pick up cases, so this victim was her responsibility. Clenching her teeth, she strode over to the woman and held out a couple of napkins. "Here," she said gently. "Try these."
The woman swapped them for the paper at her nose.
"My name is Anna Curtis. I'm an AUSA, an Assistant U.S. Attorney. I'll be handling your case."
"Laprea Johnson," the woman said. Her voice was so soft it was barely audible.
Suddenly Laprea gasped. The pain on her face transformed into a puckered mask of rage. At first, Anna wondered what she'd said to infuriate the woman.
But she was glaring past Anna—at Nick, who stood frozen in the doorway. His face had turned an ashy white. The wounded woman spat her words at him.
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
"Law of Attraction" is available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. Click here to check out the reviews. All views on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the view of the U.S. Department of Justice.
February 9, 2011
SVU Episode #16: Spectacle
Summary: Horrified college students watch as a girl is raped by a tattooed man on the campus's live streaming video. The girl is then abducted and held hostage. Her kidnapper continues to stream videos of violent things he's doing to her. Using a tattoo database and cell phone records, Elliott finds the rapist: a weepy college boy whose little brother was kidnapped eight years ago. But Weepy's friend is still holding the girl. Weepy says he'll kill her unless Elliott solves his brother's case. Elliott miraculously finds the little brother. Then Weepy leads them to the girl, who is fine. Turns out, Weepy didn't rape or kidnap anyone. He and a couple of friends staged the whole thing to get NYPD to reopen the cold case (kids, don't try this at home).
Verdict: B
What they got right: There really is a tattoo database! This is one of the few things in real life that is almost as cool as what you see on TV. NYPD's Real-Time Crime Center is a Jetsons-looking nerve center that collects data on tattoos, birthmarks and scars. It also tracks embarrassing identifiers like blotchy skin, limps, and missing or gold teeth. They get this information from arrest reports, 911 calls, complaints filed by victims, and traffic tickets. You can run a key-word search for the tattoo or mark you're looking for and – presto! – the system tells you who matches. If a guy with psoriasis and an "I love Mom" tattoo robs a 7-11, the police might be able to find him using that information alone. Technology, I love you.
As a side note, I chuckled when the Chinese tattoo that was supposed to say "Try or Die" actually said "Pie or Die." There are many reasons I wish I could read Chinese, but the most compelling would be to see how often tattoo artists mess with their clients.
What they got wrong: The DA charged a man with Possession With Intent to Distribute an illicit substance ("PWID") after the cops found some Adderall on him. Adderall is a drug abused by some students today the way I abused Mountain Dew in the 90′s: to pull all-nighters in college. Unlike Mountain Dew, you need a prescription for Adderall – but this character had one. The DA's legal theory seemed to be that, because the pills were packaged in a few different ziploc bags, she could prove that the guy intended to sell them to other kids, which would be illegal. Good luck with that. It's hard enough to get a felony PWID conviction when you have a police officer actually watch a kid sell crack on a street corner. Even if that kid has 20 more zips of crack on him, he'll claim they were for his personal use (making him guilty only of Possession, a misdemeanor). Juries can be sympathetic to this claim. If SVU's DA convinces a jury that there was intent to distribute the Adderall based solely on a few extra ziplocs, I'll eat that Adderall. And then I'll stay up all night blogging about it.
All views expressed on this blog are mine alone and may not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
February 3, 2011
SVU Episode #15: Flight
Summary: A billionaire with a penchant for 13-year-old girls forces them to give him massages with happy endings. He pays most of them off. But one French girl finally reports it, and the SVU detectives find his semen inside the girl. The billionaire shows up at the police station (with an expensive lawyer) and claims the girl raped him. He says he was sleeping in his massage room at home when the girl walked in and started fondling him. When he woke up, she threatened to cry rape if he didn't finish, so he had sex with her. But the police soon find more girls he molested, as well as videos he made of his sex assaults. They arrest him and mock him for having a small penis.
Verdict: B+
What they got right: Some child molesters do try to get out of rape charges by claiming the child did the dirty work while they slept through it. It's the sex-offender version of "The dog ate my homework." Convenient, easy, and pretty damn unlikely. Defense experts have coined a term to try make it sound scientific: "sexsomnia" – having sex while you're sleeping. I think this theory became popular in recent years because DNA testing shuts down every other defense for child molesters. It's hard to say you didn't touch a child when your semen is found inside her. If the victim was an adult, the guy could claim that his semen got there during a consensual encounter. But consent isn't a defense to statutory rape. It doesn't matter if a naked 15-year-old hands you a can of Redi-Whip and begs you to lick it off her – if you have sex with her, you're on the hook. And so "sexsomnia" became an excuse for desperate defendants who need to explain how their semen ended up inside a child.
I had a defendant who made a similar claim. He was 55 years old, and had raped and impregnated his 13-year-old stepdaughter. At first, he denied ever touching her. But DNA testing proved the baby was his. So then he claimed that he was passed out drunk on the couch one night, and the girl (who was a virgin) climbed on top of him, had her way with him, and impregnated herself while he remained mostly unconscious. Right. She raped him. Because every 13-year-old girl dreams that her first sexual experience will be with her smelly, drunk, passed-out stepfather. (That guy is now serving 20 years.)
What they got wrong: Okay, let me get this off my chest (no pun intended): the DA's cleavage. Was she applying for a search warrant or a job at Hooters? Real female sex-crime prosecutors are a conservatively dressed bunch. We're in court all day talking about sex (and not the nice variety). We say words like "vagina," "breast," "penis," and "ejaculate" hundreds of times a week. To each other. To witnesses. To judges and jurors and thugs and rapists. We're immune to talking dirty, but we don't want our lovely lady lumps bouncing around as demonstrative aids. You're more likely to find a male lawyer in a kilt than a female sex-crime prosecutor showcasing her cleavage in court.
A more technical nit: will these defendants never stop talking to the detectives without their lawyers present? This billionaire's lawyer probably charged him close to $1000 an hour. Seriously. So I'd expect that he'd advise his client not to talk to the police without him. That's bare-bones first-year-law stuff. Yet the billionaire invited the NYPD into his mansion and showed them the massage room and the TV where he taped all his sexual assaults – giving them grounds for the search warrant that finally sunk him.
And what about that scene after the billionaire was arrested, and he was put in a holding cell in the middle of the police precinct, where he could watch and comment on the detectives as they reviewed his sex tapes and strategized about their investigation? That was some seriously bad feng shui. Our poor SVU detectives should be able to work without the defendant watching their every move. That setup was akin to handing Nixon the key to the Watergate and inviting him to make himself at home.
*The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Justice.
January 27, 2011
Rerun of "Trophy"
Last night's SVU episode was a rerun, which worked out pretty well for me, because D.C. got hit with a crazy lightning/snowstorm and my house lost power. If you're interested in my recap of the episode they reran ("Trophy"), click here.
Meanwhile, enjoy this cartoon from a blog called Twice Shy. It's a fun site full of clever cartoons. A kind reader pointed it out to me — thanks, Donald!
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